The more I think about the concept of "self," the further in I go. The further in I go, the farther I have left to travel. It is a very enigmatic and cataclysmic concept. Being the most open-minded and critical person that I can, I cannot and will not accept any one interpretation of reality or myself. I can be very "far-out" in my contemplation of self, or I can simply accept it at face-value. I do not wish to settle with either, and I never will.
When I think about the concept of self, many ideas come to mind...
I first start by looking at myself in a physical sense. Physically, I am an organism, a very complex collection of organisms at best, and I see an amazing, versatile, and fragile body. I look at my body as a part of my surroundings. I am not a result of all things. I am still "all things." All of life is a simple collection of elements that is organized, compounded into itself, and ramified into different forms of the same fundamental elements. Like the Japanese sword-smith takes the steel, spreads it out thin, and folds it over and into itself. He repeats this many times "wringing" out all impurities and strengthening the steel. Everything in the entire universe contains the same elements that I have, or am made up of. I am not separate from my surroundings, I am my surroundings and vice versa. I do not like to view myself as a separate entity.
My spirit, as I like to look at it, is my perception of self and my environment. Everything I see and how I see it is a reflection of myself. My consciousness is the organized collection of my past, present and future experiences. All humankind is endowed with the ability to reason with or work with their environments. My body is simply the vehicle through which I interact with the cosmos. Our minds or consciousness is simply a "clay," of sorts, that our environment and ourselves can "shape." My environment, alongside myself, creates the type of person I am.
My spirit, is a collection of "ancestral wisdom" passed to me within my genetic framework, from my source of existence... the planet I live on. Seemingly invisible and metaphysical things like courage, love, reason; all of these things are intrinsically woven into the fabric of humankind. They are shared by all and belong to none. So, I believe that there is no soul. If one were to say he has a soul, then that would imply explicit ownership of the feelings that we all share, like love or courage. Thus, I see the soul as being a piece of our universe that was "shaped" into us from our parents at the moment of conception.
Does my spirit live on after my body dies? Not exactly. Looking at our spirit as an entity in itself is simian and childish. The universe is comprised of energies: Electricity, gravity, fission, heat, etc. We are comprised of energies. Every atom in our body has it's own energy. When our bodies fail and die, we decompose. From that compost pile, we become food for plants fungi and other lifeforms. People eat those plants and give birth to life. The energies are passed in an infinite cycle from being to being. As for our reality, what we see daily is what defines our reality. How we see it, is our interpretation of said reality. I believe there is no afterlife; in which we can live out eternity, with our past intact behind our eyes. Once we die our brains cease to function. Without the energy within our mind and the neurons to interpret that energy, there is no past. Like an individual with Dementia. To them, there is no past or no future, only present. They have no concept of time or being for that matter. We simply stop thinking, viewing, or interpreting when we die, and the energy that was "lent" to us, then returns to the cycle to be loaned to someone else.
I believe that the concept of self applies to "us" as a whole. Myself and the ground I stand on, you and the ground you stand on, all is included. All is one. That's how I see it.

You remind me of my "self"

^^This.

BTW to the OP: That was a Great post! I think you have the big picture.

There is only a mental illusion to separation.
Meditate on that and make it an obvious truth at all times and I believe you will achieve true Sukha.

Peace.

I love what you're saying here. The way you wrote it out is wonderful, and I am totally on board with all the stuff about energy and the 'afterlife.'

On the soul, however:

Couldn't individuals have a soul, however, and each persons soul just has reflections of this universal humanity in different measures? Yes, these things like love, courage and curiosity are in all of us, but we have them in different quantities. Each of us is unique. To display them is not the 'own' them, per say, but rather, manifest them in different and and endless combinations.

Blessings
~ND

PS. The return key and paragraph structure are your friends. Try chopping up your posts so they're not so much like a wall of text.

*****Sorry about my structure. When I write or type I get too excited and forget English 101 I guess.
Yes, that is a good point. Different people do feel feelings differently. Just the very fact that we all share those same feelings mutually, is proof enough that we are all connected.
As for the soul, I'm still pretty caught up on that. I can't envision it as some corporeal manifestation. The way I kind of look at it is that spirits are all around us, constantly. The tree I see outside my apartment window is a fountain of life energy, and spiritual energy, erupting from the constantly composting ground. Why? Because, I think even trees have souls.
I see the soul as a process of giving to and taking from our Mother, the energies that surround us. The soul, the way I see it, is a reflection of our basic "humanness" put into a context we could fathom and understand. The soul to me is not an entity presiding within our physical bodies, but a manifestation and interpretation of the interaction with various energies around us. It is basically our capacity to feel, understand, and wander.
We cannot wander about something unless we gaze at it, mentally chew on it per se. We envision the tree and picture it in our minds as a subject of thought. As we stare at it, we can feel it's energies with our "Third Eye." We see a tree and we call it a tree, but that doesn't detract from it's energy. That's simply how we describe it.
All in all, I think the soul or what have you is simply the feeling we get when we look at someone or something we love. It's the feeling we get when we stargaze and wander about the immensity of the cosmos. The soul is not something that leaves the body when you die, or resides within it, it is the experience of the universal consciousness, unique to those who want to listen to it.
It is the candy or the fruit of existence. The dessert when you're done with dinner. It is all that is knowable, beautiful, artful, sensual, sexual, wonderful, and untouchable in our universe. That is the soul. Everybody shares love so everybody shares "The Soul."

