Audio Transcript here:

Alright, welcome to Thomistic Womanhood. Right now I am majorly feeling the passion of sorrow, which you’ll find out about later. But I’m feeling this because I filmed a whole video on this. And my camera lost it. So I’m re filming on the soul. I had promised in another video that we’ve talked about this. And that’s what I’m going to do today. It’s a very broad topic. So we’re going to have actually two videos for this. So the first one, I’m going to talk about the soul in general. And then on the second video, we’re going to kind of dive deeper into the different passions of the soul and our will. So the benefit to you is, this is going to help you understand yourself more, I think it was Socrates that said, Know thyself. And it’s important to know yourself in kind of an emotional way like what you want, what you’ve been through, things like that. But it also helps to understand the mechanics of how we think and choose and then You can often understand easier, what is motivating yourself in a certain situation. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Stick around. Hope you enjoy it – All the things.

The Soul Is Spiritual
It’s not a physical thing

All right, welcome to Thomistic Womanhood. Today’s video is going to be the soul part one, and we’re going to talk about the soul in general. And then in part two, we’re going to get into kind of like the passions or feelings and how that interplays with how we choose. So to begin the soul.. one thing I want to get kind of clear from the get-go is when I say soul, I don’t necessarily mean it in a strictly religious way. That is really the only context when we hear about the soul. But it’s actually more of a, It’s not like just this floaty thing that we have and like nobody really knows how it works or what it does. It’s just kind of there. And religious people are worried about it, you know, that’s like as far as we go, No, the soul is actually to put it quite simply, the soul is literally the life force. It is the thing that keeps us alive. The soul is spiritual. It’s not a physical thing, but it is joined to our body and it’s joined to our body on purpose, as I’ll explain later, it’s good that they’re joined together. But the official philosophical definition, I think, was Aristotle who said that man is a rational animal. And so what he meant by that was, we’re an animal you know, human beings have like our animal side or physical side, we eat, sleep, reproduce, you know that in round, you know, we have that in common with the animals, but we also have a part of us that is a little more sophisticated than what the animals have. We are rational. We can think. And we can choose. Yes, we can feel, but it’s not the thinking and the feeling that makes us human because animals can feel, you know if you kick your dog, he’s going to yelp in pain, because he is feeling something. But, you know human feelings are more complex. And we’re going to talk about that in the video on the passions. But we are rational animals in the sense that we’re more sophisticated than any animal because we can interact with our environment in a more nuanced way.

Animals can interact with their environment, you know, they have instincts, some animals can actually take things they find in the environment and use it almost as a kind of a rudimentary tool. But there is not the level of sophistication in the knowing and the choosing and making decisions that a human being does. And that thing that enables us to make those decisions and know and judge, that is what we call the soul. And so the way the soul is broken down into different aspects, different abilities are often called the powers of the soul. I don’t mean that like a superhero way, but it kind of does sound like that. But they’re just their abilities, there are things our soul can do. And while we’re on the subject of a man being this hybrid creature, you know, he’s spiritual and he’s physical, he or she, you know, but on that subject, there are certain opinions on men. And there’s one opinion in particular that I want to talk about, that is important to make a distinction about this.

So oftentimes, when we talk about the soul, or the life force, the thing that keeps us alive, there is often the attitude or the belief that man is a spiritual creature that’s been embodied in this physical body that weighs him down and you know messes with his deepest longings and you know, if a man could just be freed from his body, he could achieve spiritual enlightenment and oneness and just be awesome. And it’s this darn body that is holding them back. And that’s not true.

