our spirit housed by our body

[Pry3rdEye]

for the song Parabola, i've been thinking about it for a while and it's hard for me to find what the whole song means to me. but i do have a vague idea of what the chorus could be translated as.

"this body, this body holding me".....i've always thought of this line suggesting that the body is mearly a house or shelter for the soul. the body's a shell that we shed after he pass in this physical stage of our journey. i believe after we die....we don't inhabit bodies but our souls roam free.

"feeling eternal....all this pain is an illusion".....the body isn't eternal but the soul is. it lives long after the body is disposed of. the pain the body takes only happens to the body....not the soul which is the only part that matters. the body is the shield.

as for the rest of the song....i can't match the rest of it w/ my theory on the chorus. if anyone feels the same about the chorus and could maybe help me w/ the rest of the song.....please post your opinion.

pacem vobiscum

[CrymsonInnocence]

i agree whole heartedly about the ethereal attatchment of the soul.

[Jesus H. Christ]

Your on the right track. The best way to understand TOOL songs is when you truly experience it (if you know anything about TOOL you would understand what I speak o)f. Especially with Parabol/a, it truly is an amazing track and when you do experience it will all make sense. You should be educated on the matters though. here is a quote from Maynard that sums it up:
""I think psychedelics play a major part in what we do," agrees Keenan, shifting uncomfortably. "But having said that, I feel that if somebody's going to experiment with those things they really need to educate themselves about them. People just taking the chemicals and diving in without having any kind o preparation about what they're about to experience tend to have no frame of reference, so they're missing everything flying by and all these new perspectives. It's just a waste. They reach a little bit of spiritual enlightment, but they end up going, 'Well, now I need that drug to get back there again.' The trick is to use the drugs once to get there, and maybe spend the next ten years trying to get back there without the drug."

[RRed]

Parabol is perhaps the body as the story its self and at the same time the story teller as well.

Parabola is an extrapolation upon your idea. Perhaps Parabola is about the evolving awareness of a maturing soul; a older soul. I would suggest to think of it as a first persons acount of realizing his/her reincarnated state. Just a thought.

[Dead eyes]

I think Parabola is either a belief or an incredibly hopeful song especially regarding such lyrics as "we are eternal, all this pain is an illusion" Id very much like that quote to be true but pain is something which can be repressed by our minds but is as damn well real as when we die. I believe that when a human dies there is nothing more, no matter how ... parabola is such a technical piece of wonderful genius. *turns into a puppet and is carried away*

[zacharyv]

Our spirits housed in our bodies is something I've believed in for years.

I like to think of our bodies as the vessels that hold our souls, yes. There is a pool resting at God's feet full of souls, or maybe it's one soul. God dips in a body and it fills and comes to life.
We are all one in the same. Before we are born, we all rest together in that pool. When we die, we return to it.

I believe it has not a single damn thing to do with drugs. I kind of agree with maynard about the drug thing, but I don't think you should have to go there anyway. That's more of an instant gratification to me. It's easy to eat a mushroom and feel colors and see sounds.
I prefer the following method:

Keep a dream journal. Learn to control your dreams. Dredge through your subconscious and look for the Opening. That Opening will be your portal back to that universal consciousness.
That's what I think anyway.

Oh, this song rules everything. I love the video too. WOW.
-zach-

[royc]

im not sure what a soul is exactly but from a biological point of view i would suggest that the soul is our genetic material, our dna. i'll try and explain how i relate this idea to parabola. this will probably be quite abstract as music is an expression of life whereas dna is the precursor to it all.

"This body holding me"

of the trillions of cells that comprise this body most everyone contains the full set of our dna, this body could have never come to be without those instructions. and even now it has the potential to create another body to call its own. (babies)

"We barely remember who or what came before..."
"Be my reminder here that I am not alone..."

everyone of us lives our lives according to the dna we inherited. inside us are genes from our mother and father and theirs all the way back to fishes and before. we are not alone we are the collection of so many lives and experiences although we may not think of it that way.

"feeling eternal, all this pain is an illusion"

when you realize that you will live on in your children then further on in theirs you may feel like you'll live forever. also, life is suffering this is nothing new, when you accept this fact it is no longer relevent in fact it is necessary.

"Twirling round with this familiar parable."
"Spinning, weaving round each new experience."

the second line maybe in reference to how a body grows with each new experience but not just mentally, science does not know the extent of the CNS to DNA communication but i believe that is where the human potential lies.

the words twirling and spinning that are sigificant here, dna in its double helix form twirls and spins. right now there is enough spinning and twirling going about in your body to account for some 30% of the ionizing radiation you'll encounter today.

i think the whole point to this song is that this holy moment was brought to you today by the letters C, G, A, T and U and the numbers 44 and 2

just my opinion ofcourse. on a side note, dna in its helix form has 10 molecules per rotation creating a decagon (if you were to take a cross section) this gives it certain "golden" traits if related to lateralus it may be the spiral of our divinity.

[royc]

you liked it eh, well you encouraged me to delve a little deeper into these lyrics.

