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Art & Science of Meditation
Atman (Soul)
Philosophical views
The Ancient Greeks used the same word for 'alive' as for 'ensouled' indicating that the earliest surviving western philosophical view believed that the soul was that which gave the body life. The soul was considered the incorporeal or spiritual 'breath' which animates (from the Latin, anima, cf. animal) the living organism.
Francis M. Cornford quotes Pindarin saying that the soul sleeps while the limbs are active, but when one is sleeping, the soul is active and reveals in many a dream "an award of joy or sorrow drawing near."
Erwin Rohde writes that the early pre-Pythagorean belief was that the soul had no life when it departed from the body, and retired into Hades with no hope of returning to a body.
It has been argued that a strict line of causality fails to explain certain phenomena within human experience (such as free will) that have at times been attributed to the soul. (See also: Determinism and free will.)
Some metaphysical thinkers believe that the concept of soul can be a solution for the explanatory gap and
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