The Soul And The Body Work Together
In A Very Harmonious Way

The human soul is dependent on a body to sense things. The soul cannot interact and know our environment without a body that is not the soul in the body are so interconnected. It’s not two things that just happened to be together, you know, tied together, like with a string tied around them. They’re very intertwined. And they work together in a very harmonious way. And the soul it’s kind of weird to say it like this, but the soul and the body want to be together. There is a nice marriage there. And you know, we know this on an instinctive level. This is why death is so horrible. You know, when people, we see someone dead or we think about our own death, let’s say seeing someone else dead because I think that’s different it’s a more clear example. When we see it when we think of ourselves dead. There’s the fear of ending, you know, and fear of change. But when we see someone else dead, like, you go to a funeral, and you see the corpse, isn’t it a little scary? You know, you look in the casket, and you’re like, Whoa, that was my grandma. Like, something’s wrong here. You feel that on kind of a deep metaphysical level, it’s not just that you lost your grandma. You know, you lost this person that used to be in your life. It’s that there’s just something that feels wrong about it, right? You look in the casket and you’re like, no, she’s supposed to be walking around. That is actually like a philosophically true feeling. It’s not just grief. It’s because we know deep down, a man was not supposed to die. You know, there’s original sin and all that, the whole Adam and Eve story. And that is how we got death, you know, sin was brought into the world and that brought death. But that’s not how it was originally the body and the soul were not supposed to be separated. So when we die, that’s why it was a punishment, because that was not how it was supposed to be. And that’s why, you know, on some level, we know this, you know, we know that the body and the soul are supposed to be together. So that is why I kind of wanted to discuss that a bit. That’s also why you know.. of I’m Catholic, this is a Catholic channel, and we talk in Catholicism about the resurrection of the dead, you know, that at the end of the world, after everybody’s lived out their life and the last person has lived out their life on Earth, then, you know, people we’re going to have like the resurrection of the dead, we’re gonna have people’s bodies like rising up, and we’re going to have like a mass judgment of like everybody. And that makes sense because if you think about it, it’s The soul and the body if the body helped you sin, it’s fitting that it’s going to be punished forever. If the soul if the body helped you be good and be virtuous go to heaven, it’s fitting that it should have a reward. So let’s share in either the reward or the punishment. So again, that’s another thing about how the soul and the body are meant to be together. So enough about that, we’re going to get into how this soul that I’m talking about works.

So the next thing is, I got some notes here. So we’ll go through these a bit. I’m going to go a little Casey Neistat on us today. And we’re going to have a written little visual aid here. And this is basically kind of a diagram of how our soul is. And when we say, soul. The tricky thing about this is our body and our soul are kind of on a spectrum. You know, there are aspects of us that are physical, and aspects that are spiritual. But then there are aspects of us that are kind of a gray area. This is kind of a diagram to show that so here at the bottom, this is our very animalistic side. This is like pure physical, it’s called the vegetative, you know, this is like the nutrition, growth, reproduction, you know, we want to eat, sleep, you know, do other things. And that is what we have in common with the animals and it’s very animalistic, and just kind of simple urges, you know, not not very, not spiritual at all. But then up at the top here, this is where we’re purely spiritual, our intellect, our mind, our will our choosing, you know, thinking and choosing are strictly spiritual, that’s a spiritual, it’s not a physical thing. That is why, like identical twins will often maybe they’ll choose different careers or they’ll marry different people, or they will want to do different things at different things in times in the day because they have the same body you know, genetically their DNA and their body is the same, they’re identical twins, but it’s this intellect and this will, that’s making different choices that make them different people. And again, we do see how much our body can influence our choices because identical twins will often pursue the same career, you know, maybe they’ll both really like sports. And you know, it’s kind of where the whole nature-nurture debate comes in. But again, you know this is purely spiritual. This is purely physical. And then this is where we get into that kind of blend. This is where literally, the rubber is hitting the road. And this is where this is the blend between the body and the soul. And there’s kind of a spectrum here. So yeah, so that’s kind of how it works. 

So the first part of this video, we’re going to talk about what’s called the apprehensive abilities, powers. That’s where we just see things we take things in and then in the next video, we’re going to talk about our appetite for power. Where we make a judgment, we kind of develop almost like an opinion on these things, you know, it all happens instantly. But it’s a little different, you know, it’s not just this generic neutral taken stuff in, it’s where we’re kind of, you know, developing an idea, our idea about it. And so breaking this down a little bit, I’m going to kind of stay kind of a more high level. This is a really complex topic that you could get really deep into the weeds of, but I’m just going to try to stick to a high level because again, we really just want to know enough so that we can understand ourselves and we don’t really need to get too theoretical about it. So we’ll try to keep it pretty practical. So going into this, so the first part is we have our external senses. So if you can see that, you know, sight, taste, just the five senses, you know, smell touch, hearing the five senses, that is how the external world first comes into us, you know, before we can start thinking or choosing, we have to be aware of what there is out there to think about or choose. And so that is the first entry point into a human being is through one of the senses. And then from there, we go into what’s called the internal senses of the soul. And I’m saying soul little loosely because again, this is kind of the blend of the body and the soul. But so we have our external senses, or we see the outside world I’m seeing kind of metaphorically here, so kind of go with me. And then in the internal senses, we have four internal senses. And these are what’s often called common sense. This is what I’m talking about right now is something called Thomistic Psychology. And a lot of the Thomistic Psychology textbooks will often call this like common sense, but it’s basically like a central sense. Think of it as the aggregator. It takes all the data that it’s getting from the site, the hearing, the taste, and the smell. And it kind of puts it into a form that our imagination and our memory can deal with. And so there is like a little middleman between the outside world and get it in here. And then that is kind of the coordinator also, this is why when.. have you ever thought how you can’t smell color? Or you can’t see fuzzy? Like, think about that? Right? You know, there’s kind of that’s partly what this has to do. This is what keeps that kind of stuff coordinated. And then we have our imagination and our memory. Pretty straightforward, right? We know what our imagination is, it’s where we kind of collect from the outside world and we kind of create, you know, and then our memory, we know what that is.

