What is the difference between the mind and the heart and soul?

Answer 1

Everything we think is thought in the brain. So, the 'mind' is just our everyday way of saying the 'brain'. Sometimes when we want to talk about feelings, which are a very special kind of thinking, we talk about the 'heart'.

Of course the heart is really only a muscle for pumping blood through the body, but the ancients thought that it was also tied up in some way with our feelings. Since they did not understand physiology, the ancients simply decided that thoughts came from the mind and the heart.

To some, the soul is also an imaginary part of our bodies. Certainly, this is true when we talk of an artist having 'soul'. But, in many religions the soul is also a spirit that forms part of a person and will inhabit an afterlife when the body has died.

The soul is our "higher self", our essence. It is immaterial and feeds off spiritual nourishment. It is where we feel pleasure and where we are, our life almost.

The mind is where we calculate how to receive pleasure, where we make decisions between what is right and wrong and how we live out lives. It is our "self", our consience.

The heart is an organ, it keeps us alive and so is essential to us. It is also the organ that - mythically - governs our feelings. This is in fact false, because we do it with our brain, but there is no denying the fact that it is an important symbological tradition.