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The Soul

A History of the Human Mind

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The Soul

By: Paul Ham
Narrated by: Lewis Fitz-Gerald
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About this listen

 Everyone thinks they have one, but nobody knows what it is.

For thousands of years the soul was an 'organ', an entity, something that was part of all of us, that survived the death of the body and ventured to the underworld, or to heaven or hell.

The soul could be saved, condemned, tortured, bought.

And then, mysteriously, the 'soul' disappeared. The Enlightenment called it the 'Mind'. And today, neuroscientists demonstrate that the mind is the creation of the brain.

The 'religious soul' lives on, in the minds of the faithful, while the secular 'soul' means whatever you want it to mean.

In The Soul: A History of the Human Mind critically acclaimed historian Paul Ham embarks on a journey that has never been attempted: to restore the idea of the soul to the human story and to show how belief in, and beliefs arising from, the soul/mind are the engines of human history.

The Soul tells the story of the inner 'I', the strange essence of ourselves, and how it has been animated, immortalized, loved, armed, inflamed, enslaved, illuminated and enlightened over 250,000 years: from the dawn of self-consciousness among the earliest Sapiens to the ancient Hindu and Egyptian ideas of immortality and rebirth; from the Jewish self-conception of the 'Chosen' to the Ancient Chinese and Greek theories of soul; from the rise of the Christian spirit that broke the Roman Empire to the Islamic conquests and crusading Christians; from the divided souls of the Reformation to the 'rational' soul/mind of the Enlightenment; from the missionary spirit that harvested souls for western empires to the earliest recognition of the souls/minds of women.

We enter the dark night of the soul under totalitarian rule; contemplate the harrowing and fragmentation of the modern mind; and glimpse the rise of the synthetic spirit of artificial intelligence.

The Soul is much more than a mesmerizing narrative and uniquely accessible way of explaining the human story. It transforms our understanding of how history works. It persuasively demonstrates that the beliefs of the soul/mind are the engines of human history.©2024 Paul Ham (P)2024 Penguin Random House Australia Audio Anthropology Consciousness & Thought History Philosophy Middle East Middle Ages Ancient History Mormon
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I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of a book entitled the soul - perhaps a survey of historical perspectives on what the soul is or could be. While that expectation has indeed been met, the book is really so much more than that - a thoroughly engaging evaluation of human consciousness through history, and the ways ideas about the soul have led to both enlightenment and bloodshed. The profound conclusion left me with an odd sense of both hope and dread, somewhat reconciled by a fragile hopefulness.

Brilliant and so engaging

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At 38 hours, this book is daunting in its size and topic.
I highly recommend it to any one of a curious nature. The story is ours in all its multicoloured glory and disgust.

A mighty tome, a fascinating story

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This a long book, and reading, but I was drawn in by it from beginning to end. Paul Ham has done a vast amount of research into world religions and ideologies, priest and prophets, to put the book together, which is structured very well. I hope it gets the wide readership it deserves, though some will be put off by its sheer length. The reading by Lewis Fitz-Gerald was also excellent, though he does not get some German pronunciations quite right, eg Weltanschauung.

Outstanding work of scholarship

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It’s not possible to write a flawless book on this theme but Ham has come as close as is reasonably possible. The content is balanced with no hint of dogma-just a hint of humanitarian concern. The research is deep and rich.

This book should become a classic of its kind.

A stupendous survey of human thought and beliefs

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I was hoping for bit more depth on understanding of souls from different cultures, notably Islamic idea of soul is not described very well or hard to distinguish from that of the Christian notion. I would've liked more on the way the original culture or religion understands soul and maybe a little less on the political history. But very appropriately this title raises soul searching questions and soul crashing myth busting ...

This isn't the Answer but it seems bloody close!

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