What Do We Mean by “Body-Mind-

Soul-Spirit”?

Copyright (c) 1996 by Timothy Conway, Ph.D.

It is now becoming something of a cliché in various circles of modern life—from religion to
psychology to holistic medicine—to use the nifty phrase “body-mind-soul” or “body-mind-
spirit” when referring to our totality as a human being.
But what do we mean by this phrase? What is the “body”? What is the “mind”? What is
“soul”? And what is “spirit”? If we are not careful, each of these words can be used so
glibly that the wondrous reality denoted by each term is ignored and neglected.
I submit that we need a much fresher, deeper understanding of each component of
our totality so as to help us awaken from the somnambulist trance of ordinary,
unenlightened consciousness —lest we all fall into a limbo of mediocrity.
Let’s start with this aspect of ourselves we call “the body.” From the usual viewpoint, the
body is this fleshy, bony “thing” that we awaken to each morning. We wash it and brush its
teeth, we walk, drag or drive it around through the day to the various places we need to go,
we (hopefully) give it adequate exercise, we shovel (hopefully) healthy food and liquids into
it, we let it relieve itself of accumulated wastes. We might allow it various forms of pleasure
(ranging from nature walks to ecstatic dancing to massages and other delights, depending
on one’s fancies). Finally, we lay it down to rest at night in sleep. For too many doctors, the
body is coldly viewed as merely a biochemical machine, needing to be fixed when it breaks
down (usually by pumping drugs into it or invading it with surgery, chemotherapy, radiation
—such interventions often quite helpful, even life-saving, but also far too often an
inappropriate way of dealing with the roots of the problems). From a mercenary point of
view, the body is just a skinbag of water (comprising two-thirds of the body), plus carbon,
calcium and other materials, with an overall cash value of about $8.
But now, from a more “up close” biological viewpoint, the body is this utterly marvelous,
living assemblage of exquisite organ systems, whose simultaneous, relatively-
smooth functioning is a major miracle. Consider this: what is the fantastic Power that
fertilized a pinpoint-sized egg cell in mama’s womb and grew it for nine months into a fetus
—unfolding 10,000 generations of genetic memory, and differentiating this single little cell
into various kinds of cells such as muscle cells, nerve cells, blood cells, and so forth? What is
the Intelligent Power that then brought this organism from the womb into the world, since
which time it has grown from infancy into childhood into its present adult form of about five
or six feet tall, comprised of some 75 trillion cells for the average body (155 pounds)?
Incidentally, the configuration of these approximately 75 trillion cells is rather unusual: only
about 3.4 trillion cells are tissue cells, and another 31.5 trillion cells are native non-tissue
cells, mainly in the form of erythrocyte red blood cells (~28.5 trillion), plus platelet cells,
white blood cells, lymphocytes, macrophages, and other reticuloendothelial cells. Beyond all
these native cells, our bodies contain, on average, about 40 trillion foreign cells, mostly
bacteria in our colon. As scientists like Robert Krulwich have pointed out, "there are more
bacteria in you than there is 'you' in you.... Aliens from outer space might conclude that
humans are just one big chain of microbe hotels."
Each of our native cells is on average 1/1000th inch in diameter, ranging from tiny platelets
and red blood cells to much larger neurons, some of which are huge. Each of these cells is
awash in a sea of water inside and outside, with a miraculous membrane of phospholipids.
Each cell is made of a number of atoms equalling approximately 10 to the 27th power--one
thousand million million million million! Each cell makes some 2,000 proteins per second—
and, given that each protein is comprised of a few hundred amino acids—we see that each
cell is selecting 500,000 amino acids per second, organizing them, joining them, checking
them, and shipping them.
