Do you think all animals have souls?

No, I don't believe they have souls. But don't tell my kids...Velvet looks after us, you know.

No. Not the dead ones. Same goes for plants.

To me, the word "soul" is defined as "that which animates a living entity". Of course it is more than that, it is also its essential being, that which makes it an individual. It's what you connect to (assuming you aren't incredibly superficial...).

I think some of the higher order of animals have souls. Animals such as great apes, dogs, cats, dophins, whales, etc., I think they have souls.

No

I think some do, but not all.

No; I don't believe in the human soul either.

I think some do for sure, but I'm not sure about the others so I picked two answers. I look at my dog and think, if I have one she has one........hold on. I didn't used to believe in souls as an entitiy until I saw my grandfather die. In seconds, everything was so different. He was gone. So I believe in them now in a vague mysterious way. Then I look at a fish and think, maybe they do. Then I look at a June bug and seriously question if they are intelligent enough to have a soul, because they are pretty stupid. Then I look at the puss coming out of my boo boo and wonder if souls can be that small.
I don't really have a pussy boo boo BTW.

OK. I came back to edit that to 'I don't really have a boo boo with puss.' but the original was so funny I left it. But be it known=I DO NOT have a boo boo on my you know what.

nothing really has a soul... souls are a metaphorical idea ...
Metaphorically, animals have souls.

I would like to think so.

yes, i do.

I don't know. And I might not believe anyone who attepted to explain one way or the other. I would venture to guess yes.

> I think some of the higher order of animals have
> souls. Animals such as great apes, dogs, cats,
> dophins, whales, etc., I think they have souls.
>

Do not forget 'pigs', not kidding. They are closest to humans. *note the irony humans have given pigs a bad connotation*

No; I don't think humans do, either. I don't believe in souls. I think humans have consciousness, and that some animals also have consciousness. But I don't think all animals do. I think scientifically speaking, the jury's still out on this one.

From what I've heard, pigs are really smart animals.

I don't believe that anyone or anything has a soul.

I went to a seminar (that made my head hurt) where the main theme was essentially that the jury's still out on humans being conscious too. It may be an evolutionary advantage for us to have a sense of free will and consciousness that doesn't actually exist at all. i don't want to believe it, because who would, but it wasn't some kind of far out there theory - it was coming from a basis of good science.

Wow, that's really interesting. I had just assumed that "consciousness" was the basic feeling of being human and existing in relation to the world. If we're not conscious, then what are we? What's the explanation?

That is the question. And if science could prove that we're not conscious then what does that say about intellectual thought at all.

You can read excerpts from books by Susan Blackmore (who gave the seminar I attended) and also some (not too complex) journal articles here: http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/

She's one of the leaders in the field, and probably the best person at communicating the concepts.

I don't think anything has soul... so, no, animals don't have soul.

No. I'm not even convinced that humans have souls.

yes everything does!!!!!

I'm not sure.

As special, and precious as our pets are to us, there is no mention of animals having souls. Animals are wonderful helpers, in many ways, to humans, they are fulfilling an important role in God's plan.

Maybe they mean we are more like ants or bees or some primitive animal than we'd like to think. For a long time scientists believed humans had evolved past pheromones, that we didn't even have the organ anymore. Turns out we do have and we do unconsciously respond to pheromones.

I think most humans have souls with some exceptions.

Souls are like force fields. I think the objectiveness is proportional to objective consciousness. A bed of shrimp or rock or tree formation may have a soul of sorts, but not nearly like a bird or cat. You can communicate soul to soul with birds and cats. Lesser organisms are more environmental.

I was going to say that thats pretty out there, but you then proceeded to identify what's at stake. If 'I think, therefore, I am' can be disproved by science, science ain't worth much.

In one sense, to the degree that I believe in matter at all, I think of the human body and brain as interface to the soul. I've had astral travels with and without my intellect along, and in doing so, observed that the mind was just a machine following the script of the universe, but the same was not true of the essence of observation which typically occupies the mind and body. Without that force, we would be nothing but machines. No matter how many perceptual sensors are attached to a robot with the programmatic sophistication to conjugate sentences like 'I am', it will never have the experience of being that we, or even a fish with less sophisitcated thoughts has.

