Averroes seems to be misunderstood by many philosophers. His idea of a universal intellect that pervades human thought reminds me of the mental plane in Eastern and occult beliefs. It is but one of many planes of existence that the spirit may access on its journey through the afterlife. Averroes didn't believe in an afterlife without the body; he believed only in an impersonal immortality, wherein the collective thoughts of humanity are passed down to new bodies, suggestive of the collective unconscious or Jungian archetypes that wire us as we are born.
I am more in tune with the traditional projection through the afterlife; that it starts on the astral plane, where our emotional memories can always be accessed, making a part of our souls personally immortal. Another part, the intellect, transcends the astral and imprints itself on the collective unconscious, as Averroes describes. He may be correct that this part of the soul is not personally immortal, rather impersonally immortal. My thoughts are not my mine, he would say, but they derived from a universal intellect, and are passed on to others through the medium of thought in the after-world.
For this to work, it's as if to say a new body is composed of a personal astral soul and a disconnected mental soul. Such complexity may not seem elegant, though it could explain why some people feel their heart is always at odds with their mind. I'm leaning on the fence with this. Often I have felt like my heart and mind were two different "people" jostling for position; the heart being young and irrational, the mind being old and rational. I have found it difficult to reconcile the two, not necessarily because I feel they are two souls inhabiting one body, but because their chakra development may be out of sync.
No comments:
Post a Comment