This is my first post, and i know it's somewhat late. I don't have the internet at my house at the moment so I am currently sitting in a copy shop, wondering if I'll have enough money to pay for the time this will take me! But 35 cents a minute is a small price to pay for the priceless discussions of our blog.

I was reading Sam's post and wanted to comment on it, but i decided my idea was pretty much what I wanted to express in my post anyway, so I'm going to do it.
Sam said that he thinks that the transcendental oversoul has nothing to do with religion, and I personally agree. Especially becuase near the beginning of the book Casy the preacher makes the distinction himself. He looks shyly at Joad, and asks him to not take offense before he expresses his idea. He ponders that perhaps instead of the holy spirit being exclusivley Jesus and God, that "All men and women we love, maybe that's the holy sperit, the human sperit, the whole shebang." In his own slack-jawed way, underneath the shade of the big tree, i think he summed it up quite well. I'm not finished the novel yet, but I am certian that this will be an idea that presents itself again and again. And given the setting of the story, and the hardships that people in the country faced at that time, I also think it's an extremely important theme. It was probably running through everyone's mind at the time. When you are sitting on your porch watching your dying crops and choking on dust, you probably have lots of time to think of the bigger picture.
The thing about Casy saying something like this is that it's the type of thought that you don't expect to hear someone talk about, even if you are thinking about it constantly. Joad, who isn't even a religious man himself, can't even look at Casy's eyes after he lets out his secret beliefs.
And then he says: "you can't hold no church with idears like that." And this pretty much sums up what Sam said.
To me, I think that the concept of T.O. in this book will be able to be peeled away in layers, like a philosophical artichoke. And perhaps by the end we will come away with an understanding of what John Stienbeck wanted us to learn. For now all I can say for certian is that it is a very spiritual thing, but not a religious thing.

So, I'm going to walk home now and read some more, so I can back up my ideas tommorow! hopefully my home computer will be fixed by then.