We are not our thoughts, our senses, or even our feelings; we are are the observor of creation which inhabits creation and creates it.

If you reach a state of meditation without senses, without thoughts or feelings, you will still be aware in another dimension of sense that you are there. - That is what no computer will ever recreate. At best, it's domain is limited to constructions of tangible data. Pure consciousness is beyond that domain. Science too is limited to the domain of tangability, thus of course science must inevitably prove that we are not conscious. Science also says something can't come from nothing, and yet we are here.

Science, while claiming to be the ultimate authority on matter, is only a man-made abstraction. Let's take yet another man made abstraction, mathematics, and compare it to reality. For awhile we had no such things as negative numbers or fractions. Did this mean that half a fish on ones dinner plate couldn't exist? While the mathematical model is always always being expanded, it has a lot of catching to do before it can represent things like emotions. Mathematics is it's own domain, mapped to domains like tangible matter. The laws of tangible matter are also a man-made abstract domain hoping to catch up to the domain of actual matter it always strives to model. The domain of tangible matter is yet in itself another abstraction of the ultimate reality, of which things like consciousness and emotions are other abstracted sub-domains.

To ask physical matter to describe the entirety of reality is implausable. We know of things whichlie outside it's domain. To ask some man-made abstracted model of reality we call science to explain reality is purely wacko. The best science can hope for (and this is true of all abstracted systematic domains), is to describe itself. Anyone choosing to abide by the laws of science has arbitrarily resticted their domain of reality from the get go. It's like living on a plane of Flatland, and describing spheres and cones as circles, but worse, because we have hints that life is more than 2-D.

Dear god, I should have known what to expect with the name Blackmore (one of those 'ellipse is a cone' cues). Did you per chance notice that there's a theme to most of her blog, that consciousness is not a good thing?

I speak somewhat figuratively as I say: Bravo. What a fascinating new demon you've conjured for us here!

Dang. I've read further. She's deep and subtle. She's not disproving that a universal consciousness exists, just that any personal doer exists. It's not entirely contrary to the point I was trying to make. Shes following one of the Zen traditions, which, I will say again, is but a single plane (domain, if you will), within reality. I have experinced this state of no decider/thinker/doer she brings up in many forms. My favorite to bring up is the 'Heaven on Earth' experience I had for a week and a half.

Where I part part paths with her is on the matter of there being no consciousness. While I agree that personal consciousness as an aspect of or counterpart to intellect and ego is a delusion, provable by spiritual practices, I don't agree that there is no such thing as consciousness. Buddhists are afraid to bring up the notion of God, yet all there practices lead to a merging with God, which they might call the tao, or the flow of nature, or something, but implicit in it is an orchestrating order, perhaps not conscious in the way we call ego intellect consciousness, but still with a plan, and that, a universal plan, should be looked upon as god, by definition.

I can see some logic to her train of thought, given her experiences: If ego intellect turned out to be a delusion, perhaps consciousness too is a delusion. You'll recall my using the phrase 'to the degree I believe in matter at all', as I have found too that matter itself is a relative delusion, and really takes on a myriad of forms (with accompanying explanations and histories) as suit consciousness. That ego, intellect, consciousness, and matter are all possibly delusions gets to the heart of the matter, the force behind creation.

Anyhow, don't take her work too superficially. The implications are not readily grokked.

I somehow got from you that you were suggesting that she was suggesting that consciousness is a fluke of machine activity (there are adherants to that understanding). She is only claiming that thought is a product, possibly epiphenomenalistic, of some higher order. She hasn't gathered enough data to draw conclusions on consciousness itself.

I applaud her on her experimental study using spiritual philosphy as her thesis, and scientific observation as her proof. I do the same thing myself. Granted, my experiences allows me to be open to grand possibilities, given the open implications of what I have thus far witnessed to be the order of reality. I've never been one to promote faith without understanding and evidence.

