In contemplating one’s metaphysical life, it is natural to ask about the soul. Is it a chariot transporting us through innumerable lives in the pursuit of adventure? Is it an aspect of the Jungian unconscious? Is it an entity all its own “trapped” in your body? Does it have a destination of reward or punishment? Can it attain "enlightenment"? Is it everlasting? Is it individual? Does it even exist?
There are many ways to approach the question of the soul, but in this post I will do a traditional East-West comparison and then try to find some middle ground. Western religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) generally believe that we have individual souls with destinations, based on either how we have lived our lives, or based on a personal decision to accept or deny the gift of salvation. There is directional ascent or descent that puts us in heaven or hell after a single lifetime.
The Eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism) generally hold that there appears to be an individual self of some kind that proceeds through multiple lifetimes of experience. But through a gradual process of self-realization, the goal is to awaken to the idea that there is no individual "I" that survives. This is particularly emphasized in Buddhism, with its concept of anatta or "no self". According to this, all things and people are ultimately impermanent (anitya) and without individual being. Westerners have a hard time with this seemingly nihilistic idea from the East, and instead place prime emphasis on the individual reaching spiritual preservation in a heavenly afterlife, abiding blissfully in everlasting relationship with God.
By comparison, the Eastern aspirant accents the virtues of psychological stillness and non-attachment, developed through yoga, meditation and other inward-turned investigations. A god is a power source you can invoke to provide steps in your progress, but eventually that same god becomes your final obstacle. The goal in the East is to release the goal, which includes letting go of God. By letting go your desire to survive as an individual spiritual being, you realize a state of being called enlightenment.
And what is enlightenment? For the Eastern practitioner it is the discovery that Life is Life, an eternally self-creating, self-renewing, self-reflecting energy that expresses itself through myriad forms like you. Individually, we are apertures through which Life looks at itself, dances with itself. So our individuality is temporary and there is no separate soul that must spiritually survive. If we survive at all, it is through our progeny.
To find some common ground between these contrasting worldviews, we can consult other geniuses who have worked on the soul problem. In the 5th century BCE, on the west coast of what is now Turkey, the Greek city of Ephesus was a prime location for the blending of Eastern and Western ideas. In this multi-cultural crossroads on the Old Silk Road, the obscure philosopher Heraclitus metaphorically envisioned the soul as fire.
He came to this idea by first noticing that of the four elements (there were only four in ancient Greece: earth, water, air, and fire), the element of fire stood out in a unique way. Earth, water, and air were all physical substances—they were things. But fire was no “thing”. Rather it was an action, a process.
Heraclitus curiously observed that fire was a process that changes things. It both destroys and creates: it burns down forests, yet the fire of the sun is the very reason we are alive. When I studied Heraclitus in graduate school, it hit me that he was really onto something. All you have to do is look up into the night sky to realize that for the most part, the cosmos is vast space filled with trillions of spherical fires!
Fire is an agent of transformation, turning life into death and death into life. Heraclitus saw fire as the perfect symbol for the soul of a human being. For him, the soul is not an entity trapped in a body, striving for balance and peace, or hoping for a joyous afterlife. Nor is the soul some impersonal emptiness that never was individual. Rather, the soul is an eternal process, forever situated in a mysterious pivotal position, balancing and interconnecting the physical and metaphysical realms.
Studying Heraclitus, I began to envision the soul as an eternal cauldron, a burning place where matter and spirit meet and transform each other—if they are in fact two different things. In psychological terms, the soul is an ongoing interaction where two minds meet: that thing we call our individual mind with its ego, alleged free will, and need to survive; and that bigger, Unborn Mind of the whole cosmos, whatever that may be. When this struck me I remembered a line from one of the Upanishads (philosophical texts of 7th century BCE India), that says the soul or atman “…keeps the two worlds apart so that they fall not into confusion”. By “two worlds” is meant the physical and metaphysical dimensions of a single person.
