The tobacco used by the native Americans before the advent of modern cigarettes did not have all the chemical components found today. It’s just my opinion and yes, I’m an ex-smoker, you are doing harm to your mind as well.

The oxygen deprivation does affect your mind.

There is 0 proof that smoking affects auras/essences negatively or otherwise. Incidentally, there is also 0 proof that auras/essences actually exist. Nicotine does have an effect on the brain (that’s why it feels good when you smoke).

I believe that there is no such thing as a “soul” or “aura”- there is just what our brain creates. And, since smoking is bad for your body (in so very many ways), it’s eventually just as bad for your mental health as well as your physical health. There’s nothing like a diagnosis of lung cancer or COPD to really ruin your day. Shaman, medicine men, and mystics all die of lung cancer just like any other men.

YES and YES.

enuf said

I say it is a personal preference. I definitely have a hang up taking any poison into me, excepting alcohol.

That said, consider that at any moment your life could end for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with smoking.

Smoking would have to be my key to happiness for it to be worth it. It would have to be the only thing that really made me happy. If there are other things, or family that you want to see in the years to come, I suggest you do what it takes to quit immediately.

I don’t believe in souls and auras and stuff, but it can sometimes affect your mind…when you haven’t had a smoke for a long time and your body needs it, that’s all you think about until you get it. Nowhere near as bad as alcohol or hard drugs, but the effect is there. However it effects you, it will only be negated once you get a smoke. If souls exist and were able to be affected by nicotine, then I guess yeah, it could.

When I am ailed by woes, problems, anger or confusion, a cigarette can help a great deal sometimes. I suppose that can be translated into soul appeasement.

I’m just curious, without the brain is there “aura, spirit, soul, essence,”?
If the brain cells are affected by the cigarettes, then….I don’t know I’m thinking out loud.

@flo Yeah, it’s my personal opinion that things like souls, auras or essence were things we came up with before we discovered how the brain works. Or at least some of it. So, I guess by default, smoking, in some ways do affect the soul. :/

Not ideal, but, habits have nothing to do with enlightenment.

Another ‘spiritual’ myth, that to be truly ‘enlightened’ one must live a life of asceticism, celibacy, dress in sack cloth and live on lentils in a cave on a mountain top. Not true, just more stereotyping.

First, I believe all of us are different in the genes department. Some people that never smoke develope lung cancer, while other people smoke a pack of cigarettes a day and are healthy.

Here is a good example: my mother just died. She was 93 years old and smoked a pack of cigarettes each day, since she was age 15. She did not die of lung cancer.

I have been a smoker, since the age of 16. That’s 51 years, so far. I have a physical each year and a chest x-ray. My doctor tells me that I am in good health.

So, how does a person explain this big difference in their health and cigarettes?

It has to be the genes they were born with.

Look at your family health history. You see people in their 90’s still puffing away. If you have someone like that in your family you may possibly have the gene that allows them to smoke and not die early from it. Just smoke where there’s nobody to breathe the second hand smoke, because a lot of people do NOT have that protection.
Note: I’m avidly anti smoking, but I had a mom who died of emphysema. It’s NOT a pleasant way to die.

Spiritually, I have no idea. Mentally, smoking makes me feel more alert and more relaxed at the same time. Ahhh

When you smoke a cigarette it sends chemicals to the brain, changing its chemistry, which affects a smoker’s mood. It only takes 10 seconds for nicotine to reach the brain after being inhaled into the lungs.

Nicotine is a psychoactive substance. Like alcohol or cannabis or valium. Yes, it does change your brain chemistry.

Fact: I am an ex-smoker. I quit all the time, but not in the joke way – I truly quit all the time – sometimes for months and years. I can tell you this: smoking makes me an angry person. Not just angry – an angry person. It changes me. It affects me.

@Symbeline I kind of see what you mean.

@rOs Sorry to answer a question with a question but How could it NOT affect both mind and body?

@Symbeline…not really though.

I mean that, since smoking does alter your brain juices and your behaviours, then, if the brain is the soul, hypothetically and in regards to my ’‘the soul is what we used to call everything we didn’t know about how the brain works’’ suggestion, then by default, yeah, smoking does mess up your soul/essence/spirit/whichever.

@Symbeline it makes sense, if the brain cells are affected whatever needs the brain cells is also affected. But when I hear the words “soul” “aura”, “essense”, I think of “personality”.

Aaaaah…that clears stuff up. Well if I go on that, personality is a lot of stuff. How you make decisions, what you base things on, how you reason, how you perceive…it’s probably a bigger factor that predisposes an addiction, rather than the addiction affecting you. For smoking I mean.
Hard drugs or booze is something else entirely…smoking can affect temperaments and the like, as I’ve said, and as you point out with the body needing it, but not enough to damage your mental self.