Bokuto,
" The soul is the superior part of man. Because God is a Spirit and the Spirit is always superior to flesh." and "Man he is two parts of creation whether you like it or not. Spirit and mud. the mud came from a chaotic happening."
I am not sure what you are getting at, is it your overarching theme that spirit is good and flesh is bad? That is the general idea I get from your post but I may misunderstand you.
Both body and soul are created by God. Gn1:10 "God called the dry land Earth and thee assembled waters Seas. And God saw that it was good." Gn1:26 "God said, "Let us make mankind in our image and likeness:*...Gn1:31 "God saw all that he had made was very good." (Confraternity Douay).
Genesis 3:10 reports that man is made from dust and "unto dust you shall return". The idea being that dust is lowly, as you indicate with mud, as when the serpent is told he would take dust in with his food a semitic indication of degradation. Man has degraded the good by sinning. (It's interesting that we should still taunt people with "eat my dust").
I am also not sure where you get the sense that creation was "a chaotic happening." I consulted four different translations and the terms used are void and waste with the sense of the context and original language indicating creation out of nothing.
How can creation not be under His design and control, how then can it be chaotic? In the garden of Eden before the fall all was orderly and Adam and Eve shared the beatific vision. Now, in a fallen world at the Macro level there is much unpredictability at the same time there is extremely beautiful order in the underlying physical structure of the cosmos. There was an extreme burst of energy in the big bang but that does not result in chaos. It is merely what God planned to happen at that stage of development.
On the soul, paraphrased from Fr. William Most:
Now the soul has superior intelligence compared to our physical brain and our attraction to physical stimulus and material things, those nagging false gods, limits our ability to use our souls intelligence to immediately and fully see the truth about things.
When we sin our intelligence is limited by our physical brain. That is why even venial sin has a deleterious affect on our path to holiness and continued venial sin can lead to mortal sin or at least to a kind of spiritual malaise where we do not advance in holiness.
When we die the soul no longer is hampered by the physical brain and even if we do not immediately see God we bring with us information of God and now really understand and long for him above all else. The pain of hell is to forever feel this separation and revolt against Him while yet still wanting Him.
So it is important that we be most concerned with the health of our soul , what does it profit a man to gain the whole world but loose his soul. But because man is both body and spirit, the health of the body can affect the soul, there is a psychological principle called somatic resonance Fr William Most explains:
"St. Thomas explains how it is that God sometimes sends to a man some special foreknowledge that He might not have sent otherwise, on the occasion provided by apt somatic conditions that are present either in sleep or in sickness: "[The human mind in such a state] is helped by some superior spirit, created or uncreated, good or evil . . . for [the mind] is weighed down by the weight of the body, and, while it applies itself to things of sense, it is less capable of higher things; and so, when it is withdrawn from the senses either by sleep or by sickness, or in some other way, it becomes thereby more apt for receiving the impression of a higher spirit."
(I had an experience of this while meditating on this topic. An image of a mans face was in my mind but it was unfocussed, as through a really dirty window in poor light, suddenly and for only a split second it became extremely sharp then returned to its indistinct outline.
What I was meditating on was a postive example of somatic resonance shown in the crucifixion of Christ when He says, Mk 15:34 "My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?"; how that in His extreme anguish He is able to teach and give comfort to those around him by quoting Psalm 21(22): showing the passion foretold there but giving comfort in its outcome v24-25 "You who fear the Lord, praise him; all you descendants of Jacob, give glory to him; revere him, all you descendants of Israel! For he has not spurned nor disdained the wretched man in his misery, Nor did he turn his face away from him, but when he cried out to him, he heard him."
In His extreme anguish His physical condition does not affect His mind and soul as it does in the example of depression mentioned below.)
We are creatures made up of spirit and matter, body and soul. Our spirit is the immaterial soul, which our senses cannot feel. But our faith tells us it is there. So by way of our soul, we have some share in the nature of the angels.
First of all, there is such a thing as somatic resonance-a term from modern psychology. Since man is a single substance composed of both material and spiritual principles, it follows that for a condition in a person's body, there should be a parallel condition, called a resonance, in the soul, and vice-versa. For example, a person in deep depression sometimes thinks he is losing or has lost his faith. But the bad chemistry of his disease can interfere with the biochemistry that should serve as the somatic resonance to his faith. This does not expel faith, but can keep it from functioning normally, so that the person thinks he has lost it or is losing it."
One thing of note to take from the above and that is to be extremely wary of using forms of meditation that are not Christ centered and I would say not tried and true methods taught by the spiritual masters of the Church. Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and Ignatius Loyola come to mind. There is much that can go wrong for St. Thomas says that the reception from a higher spirit might be good or evil and it might be hard to tell which without the advice of an experienced spiritual guide.
One other comment on the soul. It is not just a spiritual mirror image of the body, this is a form of Dualism.
From the Catholic dictionary at www.newadvent.org (I recommend reading the topics covering soul and spirit there.)
The soul may be defined as the ultimate internal principle by which we think, feel, and will, and by which our bodies are animated. The term "mind" usually denotes this principle as the subject of our conscious states, while "soul" denotes the source of our vegetative activities as well. That our vital activities proceed from a principle capable of subsisting in itself, is the thesis of the substantiality of the soul: that this principle is not itself composite, extended, corporeal, or essentially and intrinsically dependent on the body, is the doctrine of spirituality. If there be a life after death, clearly the agent or subject of our vital activities must be capable of an existence separate from the body....
Often, as among the Fijians, it is represented as a miniature replica of the body, so small as to be invisible...In short, all the evidence goes to show that Dualism however uncritical and inconsistent, is the instinctive creed of "primitive" man.
That is why I wouldn't refer to the soul in the way you did in your post, having veins and a heart, although it does have intelligence, and it infuses our chemical based brain with an intelligence and free will that the animal world lacks.
Why am I so picky about all this? The Church in its official documents is quite particular about how it expresses itself and it does this to protect the doctrinal issues at stake. As we are probably (mostly) not trained theologians we can't always be expected to be able to make these fine distinctions but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try and be careful about how we express our opinions in doctrinal areas, perhaps a little homework is approrpriate.
Now I understand that you are spiritualizing the creation story and some of the other topics to make some point but your examples can tend to be a distraction and make it hard to follow to your point. If they help you, wonderful, just be sure that you test the conclusions you draw from them against the living, orthodox faith.
Dado
AMDG
PS If anything I have written above is contrary to the faith, don't be shy about calling me on it.
