Conservation of Spirit

I thought I actually might start rambling a bit, do something besides pictures.

This is an idea that is actually extremely personal to me.  I've only shared it with one other person, and that was when she was having a really tough time and it was the only thing I could think of to say.  For some reason I feel completely fine posting about it on the internet.  I guess it's just so impersonal that it doesn't bother me.  But I really do want to talk about it.

When I was a sophomore in high school I struggled a bit with depression.  I never quite got to suicidal thoughts, but I did spend a lot of time thinking about death and what I thought that meant.  It was also the year I took chemistry and learned about the law of conservation of mass/energy.  The whole "mass cannot be created or destroyed" kind of thing.  I think this was also around the time I watched Full Metal Alchemist for the first time,  so that probably played into this a lot.  I guess I really saw the body as being made up of a lot of different elements, all interacting to cause the motions and functions of the body, but chemistry couldn't really explain the mind to me.  Well, maybe not the mind, but just how these elements could come together and make something alive, something that could think and love and feel from things that couldn't do anything like this.  So I decided that there must be something else, something that I like to  call spirit, that goes with the carbon and oxygen and all the other elements that make us up.  This "spirit" could also not be created or destroyed, so somehow the same amount would always have to exist.  In this way, when we die, although the physical form of our body decays, the spirit moves onto other flesh, other life, never being able to become anything but.

Now, there are probably a lot of arguments against this theory.  Number one would probably be the increase in population of the world over the past years.  The way my sophomore-mind handled this was by believing that spirit existed in everything.  So, as the human population grew, the population of animals, insects, and vegetation would have to decrease.  I think this starts getting into how I sort of fell in love with Taoism, there needs to be a balance!  And I know that there are still a lot of reasons why this theory is not perfect, but something about it makes me feel safe, just a belief that death is not final, but just another step in the cycle.  It also made me more willing to accept what I learned in biology, because I always felt like I was missing something in that class.  Like I needed a philosophical study of biology, not just a scientific one.

Anyways, I guess I just wanted to put this somewhere where other people might actually stumble across it.  Somewhere besides my brain.  Thanks for reading, if anyone did.