Do we have souls?

[GliderGuider]

95. I've been thinking some more about how I experience that "soul-sense"

Here are some of the qualities I perceive:

1. It has nothing whatsoever to do with my personality. Its "me-ness" seems far more fundamental than my personality. In fact, my personality seems almost transparent, a pile of experiences whose shape I (mis?)interpret as my self in my day-to-day life.

2. There is a sense of timelessness about it. Not just that it survives death or is immortal or anything so simple, but that it exists entirely outside time - that time happens within it, rather than it existing within time. A (poor) physical analogy might be the process of digestion, by which the body assimilates nutrients. Time seems like part of the digestive mechanism by which the "soul" assimilates experiences.

3. There is a sense of spacelessness about it. In the same way that it enfolds time, it also enfolds space. It forms a container for the universe I experience.

4. I almost always experience it in conjunction with a "unity of existence" experience - the "all-is-one", oceanic sensation described best by Eastern philosophies like Buddhism, Taoism and Advaita. In this state it's obvious that I am the same as everything else, that there is in fact no "I" - that the personality I take to be "me" in ordinary times is an illusion, a construction, a changeable story that allows me to interact with physical consensus reality.

But you know what? There isn't a god in sight anywhere. Except when I look in a mirror, of course.

Oh, and for those who are dying to ask, I have no "evidence" for any of it. It's all subjective meaning. It really doesn't matter, either to me or to Me, whether anyone else buys it. But it might encourage someone else who has been wondering if they can have feelings like these and still call themselves an atheist.