Mind? (Asking for a Dead Friend)

Where’s My Soul —

& Can I Get It Back Wholesale?

By jaron summers © 2025

I’ve spent most of my 83 years assuming that my mind — the whole me — lived comfortably between my ears. 

That warm, echoey place where thoughts bounce around like overcooked popcorn kernels. But lately, I’ve started to question things. It began with gut instinct. Literal gut. The so-called “brain-gut axis.” 

Apparently, I’ve had a second brain lounging in my belly this whole time — probably on vacation. If that’s true, maybe my conscience isn’t in my head at all. Maybe it’s behind my belly button, whispering moral advice through occasional gas bubbles.

I’ve made worse friends.

“You Only Need 10% of a Brain — 

That’s the Good News”

Medical science has proven you can survive — even thrive — with just 10% of a brain¹. I once met a guy at a DMV who clearly had even less and still managed to renew his license and get elected to Congress. So if we don’t even need most of our brain to function, where the hell are our soul and spirit hiding?

If my soul is in the part of my brain that got tossed out with my tonsils, I may be in trouble.

But maybe — just maybe — the soul isn’t even in the body.

The Soul-Catching Business Model (Now With 3 Easy Payments)

Imagine a startup. Picture me in a white lab coat, holding what looks like a badminton racket and a dustbuster. I call it the Soul Seeker 9000™.

It works like this: when someone’s about to die — and I mean really close (you don’t want to jump the gun and accidentally soul-snatch someone just having a nap) — I stand nearby, racket at the ready. The second they expire, I swat the air like a Wimbledon finalist and suck up the escaping soul before it floats off to the Cloud².

According to urban legend (and several YouTube documentaries narrated by men with goatees), the human body loses exactly 21 grams at the moment of death³.

What is that? Coincidence? Or the soul? Or a fart?

No matter — I catch it. I seal it. I label it, ideally with Sharpie and a date stamp.

Then comes Phase 2:

Clone You. Stuff Soul Back In. Profit?

After you die and I’ve snatched your soul (non-refundable), I get to work cloning your body. Once the new you is nice and squishy and hairless — think “wet rotisserie chicken,” but hopeful — I reinstall your soul via USB⁴.

I haven’t worked out all the kinks yet. The soul sometimes ends up in the pancreas.

But I’m optimistic.

With enough venture capital, I think we can get this thing FDA-adjacent.

So Where Is the Mind?

Is it the chatter in your skull?

The guilty pang when you pass a homeless man with a “Venmo Me” sign?

Is it the whisper behind your navel that says, “Don’t eat that fourth donut — but also, YOLO”?

Or is it all of those… and also not even in your body?

Maybe our soul is a browser tab left open somewhere in the Universe, and when we die, we just hit “Logout” — or worse, “Clear Cache.”

In Conclusion (Until I Die and Return via Clone)

I don’t know where my mind is.

I don’t know if I have a soul, or if I’m just a particularly well-aged soup of carbon and stardust.

But I do know this: if you’re on your way out, and you want someone trustworthy to catch your soul, insert it into your clone, and give you a second shot at whatever this is…

I’ll be standing by.

With a racket. And a Sharpie. And a sincere desire to charge only a modest monthly fee.

Footnotes

1. The Man with 10% of a Brain: See The Lancet, 2007. French man with hydrocephalus had normal intelligence despite massive fluid-filled cavities in the skull. Link to article.

1. The Cloud: A non-denominational spiritual holding tank. May also store expired Gmail accounts.

1. The 21 Grams Theory: First proposed by Dr. Duncan MacDougall in 1907. His sample size was six terminally ill patients, a scale, and a lot of wishful thinking.

1. USB Soul Insertion: Not FDA-approved. May cause buffering, spontaneous past-life recall, or goosebumps in Portuguese.