-Or something to that extent.

To put it more simply:
The life you are experiencing, right now, at this very moment, is the soul. It is the spirit. Once you die you don't experience any more. You get your shot and what you do while you have your shot is what counts. Then the energy you use to experience life is traded away to someone or something else to let it have a shot at experience.
One way I see that DMT ties into this is that (IMHO) the sort of color changing pattern and "Spice Elves," or Aztec pattern (As a friend of mine pointed out) that you see, you don't actually see. You "feel" it. You imbibe the energies of the plant and experience the plants consciousness. Ones "Third Eye" gets squeegeed clean and ones corporeal "self" evaporates for a short time. Once you break through, you get a glimpse of the "soul" of the cosmos; a glimpse of the energies of the land. You see these energies through the eyes of the Gaian Mind or the Universal Conscious, or God, or what have you. They seem to float above the surface like some fluttering ocean of geometric electricity. It constantly moves and fluctuates, passing through a rainbow of luminescent color. You feel and experience the soul. Or at least that's sort of how I see it when I take my trip to hyperspace.
Once the energy is imbibed and if that energy resonates with you, the sub-conscious transmutes it into information and is expended in dreams, creativity, etc. I think the "energy" you get from the soul of the substance you ingest, fuels inspiration, creativity and novelty. This energy "resonates" with certain aspects of being and is transferred to ones surroundings through conscious action. It's all just like working with paints. You pick certain colors that resonate with the idea you wish to assimilate and through deft action the energy is transferred to the canvas and shared with the world.

Though I don't mean to get on a philosophical soapbox, I'll share my views.
All the collective energies, stored in their various ways throughout the universe, form one singular 'brain'
That brain, I believe, is our God, and at the same time, is all of us.

The universe is one vast memory card, and every single thing, every atom and every molecule, is one byte of information.
Inside the universe there is chaos, and this creates new 'thought' by changing the information.
Just as in our heads, information is changed, warped, sometimes entirely to form new thought.

IE, a pulsar blasts through space, eventually colliding with a planet and changing it entirely.
That planet was full of 'thought', it had it's collective information due to what it held and contained, then along came the radiation and changed it, even killed it in some cases.

This would mean all of us are truly connected, on a scale unimaginable, and it also gives us a reason for existence;
Humans being, along with all possible other entities, the thinkers of the universe, meant to generate useful thought.

This is a rough type-up I know, and I certainly don't claim a thorough understanding, and would love critique.
Also, if anyone would like me to continue to share my thoughts, I certainly will, just trying to keep short winded

I actually wouldn't mind if you did pull up that soap box LibertyforAll. I would like to hear more about the Pulsar.

Whilst I was listening to several lectures by some familiar names: (Familiar especially in this Nexus) Terence Mckenna, Rupert Sheldrake, and Ralph Abraham, I picked up on the whole "Attractor" idea they were tossing about. When they were considering whether or not the Gaian Mind, Universal Consciousness, etc. had either a plan for all of it's inhabitants or if human creativity and evolution were being drawn into the future into some "nexus of con-crescent thought" by some cosmic "attractor." Maybe this singular brain you mentioned is the cosmic attractor. It is interwoven into some separate dimension, or it resides deep out in space. The attractor emits this sort of beacon, some sort of "Invisible Hand" that puppeteers events and circumstance, shaping our destiny with deft adroitness. Sort of like an interstellar-mega-mind.

Aftermath, I would like to hear more on your point about the afterlife and continued consciousness. If you don't mind of course.

I've been putting off replying to you for some time now, sorry...
I'll be able to elaborate better tonight. I haven't been able to get in a philosophical mindset lately.
Edit: Make that tomorrow never been much a-one for deadlines haha!

Dear cupitor,

Great posts, great mindset.

Reality evolving a chemical over time, lending a helping hand to the brain of the individual, allowing a temporary glimpse into eternal nature of oneself and everything else. Seeing the wild party behind the curtain. Seeing the sacredness that is oneself and reality. A complete marriage of oneself to reality, dissolving reality to a level, where, one can view IT.....the one behind the many. One awareness, one beautiful awareness, always unfolding, for the sheer thrill of life.