I Hate My

body. Not in the traditional sense of I am unhappy with its appearance, mind you, but in the fact that the mere possession of it disallows soul freedom. What is wanderlust but the soul’s desire to move? Would that make it soulular wanderlust? Can you just make up words like that? I suppose the proper way to say it might be: wanderlust of the soul, but somehow a made-up word and a real word juxtaposed like that gives you a certain sense of the meaning.

That’s a fairly clever metaphor, no? The soul is kind of a made-up thing in its way, as we are never fully capable of knowing it. Or, rather more specifically, we are never fully capable of knowing its purpose assuming, of course, that it exists—and I think that is the assumption we are working under here, but perhaps we ought to investigate a little bit. Now, for those who believe in an afterlife, it is perfectly obvious that there has to be soul because the physical reality of a person cannot make the journey to anywhere once it’s lying, decomposing in the ground. Of this we can be certain. So, there must be some kind of metaphysical reality we call a soul, otherwise there would be nothing to transport the life force to the other realm. Now, as to those who do not believe in an after life, there are a couple of options. If transmigration of soul is the belief, then we are once again left in a fairly obvious soul situation because there has to be something that migrates, yes?

As it turns out, something like eighty-four percent of the entire population of the world could be called “religious,” and religious usually implies the belief in at least a god or a kind of god and things bigger than oneself. This belief goes hand in hand with idea of a soul because it is impossible to believe in a god or gods or something and not believe in the soul, as the god would have nothing to work on in the subject if it did not exist. In other words, to affirm one category of unknowable things (i.e. god or the after life) is to affirm the existence of unknowable things, and it is therefore illogical to categorically affirm one section of unknowability while denying another. Some things are unknowable.

Given all of that, then for that eighty-four percent of the population, the soul exists absolutely. Now, the other sixteen would probably be non-religious or atheistic. Even of this number, there are those who would deny religion and affirm the soul—I guess I would toss myself into this category because humans are capable of nothing but screwing up the understanding of religion because of the needs of the body. Even of those who would deny the existence of god altogether, there is a number that would cop to spirituality—where there is a sense of something or other in the world that is…unknowable. The only real category of people who would probably deny that there is a soul and that it is concerned with matters which we cannot fully comprehend (namely death and the meaning of existence) is those who would deny the existence of god and a meaning of life. They would be, finally, a very minimal (I believe the term in physics is negligible) percentage of the entire population, and in their negligibility, they are probably wrong. Now, the majority of the world’s population is generally mixed when it comes to matters of taste, touch, sight, smell and hearing because these are very culturally defined things. I like moo goo gai pan because I like chicken and mushroom stir-fried together in a delicious sauce. But the problem with the senses is that they are so incredibly individualistic. The individual senses then are a subset of the category “feeling.” To feel.

But physical senses are inferior to metaphysical senses. For example, one of these metaphysical senses would be love. Love is composed of the five physical senses, and this sense of something or other. It is the combination of those feelings, and most of the time—especially as time wears on—the physical senses and the pleasure that the other causes in those senses decline and the feeling of love remains in tact. Feelings of friendships would fall into this category as well because we can see our friends and in that sight reach a certain kind of happiness. We can smell something foul and the feeling that goes along with it would be disgust.

In all of this then, the body is the weight that holds the soul down. I think it would be preferable to think of this metaphorically like a ship sitting in a harbor, where the weighing of the anchor is the start of the soul’s journey into the unknown. It is holding you to the physical pleasures of the things dry land and fellowship with other humans can bring.

So, why don’t we just set sail? If the body is a vessel for the soul, and vessels hold things, those things have to be put there, and the vessel, then, is really like the guy you hand your beer to and say, “hang onto this for a minute, I gotta hit the head.” He’s waiting for you to come back and reclaim your beer, or at the very least you have some responsibility for the beer, even if it’s to say, “Hey bruh, yeah, your beer’s over there behind the plant. It was my turn for beer pong.”

To return to a more sophisticated metaphor, the ship of the soul cannot leave the harbor until it has sufficient supplies or some outside force causes the anchor chain of the body to break.

But, then the question must be asked, to which do we attend? The matters of the physical are gratifying in their way. Good god if we were to talk about sex. The body loves the feelings of sex: sliding, slipping, breathing, dripping, sweating, touching, moving, and contracting. But is it worthy of as much investigation as the soul? Or is it, rather, what we would probably more likely term a distraction from the investigation into this sense of higher things.

(All right, I feel it is pretty important here to make a small note about Existentialism, and that note is this: we’ll deal with you gazers, objectifiers, and god-deniers more fully later—thanks Sartre for giving me even more work to do)

But to deny the physical needs of the body is a preposterous notion as it is so very real and we can know it, which is comforting. The question goes back to spectrum and an understanding of what is actually necessary. Do we deny the things we can know to investigate the things we can’t?