This seemed to parallel the insight of Heraclitus, who offered an ingenious alternative to the opposing views of soul as a thing or an illusory no-thing. Rather, the soul seemed to be the fiery interaction of two worlds, a Soul Fire. I have studied translations from both Greek and German sources of the 126 extant Fragments of Heraclitus, and wrote a rather radical paper which illucidates his ideas in more depth and color than I can do here. I am happy to email a copy to you if you like. Or pick up a book on him—he is quite a unique thinker, obscure and melancholy though he was.
Interestingly, Heraclitus was formulating his ideas near 500 BCE at about age forty. These efforts took him to his version of enlightenment he called the Logos. Within a decade or two, at another stop on the Old Silk Road in northern India, Gotama Siddartha (aka The Buddha) was also about age forty, and was conceiving his Wheel of Conditioned Arising that brought him to his own state of enlightenment he called nirvana. Amazingly, these two geniuses were breaking new metaphysical ground in their respective cultures at about the same time, completely unaware of each other. They are prime examples of the synchronistic emergence of the Axial Age and its perennial ideas on the inner life and self-discovery.
Because we are still divided by nationality, beliefs, and cultural traditions, I think many of us still feel like strange bedfellows on our shrinking planet. It is therefore important for all of us to learn about former geniuses who walked the earth during a rare and fascinating time when quantum leaps into the nature of consciousness were being made. We should use comparative study of the classical philosophers and great world teachers as a basis for imagining fresh worldviews here in the 21st century. The Soul Fire image from Heraclitus may help us connect the dots in a co-creative process that can move the evolution of the human race forward a few strides.
Finally, we should remember that language always falls short of describing our deepest experiences and ideas; that all religions and spiritual ideas are only metaphors--poems if you will--which cannot possibly fully describe the Ultimate Mystery that is Life. But one thing we should have learned by now, from centuries of comparative research and exploratory experience, is that we are Life—it is not something we "contain" or that “happens to us” as if we started off as lifeless clay vessels.
There are many ways to approach the question of the soul, but in this post I will do a traditional East-West comparison and then try to find some middle ground. Western religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) generally believe that we have individual souls with destinations, based on either how we have lived our lives, or based on a personal decision to accept or deny the gift of salvation. There is directional ascent or descent that puts us in heaven or hell after a single lifetime.
The Eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism) generally hold that there appears to be an individual self of some kind that proceeds through multiple lifetimes of experience. But through a gradual process of self-realization, the goal is to awaken to the idea that there is no individual "I" that survives. This is particularly emphasized in Buddhism, with its concept of anatta or "no self". According to this, all things and people are ultimately impermanent (anitya) and without individual being. Westerners have a hard time with this seemingly nihilistic idea from the East, and instead place prime emphasis on the individual reaching spiritual preservation in a heavenly afterlife, abiding blissfully in everlasting relationship with God.
By comparison, the Eastern aspirant accents the virtues of psychological stillness and non-attachment, developed through yoga, meditation and other inward-turned investigations. A god is a power source you can invoke to provide steps in your progress, but eventually that same god becomes your final obstacle. The goal in the East is to release the goal, which includes letting go of God. By letting go your desire to survive as an individual spiritual being, you realize a state of being called enlightenment.
And what is enlightenment? For the Eastern practitioner it is the discovery that Life is Life, an eternally self-creating, self-renewing, self-reflecting energy that expresses itself through myriad forms like you. Individually, we are apertures through which Life looks at itself, dances with itself. So our individuality is temporary and there is no separate soul that must spiritually survive. If we survive at all, it is through our progeny.
To find some common ground between these contrasting worldviews, we can consult other geniuses who have worked on the soul problem. In the 5th century BCE, on the west coast of what is now Turkey, the Greek city of Ephesus was a prime location for the blending of Eastern and Western ideas. In this multi-cultural crossroads on the Old Silk Road, the obscure philosopher Heraclitus metaphorically envisioned the soul as fire.