You are blessed that your life path contains such food for inquiry into the nature of reality.

From what I started reading, on the page Biggles pointed me to, it sounds like it's really questioning the concept that there's any such thing as "being like" something at all. It sounds like a sort of existential debate in some sense, although based on scientific arguments rather than philosophical ones.

I just read her 'There is no stream of consciousness' article. While I don't disagree with it, it could be clearer if she differentiated perception, consciousness, and cognition. When she argues that there is no stream of consciousness, she really means that there is no stream of cognitive consciousness. Any good musician or athlete could tell you that. ..about being in the zone. By becoming one with the flow of reality, as both perception and external event, and discluding the cognitive stream, you gain automatic precognition of the next moment, where as if you were to think about it, there could be many possible turns in the melody or the the wave you are surfing, and yet many musicians can be in synch, with no processing delays, even in the least formulaic of musical constructs. I agree with her scientific conclusion, that cognitive thinking is something that happens in retrospect. That it is a delusion. That we actually 'know' in a higher sense what the words of a sentence mean before enough contextual data to cognitively know them arrives. She spoke in one of her articles that she has learned to do without thinking. I've been in varieties of this state. The implications of it though are far vaster than the narrow field of her study. She simply concentrates on the fact that are minds are superfluous, that decisions are unneccesary and really just latent cognition of what's happening anyhow, and misses the more majestic point that our activities in physical reality are still none-the-less orchestrated with elegant complexity. In fact, it would have been nice if she had brought up just how elegant that state is, that everything falls smoothly into place, and one does not search for objects or assistance, just as one does not search for answers in their head.

I used to be way into her perceptual line of study. Things I discovered are that we can can consciously arbitrarily choose disparate regions of selective perception and disclusion in each eye. Wear a pair of polaroid 3D glasses, and view one (backlit on a white table). If one looks through their left eye at the glasses on the table, lens one is white and lens two is black. If one looks through their right eye, lens one is black and lens two is white. With both eyes open, one readily sees a gray flicker, but may choose to see either lens as black while the other is clear, both clear, or both black. To do this one eye takes in all but one lens, and the other eye takes in all but one lens. Another thing I found is that just as changes are spotted in a static field of reference which fades fromconsciousness, so to do we form animated fields of static reference, for instance when driving past fence posts, and only changes in the animation loop are observed. One of my favorite optic effects is an artwork at Union Station, LA, CA consisting of led animated vertical animated bars, a single pixel wide, spaced out every foot or so. After a few minutes of letting your mind go and letting your eyes sweep from side to side, the wall becomes a solid animation of passenger trains whishing by filled with celebrities like Marilyn Monroe.

I didn't get what you meant by 'being like', nor did I encounter any material of hers that seemed to allude to such a notion. Perhaps you are referring to the stepping stones of associative thought that are implied in a stream of consciousness?

I find for myself that sometimes a progressive flow of associative thoughts exists, and that sometimes it does not, that one second I may think of a crayon that I ate when I was three, and the next moment of helicopters. At the moment, I can't escape a stream, which is to say that if I think of crayons, then Peanuts, I can find an associaive link, and that the helicopters, while not linear association, are proximate within the days pool of attention. This is of course all the more interesting when you have the option of having your thoughts reflected in the world around you, as radio dialogue or whatever, and still finding that you have the option of linear associative continuity or total randomness.

Science will never resolve this issue of hers however. As long as we have adoubt in our a heads, a doubt will manifest in the more sublime interpretation of data. I can make my argument about getting in the zone as a musician, but someone can come along and demonstrate that cues to a particular pattern emerging were evident. We could call the dark side of the moon evidence of a divine plan, but then someone in their creative capacity can come up with a scientific explanation as to how it is that the moons day and year have have synchronized cycles, amongst infinite possibilities. We can leave our bodies and have our consciouness travel through matter through the aid of nanotechnology some day, yet still the debate as to whethar our consciousness is mechanical cognition or observing soul will persist. As I was explaining to Biggles and Wanderer in the recent 'accepting jesus' survey, this is the infinite nature of our role within the game of creation. Scientists will find sub-particles within the sub-particles within quarks and mesons, which don't exist now, but then will always have existed, like the retro-perceived stream Blackmore describes, but applying to reality itself as a stream of consciousness. It acts as such, but as I also claim, the whole universe can be replaced with something of entirely different physics than matter and consciousness, a zillion times per second.