And of the various kinds of cells, consider the electrically excitable nerve cells or neurons,
the core components of our brains, spinal cords, and peripheral nerves. Running through the
body are a million miles of nerves (each made of vast numbers of neurons), a total length
40 times the circumference of the earth. Some 200 billion neurons are found transmitting
information in our central and peripheral nervous systems. The brain alone has ~100 billion
neurons. Our body's neurons mostly process information either in an outgoing or incoming
direction, with many neurons in the brain functioning interneuronally in both directions.
Each neuron has from 1 to over 1,000 dendrite "branches" and axon protrusions culminating
in synapses, across which "synaptic gap" flow a variety of neurotransmitter chemicals to the
receptors of other neurons. (We have up to 500 trillion connecting synapses in our central
and peripheral nervous systems.) These neurons and their neurotransmitter chemicals allow
us, along with the mystery of consciousness (see below), to receive various sensations
(sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile and kinesthetic sensations, sense of balance, etc.),
build up perceptions out of these sensations, experience emotions, make value judgments,
think thoughts, contemplate plans, store and retrieve memories, and enact motor behaviors
with the body.
On another level of the body, what is this Intelligent Power that is right now beating my
heart, pumping blood through 60,000 miles of blood vessels (roughly 55 million gallons
pumped in a lifetime), oxygenating tissues, growing hair, digesting food (despite the “junky”
food one might choose), eliminating wastes, managing the 22 internal organs,
growing/renewing 600+ muscles and 206 bones, operating the lymphatic system, and so on
ad gloriam Dei?
Biologists, chemists and physicists know that this wondrous body is composed of, as
mentioned, some 75 trillion cells, each in turn composed of various molecular substances
such as DNA and RNA which, in turn, are composed of zillions of atoms (circa 10 to the 27th
power) which are composed of countless subatomic “particles” which need to be more
accurately designated “wavicles” because they are mysteriously both discrete and also
diffused in spacetime (defying all Western logic). Moreover, modern physics has shown us
over this last century that the atoms which constitute our bodies are largely
(99.9999999999999%) composed of empty space! On the bodily, physical level, we are a
play of light, more akin to dreamlike no-things than “solid somethings.”
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Turning to that aspect of ourselves we call “the mind,” we find the psyche actually ranges
from “lower mind” computational functions all the way through the “higher mind” function
we might call the “soul.” The former, which can be categorized as the “normal mind,”
consists in 1) perceptions which organize raw bodily sensations due to various kinds of bio-
electro-magnetic vibrations into familiar entities such as recognizable colors, sounds, tactile
and kinesthetic sensation, smells and tastes, movements, processes, places, objects,
persons, etc.; 2) scanning for relevant, meaningful data in one’s environment or within
one’s own memory banks or reservoir of knowledge; 3) value judgments and emotional
reactions—the former basically dividing good-bad, appropriate-inappropriate, the latter
dividing into emotional charges associated with like and dislike, attachments and aversions,
and all the permutations thereof: joy, elation, euphoria, delight, fear, anger, shame, guilt,
envy, jealousy, trauma, shock; 4) memories of a constructed past; 5) anticipations of an
expected future; 6) abstract “philosophical” concepts about the world and the meaning of
certain events; 7) linguistic mental processing structured by grammar and syntax, deployed
either to speak or understand speech; 8) mathematical mental processing; 9) dreaming,
daydreaming, fantasizing, modeling, planning or creative “channeling” of new ideas.
Associated with both the lower mind and higher mind (see below) are some rather
wondrous, "extraordinarily ordinary" powers of consciousness that most folks simply take
for granted. For instance:
• Neuroscientists (psycho-physiologists) are entirely unable to satisfactorily account for the
subjective, “phenomenological” experience of seeing color, hearing sound and music, and
feeling emotional states such as “love,” “happiness,” “sadness”—merely in terms of neuronal
processes in the brain. Such physiological states can be correlated with these subjective
experiences, but descriptions of physiological events cannot adequately account for the
extremely vivid immediacy and emotional richness of these “noetic” experiences. This
phenomenon—better to say “noumenon”—fascinated the eminent Canadian brain surgeon
Wilder Penfield, who raised these philosophical issues back in the 1970s, issues that have
never been adequately accounted for by neuroscientists, asserts a contemporary
philosopher of science and consciousness, David Chalmers.
