What is the Weight of the Human Soul?

Andrew Jackson Davis believed it to weigh about one ounce. Others say it does not weigh anything. However, being substance, the astral body must have some weight. ~ Sylvan Muldoon & Hereward Carrington, 1973 the idea of a material soul is not new. The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, who lived in the sixth century BC, thought that the soul was composed of an unusually fine or rare kind of matter, such as air or fire. However, if it was material it had to have some weight. Barbara Brennan, the former NASA engineer and now world-renowned energy healer, observes that ‘aura’ appears to have weight.

 

Robert Monroe also believes that the ‘Second Body’ has weight, although much less than the carbon-based body. (The terms ‘aura, ‘astral body’ and the ‘Second Body’ refer to what is generally de- scribed as the ‘subtle body’ in the metaphysical literature. The subtle body has often been loosely identified as the ‘soul’) If the soul has weight, it means it has mass and is subject to Earth's gravitational force. This has motivated various researchers, including Noetic Science, to undertake experiments to weigh the soul. 

In 1907, Dr. Duncan McDougall weighed six patients, while they were in the process of dying from tuberculosis. When death was imminent, the entire bed of the patient was quickly placed on a highly sensitive industrial sized scale. In each case, when the patient expired, he noticed an extremely small sudden change in the weight of the deceased which could not be ac- counted for by other means. 

The missing mass, which this weight loss represented, was used to support his hypothesis that the body had a soul which had mass On the death of the visible body, the soul departed, and so did this mass. The weight of the soul, based on the average loss of mass in six patients, was measured by McDougall to be 21 grams A paper summarizing his findings appeared in the journal American Medicine in 1907. 

One critic quickly pointed out that the sphincter and pelvic floor muscles relax at death, and that the loss was perhaps due to ejected urine and or faeces. McDougall rebutted that if this were the case, the weight would remain upon the bed and, therefore, upon the scale. Someone else suggested that the dying patients’ final exhalation might have contributed to the drop in weight. 

To disprove this, McDougall climbed into the bed and exhaled ‘as forcibly as possible” while his assistant watched the scale. No change was observed. Another critic reasoned that body weight was being continually lost as water escapes into the air through.

 

An Estimate Based on Dark Matter Statistics — © BY JAY ALFRED —