The Soul Searching

There is a perpetual hesitancy in the words of those that would attempt to put words to truths which sit outside the scope of language: all translation is loss, and doubly so when translating the matter of the spiritual world.
Science’s biggest problem is that it makes too much sense.
Religion’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t make enough sense.
As with most things, the reality is not in the extremes.
There are always anomalies. That’s the point of them, to be. But one example cannot supply enough oomf for a reasoning, sentient being—at least, it shouldn’t. This seems to be where they both get in trouble. The one camp gives proofed evidence, and the other the evidence of faith and belief, which are rationally irrational.
It is at this point that everybody usually picks a side. People start saying that you have to believe this and that. Fuck them. Even that, using that particular word, would be abominable to some. It’s all about control.
So I have become a myopic spiritual vagabond.
I know because I see repeated structures, and that this sits nicely with me.
But I suppose I should tell the story of how my understanding of these terms came to be, so either buckle in for a quick tour of my spiritual upbringing or fast forward a bit to the parts at the end which are undoubtedly bound to be better than this rag.
My father is a music minister. He and my mother attended a Christian college in College City, Arkansas—while this seems like a preposterous name for a REAL city it is in fact a real place and home to Williams Baptist University. At any rate, Sundays were spent in church watching my father lead the music and learning more than anybody should probably need to know about any book (and that’s coming from me).
At any rate, as usually happens, unhappy children rebel against their parents. My morality and spiritual quest took a back seat for a couple of years.
Then, one day I picked up a book called The Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle. I read it from cover to cover. It’s basically about what it takes to build a great society. What do you need? Great men. How do you get great men? Genetics? True, but is it possible to make them? It should be. Education. This is how the ancients viewed education: training the citizen to be the best possible citizen (and therefore human being) they could be. It is inside this desire to create a thoroughly decent human being that we find the questions of morality, desire, turpitude, and, alternately, the place of truth and honesty in the life of the citizen.
This was, in other words, the birthplace of logic. In the course of this logic, there cropped up the eternal question: what of the soul? The ancients went crazy. There is a whole science full of its own signs and significations that the Neo-Platonists got into where they were actually defining the soul—or attempting to do so. Over-zealous as they may have been, they did interesting work and proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that interest in this issue of the soul would probably not die out quickly.
It didn’t. It should also be noted here that, in the language of that era (and I believe most people are dealing with Latin here) soul, mind, and reason all translate as roughly the same word—think about that in terms of the good book for a second.
(Quick side note: I think that Christians are doing themselves a very great disservice in cutting themselves off from other potential readings of their book. There are incredible lessons in that book that get missed because we don’t know how to read it.)
Anyhow, with the fall of the Roman Empire came the Dark Ages and for 1000 years, with many of the manuscripts of the ancients lost, the Christian church grew.
Then came the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the bastions of Christianity started falling and making way for thinkers like Nietzsche, Hegel, Sartre, Kant, Steiner etc etc etc, and the intellectual revolution was underway… but all great thinkers come upon the one question that will perpetually baffle:
“I say my good man, but what of this “soul” business?”
But it was essentially shelved and labeled “a bummer” because there was simply no way to know—I believe this was sort of the birth of Nihilism: if there’s no way to know, then what’s the point? Please, for the love of god, don’t go getting all technical with the definitions of Nihilism because I could’ve just have easily phrased it: if there’s no way to know, then everything’s true! To believe in nothing is actually quite a feat. At any rate, you catch my drift I’d imagine.
Steiner once said that the spirit surrounds the unique physical manifestation of itself, and then went on to describe it as something that actually penetrates through the layers of physical self and extends beyond, out into space. “In his later years, Velazquez never painted things. He painted the space around them.”
That’s where the spirit can be most easily seen. When it gets all mixed up with the physicality of the body, strange things happen.
All things that can be said to be share the similar trait of being. They are all connected by this, if by nothing else. And it could be said that that connection, whatever it is, is the universal spirit. People, animals, planets, galaxies, and whatever else was, is, will be are unique physical manifestation of the universal spirit—a bit like an arm hair or a pimple or a fingernail: never exactly the same, although they look awfully goddamned similar.
Well, I looked all over. I found eastern texts to contain a similar kind of structure, albeit in different words or a different style. It seems like there are four basic elements to human existence: the body (the seat of the spirit and the mind), the consciousness (sensations of external and internal sense), the subconscious (involuntary activity), and the spirit (the answer to the question: “why is there something instead of nothing?”).
Religions are usually a manifestation of a too-heavy emphasis on only one or two aspects of existence. The key is balance.
That’s a lie. The key is effort. Balance is impossible. One of the unique quirks of the universe is that nothing NOTHING is perfect (if only because nature doesn’t understand the terminology), and balance is a kind of perfection. One must try diligently to achieve that which they know is, in the end, not achievable because that is the path that will lead them towards knowledge of the world that lies inside of everything, that universal spirit that pervades everything, tearing through what we think is impenetrable, and making of us all unique universal manifestations, special, and ultimately dead, but that’s okay: to not enjoy sentience would be the greatest sin of all.
Heidegger has this thing about the four-fold: the heavens, the earth, the mortals and immortals. The earth is the consciousness: it makes the sensory world possible. The heavens are the sub-conscious: think the word “god” and you might be on to something. The mortals are the bodies that we receive: our unique manifestation. The immortals would be the spirit: immortality and eternity permeating every thing.