Rama, who daily receives voluminous correspondence from all of the world, recently brought to my attention something sent to him by an independent scholar in India concerning the nature of the soul as explained in the Brahma Sutra, which has been the subject of considerable exegesis in India as well, such as that by Adi Shankara (788-820 A.D.), who has been called the "St. Thomas Aquinas of Indian thought."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adi_Shankara
I was particularly struck by the analogy used therein likening the soul to a carpenter and agentship to that carpenter using his tools, as it brought to mind some of the argumentation on the nature of the soul from Augustine and Aquinas that David McGraw reviewed relative to Descartes last November (see his posting "Mind and Body, Medieval and Modern: Augustine and Thomas Aquinas Versus Descartes") that we discussed some months ago. I would be interested in discussing how this might be applied to the position of the (central) ego Smythies describes vis-a-vis the "observer" of visual space. This is a link to some of the summary/commentary:
http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/bs_2/bs_2-3-15.html
More exegesis/argumentation has been published in this volume:
http://books.google.com/books?id=0wvuAAAAIAAJ&q=%22just+as+this+soul,+independent+though+it+is+as+regards%22&dq=%22just+as+this+soul,+independent+though+it+is+as+regards%22&cd=1
I have a Xerox of the relevant pages that I could supply.