Birds have markings and vision in the ultraviolet spectrum (another of those 'and now that always existed' things). Trying to imagine those new universes, it dawned on me that I can hardly even envision a new color. It occurs to me however that one of the first alterations to occur in human genetics will be the introduction of UV cones, that indeed, humans will have an order of magnitude of color perception beyond that which we can now imagine. ..and yet, like some cosmic joke, we still don't know that simple green appears the same in my mind as it does in yours, let alone how we will interpret it's varying UV component. There always has to be some carrot in stick we don't know (at least in that plane of consciousness). Hey I just noticed your book, Endymion, the greek god of dreams who liked to manifest as a rock. That's essentially what I've been yakking about here for hours now. What's the book about?

um...animals like cats and dogs..stuff like that..
Your ameba? No.

I don't think souls exist, period.

I do think that all animals with nervous systems have varying levels of consciousness... cats are clearly conscious, dogs are... just in a different way and to a lesser extent than humans. And humans, unfortunately, aren't perfectly or completely conscious.

Could be. Seriously, I think if any one person has a soul, then all people do. Maybe some just have bad souls or something. But, the idea of people having a soul that lives on after a person dies is a little out there to me.

I wouldn't say cats and dogs are conscious to a lesser extent. I agree with differently, there reality being different, their needs and instincts being different, but I wouldn't say lesser.

I suspect that there's a direct corrolation between the number of neurons or the complexity of neuron interconnectivity in the brain and the degree of consciousness. And animals seem to run on autopilot a lot more than humans do... and humans seem to run on autopilot quite a bit as it is.

I think humans are on autopilot a lot more than they'd like to believe. We say animals, don't forget we are animals.

wow. this is a touchy topic. I think there is a reason that my God talks of men being over all other creatures. I also think there is a reason that he made us in his likeness. So no. I think humans are the only earthly being with soul..and no i don't believe in aliens.. but i know there is a spiritual world as well.. and that there are creatures among that that will amaze us all one day.

So your god has two legs, two arms, a digestive system and respiratory system and all that? How tall is he? I'm only 5' tall, but my girlfriend is 5'10". Is he taller than her? Is he white or black?Does he really wear a white beard like pictures I've seen?

I know my question is put into a smart ass format, but I've always been interested in hearing the answers.

I don't forget it.

My god is a dolphin and he can kick your god's ass at fire-hoop jumping.

I dont know............. to say know would mean no for humans as well? and that I am not sure of either

Who truly and really believe that animals have souls and perhaps they do have souls who knows

no. I think only people have souls.

duh

I'm going to come back to this on a day when I haven't just finished a 14 hour shift!

Reply to me so that I remember

I'll forget too, so we can play reply tag until then. My response to you was somewhat continued in a following post to enheduanna.

look into a dog eyes and tell me, do you think he feels love or affection, that means there is a soul. so you may ask does a fish show affection, one might say no, is it the size of the brain?

I saw a cool video of a guy who had trained 4 or 5 goldfish to do different formations on command.
I found it-

And again - not a reply to make when I've just come off shift. I'll come back to this tomorrow or the day after

ok, heres my next tag then. good thing, since I'm late for class again.

a soul but not a spirit

How is a soul different than a spirit?

I don't believe in souls and all that.

I know what his word..the truth says...that we were made in his likeness...but yet we are human...Positive that one day when" Every Knee is bowed and every Tongue confesses that he is God" I will stand in complete awe and be just as amazed as you...Until then I am very careful to chose not to cross him.. Wouldn't want to face the judgements he talks about in Revelations.

You didn't come close to answering my question.