"Twirling round with this familiar parable."
"Spinning, weaving round each new experience."

this is interesting, from dictionary.com

parable - A simple story illustrating a moral or religious lesson.
[Middle English, from Old French, from Late Latin parabola, from Greek parabol, from paraballein, to compare : para-, beside; see para-1 + ballein, to throw]

this sheds some light on the titles parabol and parabola. stemming from an even older word paraballein meaning "to throw beside and compare" and indeed this is what a parable does, it contrasts between the morality of a good and bad choice.

now for the genetic link. when it comes to creating life who we are and how we are designed are relative to our dna. the code is our genotype and how it is expressed is the phenotype. if you have phenotypically brown eyes there are genes resposible for this. there are 2 copies of every gene in your genotype, one from your mother and one from your father. for any given gene many alleles (different versions of the gene) may exist. this is the underlying cause of genetic disease. while many alleles may work at any one loci, for example the variety of alleles that are responsible for eye colour, other alleles may be not as fuctional or altogether nonfunctional. it may happen that you may inherit a good and a bad copy of a gene at a certain loci, depending on which displays dominance you may not be affected or you may die at a predetermined age. it is all in your genes and it is all going down right now.

there is no morality in our genes, the conflict in our dna is totally devoid of hate yet killing us just the same. it is the mechanics of the very essence of life. we are very familiure with some our genotype some which we can see in the reflection of a mirror. yet there are always other codes that have yet to execute, and when we experience that it will effect us more personally than we may ever know.

[aenigma]

I feel that Pry3rdEye is on the right track to the meaning of this song. This song has a very Buddhist atmosphere to it. In his path to enlightenment, the Buddha sought to understand pain and suffering and find a way to eliminate it. The theology tells us that, since the world around us is merely an illusion - that everything in life is transitory and not permenant - pain is not real. The soul is real because it is permenance and it is not affected by the pain in life.

To explain the body and the soul, an Buddhist will show you a cup of tea. Then, he will smash the cup and watch as the tea spills onto the floor. The tea has not changed - it is still tea. However, it is no longer in the cup and can be soaked up and put into another container. The whole time, it is still tea - it has just moved from one container to another. "This body holding me" is what the soul is saying, in the same way the tea would say "This cup holding me." The soul will be held by another body after it is reborn, but it hasn't changed.

Now, I'll turn to the lyrics.

The first verse "We barely remember....Hold on, stay inside..." is again the soul inside the body - a new body - where the old bodies (lifes) are faint memories for the soul. This point in time, although it may not seem special, is a "holy experience" since the eternal universal soul is in the body right here, right now.

I have, and Pry3rdEye has also, explained the next verse with the "body holding me" and "pain is an illusion." I would like to add that, when he says "feeling eternal" I read this as the person is trying to identify with his real Self - the soul - instead of his body in order to overcome the effects of pain.

The "Swirling..spinning, weaving" part is the soul taking in the experiences from its current body. Although the soul is not directly affected by these worldly experiences, what it is affected by are the decisions made in ones life and the consequences resulting from them - Karma.

In the end, the ultimate message of the song is "Live your life while you inhabit your current body." Yeah, pain is an unavoidable aspect of living, but you must realize that you will die and be born again. The pain will not last forever, but your eternal soul will. And if you live your life(lives) correctly, your soul will be freed from the cycle and will reach nirvana (not the band).

This is a great song, and I love the ending of the video, since the animated man becomes enlightened and it shows how his soul is part of the unveral consciousness.

[geoman2k]

i don't know much about this stuff, but i noticed that the cover of lateralus and most of alex grey's artwork is full of parabolas in the waves that emit from bodies in the spiritual realm or whatever. i think the name of the song in referencing to this, and that would link up with the lyrics about spirits and bodies and shit....

thats what i love about tool, so man little details that all hint at an underlying message. but they never nail down exactly what the message is- they leave that part for us to decide on our own. good stuff

[royc]

the ending of the parabola video is absolutly inspiring, that alex grey stuff.. his paintings, especially those sacred mirrors are amazing.

http://www.sacredmirrors.org/mirrors_view.html

the idea i put forth was that perhaps our dna, our genetic code is infact our spirit (our soul, atman, etc.) incarnate. this knowledge we are gaining about the very nature of life transcends any spiritual thought to this date. those ideologies seek otherworldly to explain the condition of our soul, there is nothing that we cannot know about ourselves that cannot be found within this "restricted" reality. pain is an illusion because it is nothing but an expression of life. our bodies have no need to be eternal for life is regenerated frequently. our body is our temple, founded on our dead ancestors that will be worshiped again by our children.

buddhist practices may play a practicle role in soothing the mind, helping to deal with the reality of suffering but the mysticism of reincarnation is unnecessary, you are reborn in your children, it is scientific fact. for me at least this song relates that this holy moment is no more than that for any individual, less than the blink of an eye in the whole of history. to have any "future" one must activly participate in rebirth, any less... well i dont know this might be where dogma might allow one to feel better about the whole situation.

choose to live and do not fear an end. realize this life encompasses so much more than any single individual. this is real life and we should care.

i should probably add that these sentiments are my own and i am not trying to convince anybody of anything. regarding parabolas, yes they appear everywhere and frequently, another example, if you look at the frames of the sacred mirrors too you'll see a two dimensional depiction of the double helix structure of dna which is a long line of interconnected parabolas. still i feel the title, especially because it is proceded by parabol alludes to evolution, in this particular example the evolution of language. within the dna diagram on the frames of the sacred mirrors is another example of evolution, showing that our dna has come a long way from our humble algae orgins. make of this what you will, i dont disagree with anyone, that just wouldn't be very productive.