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From: adobe!!asanders@decwrl.dec.com
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: Body and Soul?
Message-ID: <1990Oct20.180354.14244@nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 20 Oct 90 18:03:54 GMT
Sender: news@nas.nasa.gov
Organization: NAS Program, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
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Approved: prabhu@amelia.nas.nasa.gov


| The general consensus is that the soul (or your own interpretation of "soul")
| enters the "body" at conception, and further that the soul is in some way
| the prerequisite for conception...
                                     -Hugh Garsden

This is an interesting line of inquiry, but I can't help thinking that
one of the most basic teaching of Eastern religion is that we live in a 
state of Ignorance--that we do not know the truth about our existence and
cannot know this Truth until WE OURSELVES change. Thus Practice rather
than Study becomes the basis for the search for Truth.

>From this point of view, whatever "general consensus" we reach about any
difficult question is bound to be flawed, because the instrument of inquiry
is flawed. Clearly, the road to self-perfection is far more trecherous than
the road to intellectual knowledge. But the rewards must be correspondingly
greater as well.

Alan

*********************

Man does not learn
unless he is thrashed.

           -Goethe