Now, this one right here is the cogitate of power. And this is again, you can see it’s on the bottom of the spectrum, kind of closer down toward the animal side and this is because this is what’s known as kind of almost like it’s kind of like pattern recognition, but it’s for danger. So think of it as like animalistic fear in a way, but it’s more associative than that. It’s how we associate whether something is dangerous or not. And basically, a good example is probably the way it works. The best way to describe it would be to describe it when it goes wrong. And so this is the ability of our mind to associate something with danger. So if you have somebody who was traumatized, like, let’s say, you know, you are a grown man and you don’t like strawberries, and for whatever reason, you can’t figure it out. You just have this like weird, illogical aversion to strawberries. And then you know, you go into therapy and you find out Oh, actually I was when I was a five year old, I was eating strawberries when my mom came in crying and told me that my parents were getting a divorce. And oh, now I understand why I never liked strawberries. You know, it will associate things based on some kind of negative experience. Normally, this is good. You know, when you’re a child, you learn not to put your hot hand on a burner, because you’re going to get burned, or you learn not to run too fast, or you’ll fall. These are kind of basic things that just kind of happened without our knowledge and it becomes an association. It’s like I said, the pattern recognition system. It’s how we will kind of unconsciously recognize danger. And that’s why we have it on the bottom here on the animal side because it is kind of like animal instinct, but it’s a little more sophisticated because it’s not inborn. It is something that develops through our lifetime, and through what we kind of perceive as a danger. And again, so this is not something that modern psychology recognizes and knows about. Because modern psychology is like strictly, you know, you’re either body or nothing, they don’t really recognize an immaterial, intangible soul. And so this isn’t kind of the pattern recognition one, this is not really talked about, but this is the one that is most impacted when there’s like trauma and things like that.

This is where I think in my opinion, this is where I think a lot of PTSD comes from when you have a trigger, and then somebody is like, Whoa, there’s danger and you’re like, no, calm down, like, you’re not in Vietnam anymore. You know, that can be impacted. So it’s probably the best description of that. And then, well, maybe not the best description, but I hope it makes sense, but this is why it’s important, what you see or hear because your memories can later become the fodder for emotion. So that’s important. And so yeah, that’s basically our internal senses. So then moving up a level, we’re going to the more strictly spiritual here, our internal senses. Those are kind of a blend of the body and the soul. But then we’re going in there a blend of the physical and the spiritual. Let’s put it that way. And so then we’re coming up here. And again, when I say spiritual, I don’t necessarily mean that with a religious connotation. I mean that in spirit, you know, your soul is a spirit, there is something spiritual about it. But anyway, moving up a level we’re going to the intellect, that is our mind. That is how we think, you know, we are stringing together these different experiences that we saw, or we heard or tasted, and you know, maybe we threw in some stuff from the imagination. We constructed a few things and then oh, we drew back on our memories, you know, we pulled something in all those little raw materials, so to speak, get, presented and kind of digested by the intellect, you know, the intellect kind of takes all that and makes a judgment based off of that. And that’s again why the body and the soul are so necessary for each other because our intellect is our spiritual thing, we can’t do any thinking unless we have a body with eyes to see things or ears to hear things. And then we had common sense and our imagination, all that stuff. That is what allows us to think and decide things. And so that’s kind of how that works. I hope that was helpful. That was the first part. Again, this can be kind of, I don’t know, let me know what you think.

The funny thing is psychology doesn’t really talk about this much because modern psychology has a very, if you go back to the beginning of it like Freud and Carl Jung and stuff. They were very, you know, they didn’t want to be religious about it. So they didn’t want to talk about the soul or anything spiritual. It was like some modern psychology started deliberately physical. They were like, no, this can all be explained by a physical cause. There’s this whole spiritual stuff. No, it was, you know, it was very materialistic. And so because of that, while psychology has a lot going for it, there are some blind spots that you’re not going to understand. Unless you understand kind of how your soul and how you as a human being are put together. But yeah, anyways, if you have any questions, leave a comment. I hope this was helpful to you. And yeah, I look forward to seeing you for part two.