@Bill1939 The terms ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ seem to have different interpretations depending upon which new age or religious philosophy one goes by. Those two terms seem to be used almost interchangeably to frequently describe the same things. It appears, from what I’ve read, that a ‘soul’ is our greater or real self, the entity that each of our incarnated mind fragments (or egos) help to shape according to the way that each life is lived. ‘Spirit’ would mean each of these individual fragment or ego themselves. It is difficult for me to describe this with words, but both the spirit and the soul relate to Mind, not material. Of course there are different degrees of sentience, and there is some evidence which suggest that even plants can react to our thoughts.
According to quantum theory it is entirely possible that there are different matter systems, similar to our own (in some ways), whose vibrational frequencies are just out of the range of which our senses can detect and perceive. Quantum theory in itself doesn’t prove that our minds survive after this life, or that mind is not generated by a brain function, but it does show how different matter systems (worlds of spirit if you may) could exist without us and our current instruments being able to detect them. There are many big names in science that are open to this possibilty likely having a great deal of truth to it. Fred Wolf, Ron C Pearson, Brian Josephson, Ernst Senkowski, Dr Werhner von Braun along with many others (these are great and respected names in science) are all supportive of what I’m saying here.
I’d posted what I did above so you have at least some idea of what I’m talking about when I use the terms ‘ethereal counterpart’ and ‘mind’. I’ll try to address your question now. It appears that all matter, sentient or not, has an ethereal counterpart. When I say ethereal what I really mean is any type of matter, including the shells of bodies in which our minds attach to, or even a tv or a rock, whose matter waves have a higher vibrational frequency pattern when compared to our own matter system. <—- The site that explains how this is possible is located on my profile page (warning it gets technical). According to some of the material I’ve been reading, it appears that Mind and Quantum Waves are a different phenomena from each other, but they can interact with each other, and even interfere with each other. Yes, I’m open to the possibilty that everything in the universe has an ethereal counterpart, but whether everything has a degree of sentience or not I’m just not sure at this point.
What does amaze me is how many physicalist veering scientists go out of their way to deny all of the collective evidence for the duality of the mind (this is a very time consuming process, but I have already posted many links which provides the evidence for what I’m saying in other threads so I’m not going to attempt this here), but yet are willing to support an equally ‘absurd’ idea that a near infinite amount of universes exist that continue to split themselves into more, without almost any evidence of this being true. Why is it that anything considered to ‘spiritual’ in nature, or even the suggestion that multiple interpenetrating ethereal worlds of spirit, along with the communication of these dimensions, is considered absurd, but not their own materialistic speculations? It appears that more scientists are beginning to become more open to this, and an inevitable paradigm shift is occuring in the world of science.