What is the soul? James Brown or...?

Browsing through a magazine I came across a photo of

this young man. The caption beneath it read: Young soldier

on the way to his first deployment.

 Some say that ''the eyes are the window to the soul''.

 Judging from the intensity in this young soldier's eyes,

I sensed a troubled and anxious soul.

Soul, in my view, is one of those ambiguous words that

is commonly used but when it boils down to it,

 can be very hard to define.

Some say that the soul is the incorporeal essence of

a living being. Others extend the meaning of the word to

include other very ambiguous words such as: conscience, reason,

 memory, thinking, perception, feeling and many more......

Ambiguous in what way? you may ask.

For me they are ambiguous because they are ''intangible''

concepts and the meaning we assign to such words depends on

our individual perception of them.

(Most of us would probably agree that living beings

have a soul, but exactly where it resides in a living being,

well, that's a different story.)

The first time I heard the word ''Soul'' was when my sister

came home with a Sam Cooke record.

I was instantly hooked and listened to 

''A change is gonna come'' over and over.

Something about the music and words just rang true to me.

Mind you, at that time I was barely a teenager and

only spoke Swedish, yet I still knew that Soul Music was

''real''. 

Compared to The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and other pop

groups at that time(-60's), Soul music had nothing to

do with ''celebreality'', nah, it was all about rhythm and

groove, with tinges of Gospel and Blues.

It was music you could really feel all through your body.

One after the other Soul artist and group hit the music

scene all over the globe. We were ''Sitting on the 

Dock of the Bay'', ''Dancing in the Streets'', showing

''Respect'', ''Stopping in the Name of Love'', and

''Getting Ready'' and ''Uptight''.

Soul Music was ''black'' music and often spoke of

 the difficulties that the African-American people were

enduring during the turbulent and often very violent 60's.

I still remember the first time I heard Marvin Gaye sing

''Trouble Man'' and Swedish though I was, somehow

music composed and performed by Black artists appealed

more to me than any other kind of music at that time.

It had........well, soul. (=deep felt emotion)

Some of us may believe that the soul is a term for 

something, an essence, that is immortal.

Something that after we die leaves our earthly bodies

and joins ....well, something eternal.

And comforting as the thought may be,

as yet, there is no real evidence for such being the case.

But then again, there are many things we consider as

''real'' though all we have are words and not scientific 

evidence to support their/its existence.

Take for instance; mind, consciousness, love, soul, time,

reality, truth, etc. etc. aka things we have words for

but we can't really prove exist.

Some things, in my view, we simply choose to 

believe to be ''real'' because we want it to be.

''I have come to realize that our soul is not a static element

or something we can ever put into words. 

It is something we find and embrace in bits and pieces

flowing through an endless journey of life.''

(Debatrayee Banerjee)

about the image: acrylic on canvas filtered in Photoshop