I am fascinated by the unknowable. Some people spend their whole lives saying "I 
Don't Know" to those esoteric questions that arise. Me, i like to explore the issue and come to some sort of conclusion. It's that propensity i have to bring order to the chaos. That's another reason why all my bathroom accouterments are neatly stored in transparent shoe bags on the wall....
One monstrous "unknowable" is the question of when our souls enter our bodies. When does a life become something more than a tumor on life support, and instead a human complete with its own soul? I've spent a great deal of time turning this one over in my head and listening to the input from other deep-thinkers. I've come to a conclusion; a sort of encapsulation that i believe sufficiently explains this enigma so that i can move on to more important things like finding lost socks.
I think that the soul enters the body when a newborn takes its first breath. I think the decision a soul entity makes to take on that particular body of that particular human is 
a decision made from a position of higher consciousness. There are specific karmic lessons to be learned by belonging to that body,in that situation, with those parents, in that location, with those specific circumstances. In the case of a newborn that might die, that soul may have decided that the best lesson to be had for all concerned was for the parents to lose the child. And perhaps that soul only needed the experience of being an infant for a few hours or days or weeks. As difficult as this experience might be on a human level, we cannot impose our human limitations, weaknesses and spiritual blindness on something as beautiful and wise as a Soul.