• Notice how mysterious it is that efferent impulses are initiated and enacted, such as
suddenly having the mental idea, “I am going to move my left hand,” and then executing
this as an actual physical movement of the hand in a feat of, literally, “mind over matter.”
The late Roger Sperry and Sir John Eccles, Nobel laureates and fathers of the modern field
of neuroscience, always reminded their reductionist colleagues in the field (from Francis
Crick to Daniel Dennett, et al.) that we don’t have a clue how such efferent impulses are
launched in the “silent area” of the neo-cortex. There is simply no satisfactory way of
explaining these initiatory mental events in physiological terms. Again, there may be
neuronal correlates for these mental events, but it is foolish to claim that the brain matter
itself launches the efferent impulses.
• Notice the strange, wondrous ability to switch attention from one sensory or cognitive
input to another. For example, you can switch your auditory focus from one sound to
another sound. This is the “cocktail party phenomenon”: you can inwardly “elect” to listen to
one conversation over another and then switch back and forth if you choose. Or notice how
you are able to switch your kinesthetic focus from one body sensation to another, say, from
sensations in your left hand to those in your right hand. Such subjective switching occurs
through a mysterious inner “attuning” process whereby you suddenly isolate one input as
“figure” while all the other massive sensory information instantly becomes “background.”
But precisely how do you do this? No neuroscientist has the faintest clue how you initiate
these changes, though scientists can observe with their PET-scan technology various parts
of the brain lighting up when you do this.
• The multi-faceted phenomenon of memory continues to be quite mysterious in important
aspects of both storage and retrieval, for both short-term “working” memory and long-term
memory. For instance, despite recent findings that regions of the bilateral parahippocampal
cortex and pre-frontal cortex are involved in encoding sensations, experiences and ideas
into lasting memory, no one “knows yet what prompts the greater mental activity that
seems to cement something in memory. We don’t know the source of those small
differences in neural activity,” as one science journalist has observed.
• Witness the positive and negative effects that mental visualizations and intentions can
have on biochemical processes in the human body, especially neuropeptides and the
immune system. This anomaly has ushered in an entire field, psychoneuroimmunology, or
PNI; also known as “mind-body medicine.” This is, truly, another form of “mind over matter.”
• Most recently it has become clear that our minds are synchronized, with brain cells
flickering in time with a regular electrical oscillation or gamma wave, occurring among
widely dispersed neuron cells throughout the brain with no apparent spatial pattern, and
much too rapidly to be explained by far slower neurochemical reactions. Moreover, these
gamma waves issue from each neuron's supposed "inputs," not its output areas, and there
are inter-neuronal interconnections among these gamma-producing "inputs/outputs,"
suggesting the existence of an altogether different set of neuronal networks than our
longstanding brain maps show; hence, current brain maps cannot explain consciousness.
Finally, as Stuart Hameroff argues, trillions of computations per second are occurring in the
extensive circuitry of the micro-tubule "scaffolding" that underpins each neuron, meaning
that the brain's processing speed is likely 10 to the 28th power operations per second, fully
a trillion times faster than is generally thought.
• The bottom line is that almost nothing is known about how our brains “produce”
consciousness. The idea that neuroscientists are just several years away from explaining
consciousness in terms of material brain processes, or anywhere close to creating “self-
aware” or even just “sentient” robots through a successful Artificial Intelligence (AI)
program-- is utter fantasy.
(Note: the above section on powers of consciousness is adapted and excerpted from my
larger essay on Consciousness, posted at the Science & Spirituality section of this website;
see that original article for more anomalies and for endnote references.)