Basically...The only images of God that we get are that of Christ. The bible describes him in Revelations. But God alone we will not know til we are faced with him after our lives her. God is so pure so true that he will not come near enough to us in our sinful states(being human) for us to be able to look at his face. With that in mind when the final judgment days appear.. all will be revealed...I know what he tells us..And I take him at his word. Only two people have ever looked at God's face. Then they messed things up and the world as was created changed. You can be smart about it..But the bible is ultimate truth. if you want any ideas of what he looks like read his word. As far as the white hair..I would have to say probably a shade and form of white that we have never seen before. In the bible God refers to white hair as something we should respect as a sign of wisdom on some part. He is wisdom. So i am guessing that its such a white that i couldn't put a name to it. If you want answers to your questions, I suggest you get strongs concordance and a bible and research for your answers. I am sure you will be amazed with what you find. There is no exact way to describe him.. those who know him have ideas based on what scripture tells and what he tells us in his word about being in sound mind with him. but in many ways since he has different plans for each of us, his word becomes alive to each in different ways. different convictions...outside of the moral standards he has already made very clear. So i would think he is the only one who will satisfy your question.. try asking him.. i dare you.

The goldfish were cool. Perhaps god's hair is silver with streaks of UV green and purple. At cocktail parties he may opt for tentacles instead though, along with giant fly eyeballs and a toucan beak.

You dare me?

But the 'God made us in his image' implies that one wouldn't be surprised when they do see him because he would look like us, correct? But we all look so different, I'm just wondering for example, what color his skin is. Dark or light? Or are you going to tell me it will be of a color we have never seen before?
I believe in asking your God questions as much as I believe in the answers I get from my Mr. Pirate fortune telling toy.

God wouldn't have anything to do with having animal parts since we are made in his image, not in the toucan's. Also, he, the bible, says animals don't have souls so I'm not sure you could say he stoop that low.

He can't choose how he looks at cocktail parties? I find it absurd to imagine god as a 'he' or with any appearance at all aside from taking form as us.
Some people wouldn't know when to sneeze without their Mr. Pirate fortune telling game.

Then I guess that means in the end i won't see you in glory. You have no idea the dept of misery the other option will bring you. Life here is like a dot in time compared to eternity. Good luck with that.

That's true, but it's all made of God, and god's not going anywhere. It's absurd to think that what we do within this dot of eternity will have repurcussions for zillions of years. God can form billions of entirely different universes per second, and made us to do what we do. In a worst case scenario, we will revert back to the raw material of God and become whatever god in god's wisdom chooses to become next. Our concern about what to do within this dot within eternity has more to do with the context of this dot, which in itself also contains the eternity of God.

The way things are set up, God formed and plays all the parts, including satanic forces and evil persons whom form ethical challenges for the rest of us. While we can choose good within that for our own contextual role development, we can't go judging those who got stuck with the evil roles and are also fulfilling roles god required to exist in this context.

Heavens and hells of both physical mortal mundane and mystical supernatural types exist within this worldly context as suits people operating within this wordly temporal context. Tastes of god's glory and other spiritual experiences are accessable now. What one is finding now is a litmus test for what their soul can expect to continue to find beyond our current human form. One need not concern themself with an afterlife if they find themself immersed in a flow of divine love, or perhaps an empty vacuum or life of enmity and fear now; and if they are concerned with an afterlife, what they find themself in now is what they have available to improve upon towards that end. While one can't necessarily change their external circumstances, it's still possible to live within the worst of circumstances with a saint's heart flowing like a diamond waterfall and serve god untouched by the misery.

Back at ya.

while your points are close, they don't quite hit the target. May I suggest you read a book writen by Beth Moore titled "When Godly People Do Ungodly Things" While you may find some of the points come close to yours, you will also find that you don't quite make the mark. She is a great christian author. And she doesn't just write out of her thoughts. She uses scripture to back up all of her points. I think you will find it a good read. And I pray you find clearer truths in it.

I'm sure it's a good book, but perhaps you can summarize for me as I never have time for reading, and get all my worldly input on spiritual matters from radio lectures while working.

Based on your reply, I'm guessing you take objection with my stance on the role of evil, or on judgement.

