Parent of the soul
I was out walking the other day, just wandering around. And somehow, my thoughts led me to an idea. Hear me out. Every person has parents who gifted them their share of genetic material. Then, there are external circumstances, including the world around us, how these parents, or maybe not even these parents raise them, how a given personality navigates all sorts of hardships and challenges, dreams, infatuation, disappointments, etc.
But also, in religious circles, it's customary to talk about the soul. Whether it exists or not, we don't know for sure. Even some stubborn materialists sometimes have doubts about this. Well, let's say there is a certain virtual, emergent prototype that combines a person's inner world, shaped by this genetic heritage and environmental influence, which anthropomorphically represents the consciousness of this individual. Throughout my life, I've encountered many different models of abstraction, starting with ones from higher mathematics, and later as a designer working with user personas and their groups, as an IT professional working with virtual machines, and so on. It's easy for me to imagine that what people commonly call the "soul" is just a collective abstract "something" that a person feels but doesn't quite know how to describe properly.
So, the idea is that this anthropomorphic soul also has a parent of its own. Something like grand collective, like ancestral memory, epigenetic cues, and cultural codes embedded deep in the subconscious. "It" — this parent of the soul — teaches and nurtures our soul. Apparently, it takes the form of "talking" conscience.
What's the right name for it: archetypes, Super-Ego, the collective unconscious, egregore, daimonion, Anima Mundi, epigenetic memory, memetics — I don't know. There is no established term for this. So, I'd call it Atmajanaka (Sanskrit for "sourse of the soul").
Tags: philosophypsychologyreligion