He came to this idea by first noticing that of the four elements (there were only four in ancient Greece: earth, water, air, and fire), the element of fire stood out in a unique way. Earth, water, and air were all physical substances—they were things. But fire was no “thing”. Rather it was an action, a process.
Heraclitus curiously observed that fire was a process that changes things. It both destroys and creates: it burns down forests, yet the fire of the sun is the very reason we are alive. When I studied Heraclitus in graduate school, it hit me that he was really onto something. All you have to do is look up into the night sky to realize that for the most part, the cosmos is vast space filled with trillions of spherical fires!
Fire is an agent of transformation, turning life into death and death into life. Heraclitus saw fire as the perfect symbol for the soul of a human being. For him, the soul is not an entity trapped in a body, striving for balance and peace, or hoping for a joyous afterlife. Nor is the soul some impersonal emptiness that never was individual. Rather, the soul is an eternal process, forever situated in a mysterious pivotal position, balancing and interconnecting the physical and metaphysical realms.
Studying Heraclitus, I began to envision the soul as an eternal cauldron, a burning place where matter and spirit meet and transform each other—if they are in fact two different things. In psychological terms, the soul is an ongoing interaction where two minds meet: that thing we call our individual mind with its ego, alleged free will, and need to survive; and that bigger, Unborn Mind of the whole cosmos, whatever that may be. When this struck me I remembered a line from one of the Upanishads (philosophical texts of 7th century BCE India), that says the soul or atman “…keeps the two worlds apart so that they fall not into confusion”. By “two worlds” is meant the physical and metaphysical dimensions of a single person.
This seemed to parallel the insight of Heraclitus, who offered an ingenious alternative to the opposing views of soul as a thing or an illusory no-thing. Rather, the soul seemed to be the fiery interaction of two worlds, a Soul Fire. I have studied translations from both Greek and German sources of the 126 extant Fragments of Heraclitus, and wrote a rather radical paper which illucidates his ideas in more depth and color than I can do here. I am happy to email a copy to you if you like. Or pick up a book on him—he is quite a unique thinker, obscure and melancholy though he was.
Interestingly, Heraclitus was formulating his ideas near 500 BCE at about age forty. These efforts took him to his version of enlightenment he called the Logos. Within a decade or two, at another stop on the Old Silk Road in northern India, Gotama Siddartha (aka The Buddha) was also about age forty, and was conceiving his Wheel of Conditioned Arising that brought him to his own state of enlightenment he called nirvana. Amazingly, these two geniuses were breaking new metaphysical ground in their respective cultures at about the same time, completely unaware of each other. They are prime examples of the synchronistic emergence of the Axial Age and its perennial ideas on the inner life and self-discovery.
Because we are still divided by nationality, beliefs, and cultural traditions, I think many of us still feel like strange bedfellows on our shrinking planet. It is therefore important for all of us to learn about former geniuses who walked the earth during a rare and fascinating time when quantum leaps into the nature of consciousness were being made. We should use comparative study of the classical philosophers and great world teachers as a basis for imagining fresh worldviews here in the 21st century. The Soul Fire image from Heraclitus may help us connect the dots in a co-creative process that can move the evolution of the human race forward a few strides.
Finally, we should remember that language always falls short of describing our deepest experiences and ideas; that all religions and spiritual ideas are only metaphors--poems if you will--which cannot possibly fully describe the Ultimate Mystery that is Life. But one thing we should have learned by now, from centuries of comparative research and exploratory experience, is that we are Life—it is not something we "contain" or that “happens to us” as if we started off as lifeless clay vessels.
Since we're are on the subject of fire, here is a link to my rendition of Jimi Hendrix's smash hit: The Crawdaddy Playing with Fire
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Richard - Informative, timely, and thought-provoking...as always!
ReplyDeleteThis particular post really spoke to me. The perspectives (including your own) and the final thought that we ARE life kept me awake last night! (S'a good thing)
Once again, THANK YOU!
You're welcome! Yeah, I lie awake at night too, wondering.
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