Let me clarify that by judgement, I mean a higher judgement of righteousness in our hearts. As we don't know God's grand design, we can't make such judgements. That's not to say that we can't make worldly objective judgements, for instance identifying a murderer as a murderer and dealing with them in a manner appropriate for the safety of society.

As to the point on the role of evil itself, the only way that argument can be invalidated is to say that we have autonomy from God. I realize that that is both the theosophical precept of standard Christianity, and the manner in which most people on those planet, including the atheists, operate, but I don't buy it. You can take a glass of water from a lake, and it is still made of water. Our autonomy is a delusion, existing only within the worldly context, and only as seen though the eyes of our ego. For us to ultimately be truly autonomous would be to say that God is neither omnipotent nor omnipresent. However, recognizing that would make our apparent experience as individuals born into this world entirely meaningless. While the logic is sound, I speak from first hand experience of losing my ego, operating without thought or decision on godly auto-pilot, only here as an observor of God's orchestration. Even when I'm not in that elevated a state (heaven on earth), I have spent half of my time this last 20 years witnessing god's orchestration of the details that surround my life. While there's a mortal explanation for the things which happen in this world, like Newtonian cause and effect, and freewill, there are also parallel planes in which God is in control of every molecule at every instance, and we have no say in the matter.

To go a bit deeper, God is eternity in this instant, on the fly, complete with a history and future. Merge with God conciousness and you will find that there is no point in arguing whether life is freewill or predestiny, because they are the same thing.

One thing I find unfortunate about the Christian bible is that it hardly touches on cosmology in the slightest. The closest it comes to any sort of explanation of consciousness and the nature of physical reality is Genesis. For this reason I prefer hindu scriptures which go into immense scientific-style explanations of the nature of reality and our role within it. In fact that is what they principally focus on, while christianity focuses instead on worldly ethics. Put another way, hinduism is about who/what we are, and christianity is about what to do and think while we're here.

Another argument on the judgement thing, even if God didn't exist, the thing is that for the most part, people have reasons for the things they do, and are doing their best. At worst, if they have a conscience, yet aren't following it, they either feel that what's this world actually expects of people (to be selfish, for instance) as their life of circumstances taught them (which they didn't have a choice in), or that they had a defective mind (which they didn't have a choice in either). (that's epiphenomenalism - atomic level chain reation dating back to the big bang) Of course, within that explanation, you don't actually have a freewill choice in whethar you will judge someone either.

Now, if you really want to get squirrely and say that we have freewill to steer events independent of the atomic chain reaction which includes our neurons, then that is to suggest that god has partitioned our consciousness (which one would imagine then ultimately comes from God) and constantly intercedes in the flow of reality in response to our thoughts. Now if this intercession, or even the originating consciousness is actually that of God, then God too is a chain of reactions, and the question arises as to whethar, once set in motion (if one imagines that god or the universe 'started'), even God has freewill. Alas, neither even hindu scriptures nor my deep spiritual experiences (which include a first-person vision of the resurrection, and some vast supernatural gifts) can answer that question, and for all I know, perhaps God doesn't even know the answer to that one, even if God can build a zillion new universes every second.

I wonder if Beth Moore is related to Daphna Moore, author of my favorite book The Rabbi's Tarot, a deeply mystical/metaphysical text.

Either everyones actions are all together godly (God controls everything), or ungodly (fallable mortal egos are in charge), except for three circumstances which come to my mind: 1) By godly we really only mean following a code of god-like prescriptions and applying them generically in hopes that that priniples apply equally to all similar appearing circumstances. 2) Freewill does exist and while we may not know exactly what God wants of us in any instance, with the aid of following the prescription, we have a good chance of hitting the mark on occasion. 3) We can alternate between mortal ego and god-driven consciousness.

anyhow, that last paragraph was merely an inconsequential argument for symantic's sake, as I'm fond of doing to exercise my mind.