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Now, there is a “higher-mind” or what might be called the psychic “soul” aspect to our
personality or consciousness which deserves to be distinguished out from the “normal” or
“lower” mind. Some of this entails simply going more deeply into aforementioned aspects of
certain normal mind functions, such as delving so deeply into memories that, with or
without the aid of hypnosis, one taps into full-blown past-life memories. Or else going so
deeply with certain kind of creative visualization and/or creative channeling that one begins
to access information from paranormal psi sources in what has been termed ESP or extra-
sensory perception. This can take the form of remote viewing (“seeing” distant places,
without the use of eyeballs and normal light-refraction off visible objects), telepathy,
clairvoyance, precognition (“knowing aspects of the future”), retrocognition (“knowing
aspects of the past”), discernment of discarnate “subtle-plane” personalities (ancestors,
ghosts, devas, spirit guides), etc.
At this higher-mind or psychic level it becomes obvious that we are each more than just a
distinct, discrete “bodymind”—rather, we are soul personalities that evidently don’t ever
die and can have access to states of “nonlocal consciousness” that deliver paranormal forms
of information about other places on earth, other planets, other (subtler) planes or realms
of being, other time-periods for these locales, and so forth. And, along with this paranormal
power of knowing or information-collecting can come paranormal powers of doing such as
healing and remotely influencing beings, objects, the weather, destiny—either for the better
or worse. This last area, of course, is the domain of white magic or black magic.
As souls, we are capable of a much wider array of experiences than when we are identified
merely with bodily and (lower) mental aspects of being. We can associate with multiple
levels of manifestation, from the earth planes to the highest heavens, and all kinds of subtle
realms in between—pleasant or unpleasant.
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Beyond the dynamics and manifestation of body-mind-soul is Spirit or Open Awareness. If
we are to use the word carefully and strictly in a meaningful way, in line with what so much
of the Perennial Wisdom “Great Traditions” would suggest, we can say that Spirit is the
domain of authentic spirituality, beyond mind and magic, beyond space-time, beyond
structure and parts, beyond energies, no matter how subtle, celestial or heavenly, and
beyond any form of egocentricity or selfishness.
The various Perennial Wisdom Traditions would say that Spirit is none other than the God-
Self, Absolute Awareness, Transpersonal Consciousness, Atman-Brahman (Self-Reality),
Buddhata (Buddha-nature), Shunyata (Openness-Emptiness), Dharmakaya (Truth Body),
Tao (Source/Way), Purusha (Divine Person). This is the Divine Self-Nature, the “I Am That
Am,” sheer Isness-Aliveness-Awareness, what Hindu Vedanta tradition calls Absolute Being-
Awareness-Bliss (Sat-Cit-Ananda), what Jewish mysticism terms the Ain Sof (Ein Soph,
Boundless Divine No-thing), what Muslim Sufi mystics call al-Haqq (the Divine Truth) or
Dhat (Absolute Essence).
Being truly Absolute, nondual or non-relative, there is only one Spirit or Awareness
here, Infinite and Eternal. This is the One Spirit that wondrously, magnificently conjures up
the cosmic play of multiple phenomena, the one Spirit that dreams this Divine Dream of a
universe. This Spirit, in truth, is the One Actor playing all the “soul-roles,” the One Self
displaying as all selves, the One Being manifesting in the disguise of all beings.
In sum, while there are many souls, there is only this one, nondual Self or Spirit or Divine
Reality, call this whatever you wish.
That this God-Self or Buddha-Nature can emanate a world of such endless variety—from the
subatomic quarks to the periodic table of chemical elements to complex molecules to living
cells to large cell-clusters-in-the-form-of-organs to the bodies composed thereof (from
worms to whales to humans) to the various conscious minds and souls associated with these
bodies—what a wonder! What a fantastic, amazing wonder!
Let all body-mind-souls praise this single, nondual God-Self from Whom all blessings flow
and from Whom all beautiful and bewildering manifestations emanate. Allelujah!
Alhamdulillah! Jaya Jagadeesha Hare!