The Soul Problem

Despite the power of a river to carve its course through the landscape, a river is constrained by the very course through which it has hitherto flowed. Such flows the course of human thought: winding as we have explored and pondered, occasionally brilliantly and incisively. Yet, despite how human thought has churned and frothed, its course remains deeply embedded in the landscape of human history from which it derived.

We come from history. Unlike Athena, leaping fully armed from the head of Zeus, we arrive biologically, socially and intellectually after a very long preamble. The term ‘soul’, for instance, comes laden with a tottering amount of associations. I know this, because of my own. As a child raised within a predominantly Christian environment, I remember thinking of a soul as something akin to an everlasting, buoyant bubble of essential ‘me’. I dimly grasped that this bubble was held mysteriously within the frame of my body; that is, until my body could not sustain itself (and my soul) any longer. But then, this me-bubble would float upward, perhaps escorted by angels, to where it would be triumphantly greeted by gatekeepers with white robes, to be escorted - perhaps to the sound of trumpets – into an unbelievably sacred communion with ancestors, or even God. (Unless I had been bad, and had been sent Elsewhere).

Now, many decades later, I have to admit that my idea of a ‘soul’ still carries a lot of these childhood associations. Thus, it is difficult for me to contribute intelligently about souls in general. Is a soul something that remains the same over time, or like the ‘self,’ does it change, as does the body in which it is said to exist? I get confused: is ‘soul’ the same as ‘mind?’ Or, perhaps the same as ‘self’? If so, why not use one of those terms?

The problem of the ‘soul’ is the extent to which the term has been used throughout history by so many, from so many perspectives and in so many ways. As a term by itself, with so many associations, it appears hopelessly useless. It would need, at the very least, a definition that was defensible. But here, I have to sigh, for the scholastics already spent a long while working on this very thing. You hear jokes about their purported interest in such matters as ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’. Whether or not any scholastic was truly involved in pursuing pin-head dancing, many valiant soul-searching efforts were made to get a handle on this ‘soul.’ However, all that appears to be the consequence of all that work is that a lot of well-meaning people became lost in their own terms, such that to them, the terms became realities themselves.

If when we use the term 'soul', what we are talking about is a more psychological ‘me,’ my own position is that the term ‘soul’ needs to be discarded. I don’t know how to talk about everlasting bubbles that float up to heaven, but if it is a sense of self (a ‘me’) that we are referring to, then I feel competent to chime in.

My own idea of ‘self’ (not ‘soul’) is found dancing within the spatial latticework of something that that can support such a phenomenon. Though not in itself substantial, something that exists nonetheless. A co-determination: something that has a causal relationship with the body, in both directions. To exist, it requires specific physical environmental elements which can support it. Pull out that support and ‘poof,’ it’s gone.

Dancing in the northern sky, in the uppermost recesses of Gaia’s forehead, flow the flowing colors of the Aurora Borealis. This is an image that, if not exact, suggests something of how I visualize the ‘self.’ On frigid winter nights I would stand beneath the stars, gazing at these northern lights, and my jaw would drop in awe. Remove the Earth’s magnetic field, remove the solar wind, and the aurora disappears. Did it exist? Of course.

A thought keeps nagging at me: why this interest in souls that transcend the life of a body? From a psychologist’s standpoint, it seems evident. The fear of death, ultimate loss, has probably egged humanity into a yearning for everlasting life, ever since there has been a humanity. So, you ask, what of it? What is the problem?

Certainly, in co-opting term ‘soul’ to indicate a ‘me,’ there is arises an immediate problem because of the ‘soul’s’ longstanding reference to something, perhaps not too dissimilar to that ‘buoyant bubble’ which I recall from childhood. However, this can probably be ironed out by choosing our words carefully.

The problem of the soul, the real problem, is that it distracted us in the very pursuit for which it was developed: the yearning for the Divine. It is not my place to try to convince anyone that heavens (or hells for that matter) don’t exist. I’ve witnessed both realms firsthand: in my own mind, and possibly in the minds of others. I, like any other human being, can easily create my own heaven, or hell. We don’t need to be sent somewhere else to find one.

However, our fear of death led to pitting our hopes on a soul, one that would float upward to Heaven. Therein lay the distraction: we lost sight of the precious opportunity for the Divine right beneath our fingertips.

Let us suppose, hypothetically speaking, that this universe: this life, these breaths, this world, those stars (and those stars beyond those stars) were all there is. Let us further suppose that for one afternoon, everyone’s gaze slid down from Heaven to the mundane, ceasing the perennial search for immortality, to peer instead at the world around them. Some might, with widening eyes, look more and more intently into the microcosm, others might find their eyes riveted macrocosmically to the stars, and beyond. As Douglas Hofstader wrote, “Perhaps my lifelong training in physics and science in general has given me a deep awe at seeing how the most substantial and familiar objects of experience fade away, as one approaches the infinitesimal scale, into an eerily insubstantial ether, a myriad of ephemeral swirling vortices of nearly incomprehensible mathematical activity.” (quoted in Stuart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, Naturalism, p. 25)

If this were ‘all’ that there was, is this not majestic enough? What if the odds for our opportunity to live were so infinitesimally small, that it was a miracle that our existence happened at all? Then, given this miraculous opportunity, how would we react if we learned that this was, most likely our only chance and the opportunity would not – could not – be repeated? I bet we would treat each other, the Earth, and ourselves quite differently, for would these not appear priceless?