If you ever find a Christian book on cosmology, I would be interested in knowing about it. It's been my experience that only easterners, rabbis, and new-agers deeply concern themself with the subject in either scripture or discourse (aside from the christian mystics, of which mainstream christianity seems to prefer to deny the existence of, aside from making historical note of (and possibly denouncing) crusade-era alchemists, Rosicrucians, Jeanne D'Arc disciples, Masons, and such.) Catholocism has had it's share of mystical saints, but even they wrote more on theosophical proofs of God's existence, and ethical advancement than actual cosmology.

I could speak on some heavily mystical topics, and back them up with scripture, and yet I'm sure someone could back up a comprehensive entirely non-mystical explanation of the cosmos built on the scriptures as well, so documentation with scriptures is not for me a guage of making the mark. To even say 'make the mark' is rather presumptuous. While you may be a respected authority on popular christian interpretation, we have our separate opinions which will remain unproven completely until the day we finally merge with God entirely. I may not preface my posts with 'In my opinion and experience..', but it is implied, and I certainly never say 'You are wrong, here is the way it is', when speaking of spiritual matters. Seven billion people here have seven billion slightly different perspectives on the ultimate truth, so unless one of them is God, I'll go with my own experience and be open to new suggestions.

Thanks though for the reference.

sorry so slow from what I understand a spirit is something that lives on and a soul allows you to exist on this planet adn dies. All creatures with a brain have a soul it's kinda like a personality to make a generic definition but a spirit is deeper and allows you to connect with the creator and ponder and to yearn for the wisdom to understand.

What would you say a redwood tree or a bed of coral has? I believe they have a spiritual vibe (narrative energy) though I wouldn't exactly call it either spirit or soul.

I'd reverse your terms though. A 'soul' always implies a singularity. 'Spirit', in my experience of usage, can mean an archetypal force, whether tree, war, golden rainbow life, or gray limbo. (Though it is also used to denote ghost singularities).

Science has given us a universal language we can all agree on. Alas, there are so many spiritual/religious factions out there, that we can't even agree on terminolgy. New-agers have been our best source of integrating concepts from buddhism, shamanism, etc., into a common vocabulary. While many mystics of different faiths may believe in ethereal, atmic, and buddhic planes, they don't have a common vocabulary. What one calls ethereal, another may call atmic, if they use similar terms at all. I think the world could progress considerably if we at least all had a full exposure to all the concepts out there, and had a common fixed vocabulary for all of it. Simply calling a ghost one thing, and a spirit another, could clarify things a but. One can't even argue whethar angels are souls (self-conscious singularities) or spirits (narrative energy forces), or both/either without agreeing on terms first. Definition of terms itself is often the delineation between faiths. Sheol is 'hell' to fundamentalists, and 'dirt' to Christadelphians, and that change in term definitions changes the entire universal paradigm implications for us humans.

Oh. Is this your opinion or did you learn it from somewhere?

Hey I'm not here to debate all that exists. I just answered a question. As far as trees go; I never spoke to a tree. A tree never spoke to me. I can't say that they contemplate why they exist? and what does it all mean? To me you need a spirit to do so that it's unique to humans as far as I know. Everything else that lives I would describe as having a soul. If you go into ancient Hebrew they define the definition similar to that of mine and spirit is a term that was first used in religious context. I don't know the scientific terms.

Both? I never viewed myself or people the same as animals or trees. I sought out things to explain further my feelings so I guess in the perception of some the honest answer would be both.

Ok, I'll keep on the watch now that I know people use are terms differently than myself here. I don't think trees contemplate either. I don't really think souls or spirits do either, but rather as observors they occupy forms which do, i.e. us. Spirits of coral beds and tree groves, while they may have unique flavors, I think of more as generic energy, not something that learns and moves on to other forms or planes.

im not sure about the single celled organisms, but i think animals like dogs do

I found as a teenager in my earliest telepathy experiments that dogs made great subjects. From the eighth floor of a skyscraper I was able to get dogs on walks below to pause and look up at me.

Um yeah. Doesn't everyone?

Yes of course why not.

I think the animals that have been loved in their lifetimes somehow acquire a soul and go on to a better place to be with their humans later.