WHY

In reflecting on the meaning of life it is important not to set prior judgments or dogmas of any ism; the mind must be open, clear, and willing to start fitting the pieces of a puzzle that, unlike what we are used to, has no final drawing. This will appear as we progress in our work, and we should not hesitate to set aside a piece that cannot be placed and leave it aside, for if the work has been carried out correctly, sooner or later we will find its place on the board of life. A board that, when we begin, is clear, and this should lead us to think that life may be a pure casuistry, and that when the body dies there is no beyond. Nevertheless, our search work will lead us to conclusions that may be valid only for the person who is writing these lines at this moment, but they will always be a starting point for another, who has begun from another perspective. Body, brain, mind, soul, consciousness, and spirit. If the body and the brain raise no questions about what we mean, the mind, the soul, the consciousness, the spirit, and their different meanings can lead us to confusion that will not help our work much. In Cartesian dualism, Descartes conceives two substances that can exist independently of one another: one is the body and the other the thinking part, the soul. Plato’s dualism is posited similarly to Descartes, but with the difference of the immortality of the soul. Nor does Aristotelian monism describe, in my view, the composition of being. Some religions, like Descartes, establish the duality between mind and soul, attributing to the latter the result of mental activity or of self-knowledge of existence, and in reality the immortal part of the being is the spirit. Here we refer to the body-brain as the material part of being and subject to the laws of space-time of the universe we live in. The mind-consciousness would be the result of mental activity and of the self, which we would call self-knowledge. The soul, the immaterial and immortal part of being, and the spirit would be the non-manifested part of the Absolute. Neither Descartes, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor I myself can affirm what the correct conception is, but it will help us begin to glimpse what the rules of this game we call life are.

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