Is Soul the worst idea?

 I was just thinking this on the train when I looked up to see the tattoo. Which came first?

So still seeking an accurate articulation of anatta.

The problem is that the painting tries to paint itself. But this is not quite right.

The point is that the painting of the landscape may well include the paint palette of the artist.

That is quite valid. And there is an interesting fixed point (under the condition that the artists does not mix paints on the canvas) that the colours of the paint palette in the picture MUST have been on the real palette at some point! When the artist transfer paint from the real palette to the canvas palette a fixed point is set up. In this sense the picture really does represent "reality" in an exact and provable way. However there is an alluring trick here that needs to be understood to break into actual Reality. What are the "colours" of the mind? They are "ideas" so in this palette analogy we are actually thinking about thoughts. In that sense we appear to have the possibility of a fixed point where we are thinking reality. BUT this blog has been a long discussion on the impossibility of this. Why for thoughts does it fail, but for the palette above it works? It because while we can have a fixed point, we cannot know it any more than a picture knows that the paints used exactly match the object being painted. It is a meta statement. And when a thought matches reality it requires a meta statement (another thought) to acknowledge this. identity can never know it is identity.

The problem is when the painting (assuming it is a thinking entity) introduces a unit entity that it can grasp. It may formulate the understanding that it is painted from the colours in the paint palette by creating a concept of itself. When that “itself” starts to get its own life and the pairing starts to confuse itself with this conception the trouble starts.

The idea of an independent self, captured in its entirely by the mind and grasped as oneself : that is soul. And should just cements this idea firmly into belief and the mythology of the mind.

It is wrong. That notion of self was just temporary while discussing the paint palette!

Soul then is a distillation of the essence of the very worst part of the mind's thinking.