What is Soul?

My initial answer to the question "Do people have souls?" is no. But then I started thinking that I wasn't being very open-minded, and what one person defines as soul can be an entirely different thing or form or state of being than another person. So my questions to you are "What is a soul?" and "What does it mean to have a soul?". You may think Soul can only be one thing, and everyone else is wrong, but try to bear with me. There's a lot to be learned from different opinions.

You have to consider there is no clear and unified definition of soul. Try Googling soul and see the innumerable hits it generations; even the Wikipedia page alone is rife with differing opinions on the subject. Here is the summary definition that is given at the top of the Wikipedia entry:

A soul – in certain spiritual, philosophical, and psychological traditions – is the incorporeal essence of a person, living thing or object.... Soul can function as a synonym for spirit, mind or self;[3] scientific works, in particular often consider soul as a synonym for mind.

But then if soul is incorporeal, how can it be measured? And if it can't be measured, then how can you determine if it is large or small? Can it fit inside a person, or can it not fit inside a person? Is it neither large or small? Then, in a way, it is all-encompassing or no-thing; it is, or it is not. So how can every human have an individual soul? If anything, Soul is Soul, and everything lives in it. Or there is no Soul, as far as the above definition describes it (unless you are calling mind or brain Soul, which some may consider different things, but that's neither here nor there).

Doesn't it seem to you that definitions are inherently meaningless because they are human creations? Names, especially, are intrinsically meaningless because they are pure human creations--humans create languages, languages are filled with names. Languages are flawed, imperfect. But what is perfection? I think an apt definition of perfection is flawlessness, or something without flaws. But what are flaws? Pimples, cancers, plagues, crooked noses, yellow teeth: these are all flaws, wouldn't you say? But how do we know they are flaws? Because humans call them flaws. Who says pimples are flaws? Well, biologically, pimples may be seen as signs of poor health (let's just say culture has no influence in this). This is practical: a human with a pimple is a flawed human. But our biology is simply chemicals and electricity, isn't it? So couldn't we, theoretically, alter the brain to think pimples are not flaws?

But let's go way beyond all this and think of flaws and perfection another way. Let's say, for instance, nothing alive existed in the universe: no plants, no animals, no cells, and especially no humans. There is no consciousness or awareness. Would flaws exist then? Even God, who is perfect, would not recognize flaws because He would need a language to define existence, and as I pointed out earlier, language is flawed. But not God's language, you might say. How can there exist flaws if only God exists?

(I have a question relating to this: if God is perfect, then shouldn't everything he created be perfect? No, you may say, because Satan made everything imperfect. But God created Satan--God created everything, as is my understanding of Christianity. Couldn't you say God even created flaws--if flaws actually exist--because he created everything? So if God created everything, including time and space and matter, then that means everything is perfect. If this is the case, I think we should seriously re-evaluate the world. As J.D. Salinger would say, the Fat Lady is everyone, or God is everything, or Jesus Christ is inside everything, or Buddha-hood is within us all, or we are all Vishnu and Shiva and Dharma. Flaws are not within humans because we are products of a perfect God, or perfect consciousness, so we are therefore perfect. But when we think in terms of perfect versus flawed, we lose sense of this. Nothing and everything is perfect.)

Without human consciousness, there are no flaws, there is no beauty, everything just is. This, I think, is Buddha-consciousness, and it's damn near impossible to achieve it. So you begin to see how much humans depend on definitions and names, in a practical perspective, yet how meaningless they really are.

Why care? Why do anything?

Look, I'm being honest here. I will not reach Buddha-consciousness in my lifetime. That's fact. I need to play the game of life so that I won't starve to death and my family will have a house to live in. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't try to live as harmoniously and as happily as I can, just because I can, so that I will be happy living on Earth among humans. It's not perfect, but it's the only path open to me. Do what good you are capable of doing, and let go of the rest.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this strange and unstructured draft of opinions and confusion.

(Please excuse any typos--I'm a little too tired to check for any.)