What exactly is a ‘spiritual corpse’?

[Fanghur Rahl he/him]

What exactly is the relationship between so-called ‘spiritual corpses’ and the actual people that they appear to represent? Because this is something I’m a bit confused about. After Dalinar breaks free of Odium’s influence and temporarily ascends, he hears “Evi’s” voice telling him that she forgives him, which I had originally assumed was her ghost that had somehow resisted being pulled Beyond for this very purpose. But a few months ago @Calderis later corrected me on this and informed me that it was actually her spiritual corpse, the same as the screams that Szeth used to hear.

But I’m really confused what exactly this means. Was it actually Evi in any real sense, whether it be her actually speaking from the Spiritual Realm somehow or Dalinar somehow ‘receiving’ the last thing she said before she died which was stored in the SR? Or might it theoretically be the case that Evi actually died hating Dalinar and all Dalinar actually ‘heard’ was his own mind poetically forgiving himself and she had nothing to do with it?

 

To be clear, I don’t think Evi actually did die hating Dalinar; I think she loved him right to the end (to whatever extent she ever loved him in the first place anyway) and probably did forgive him, since she always seemed to somehow know that Dalinar was driven by what we know as the Thrill to be the terrible man he used to be. But can we actually know this for certain based on the “I forgive you” scene?

 

If a cognitive shadow can be thought of as either a literal ghost or the cognitive equivalent of mind uploading, then what exactly is a spiritual corpse?

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine he/him]

30 minutes ago, Fanghur Rahl said:

But I’m really confused what exactly this means. Was it actually Evi in any real sense, whether it be her actually speaking from the Spiritual Realm somehow or Dalinar somehow ‘receiving’ the last thing she said before she died which was stored in the SR? Or might it theoretically be the case that Evi actually died hating Dalinar and all Dalinar actually ‘heard’ was his own mind poetically forgiving himself and she had nothing to do with it?

At the point that Dalinar hears Evi's voice, the barrier between the 3 realms is very thin, and I am pretty sure that Dalinar, with access to the Spiritual Realm, was able to get forgiveness directly from Evi before she died. Time is not an arrow in the spiritual realm, and spatial position has no meaning. It's like if all of reality were compressed into a single point. Distance is meaningless, and the dimension of time is most likely carried into the spiritual realm as a function of the limited understanding of the vessel or entity experiencing the spiritual realm (due to their preconceived notion that time moves only forward, and non-axial motions in time are beyond their ability to comprehend). In the physical realm (the realm of perceptions) space is fixed and time is an arrow moving forwards as sentient beings experience it. But time and space aren't similarly constrained in the Spiritual realm, so Evi's soul, on it's transit to the great beyond existed in the spiritual realm, just as Dalinar touched the spiritual realm when he combined all 3 realms. The timining of the transit through the spiritual realm is irrelevant, just as is the distance separating Thaylen City from the Rift, they both existed outside of time and space, and in that place, Dalinar received forgiveness directly from Evi.

Edited December 29, 2018 by hoiditthroughthegrapevine
some small clarification

[Calderis he/him]

Personally, I take this to mean that Evi is gone and this has far more to do with Dalinar than her. Any thinking part of her is gone. 

The Spiritual corpse/remnant/echo/whatever word you choose is, in my opinion (and at this level of discussing specifics of the Spiritual, all we really have is opinion), is all of the information of Evi's life. More importantly as far as Dalinar is concerned, it should contain all of the Connection to and from Evi while she lived. 

I think that these Connections are what was actively blocked that stopped Dalinar's memories of her, and even prevented him from remembering her name when heard. Her name was said, the connection was blocked, and the word slipped from his mind. 

So what I think happened here is that Evi had to at least have been capable of that forgiveness. I don't think that she hated him. But with her gone, those memories and feelings of her were filtered through his own Cognitive aspect. When he heard her screaming it was because deep down, that's what he felt she should be doing. She died in pain because of him, and he blamed himself for it rightfully, and so he heard her pain and tears because of him. When he reached a point that he was able to forgive himself, that he needs to focus on being a better man and not dwell on what he did, he was able to hear the love and capacity for forgiveness that she died with. 

It's all head Canon, but that's how I think it works. 

Edited December 30, 2018 by Calderis

[Solant he/him]

That's how I understood it too. While I do feel like there was an echo of Evi there, my head canon is that in actuality it was Dalinar finally allowing his self to be forgiven, projected onto that echo, if that makes sense.

[Fanghur Rahl he/him]

So is there any real-world analogy for this that relates it to anything in our folklore like there is with cognitive shadows (i.e. analogous to ghosts), or is this an entirely original idea on Brandon’s part? I know that Brandon bases a lot of the Cosmere’s metaphysics on Hindu (or at least Eastern) mythology, but this idea specifically isn’t something I’m familiar with.