A Sensory Jig-Saw

What is a person without a soul?  What is a soul to begin with?  When we accuse someone in everyday conversation of “having no soul”, we’re accusing them of either lacking or failing to demonstrate certain “human” values such as compassion, empathy, or mercy.  Say you’re talking to your friend and he tells you that last night he dumped his girlfriend by text message and fifteen minutes later called her best friend in tears, trying to lure her in with pity so that he could then hook up with her.  Say it worked. He tells you with great pride and unrestrained laughter about how stupid girls are.  At this point you can accuse him of having no soul and I won’t butt in to say, of course not, nobody does.  If having a soul simply means being a relatively caring person who looks out for the welfare of others alongside his/her own and treats them with a level of respect proportionate to what they deserve, then sure, some people have souls and some people don’t. 

            Once you try fashioning the metaphor into something literal, however, we have to start throwing up stop signs.  I don’t believe in the soul if the soul is really some amnesiac and immaterial emissary from the spirit world just sort of squatting in the human body until it dies.  Of course, you can’t prove that it’s there and I can’t prove that it’s not because by definition there’s nothing to look for.  That’s what being immaterial means.  The best you can say is, “I feel like I have a soul, so I do.”  To which a friend of mine always responds, “well, I feel like I have an invisible, insubstantial third arm sticking out of my stomach, so I do.”  If we lived in a culture that widely validated immaterial third arms then you’d be hard-pressed to prove him wrong.

            That’s all I can say on that subject.  If we do have eternal souls, then we have no way of knowing and the universe makes a lot less sense.  Let’s discuss, then, the implications of a universe in which we don’t.

            The soulless universe must begin and end with constantly moving matter, which leads us to the concept of transience.  The concept of transience is one of the pillars of the Buddhist house.  All things change, no thing remains the same forever, what is today a plant tomorrow is broken down in the stomach of a cow goes through the slaughter house finds its way onto a BBQ into the stomach of a human 15 years later if it lasts that long is buried or burned and no longer looks anything like the plant it started out as.  For that matter it didn’t actually start out as a plant; that’s just the shape it wore when we first noticed it.  That’s the whole point.  A plant isn’t necessarily a plant, it’s just a group of atoms temporarily bound together in a shape we call a plant.  If you open your eyes wide and peer far enough into the past you’ll find sub-atomic-some-day-to-be-plant bits boiling in the pressure cooker core of a star.  For the Buddhist this impermanence is a reason to chill out and relax, because everything you think of as you (including your worries and grudges) is a temporary and chance meeting of atoms and molecules held together by a complex network of thumb-tacks and twine that will, inexorably, indisputably, and irreversibly break down, sending the particles of you back into the rattling centrifuge of the greater universe.  For whatever reason, you’re here, but it’s only a matter of time and then poof, you’re gone.

Matter is, matter moves, matter accumulates for a finite period of time as a table, as a chair, as a tree, as a human being, and then is dissolved either by the slow forces of erosion or the abrupt expedient of a bomb, blasting back into space to await subsequent recombination into something else.  That’s all there is; just matter coming and matter going, matter growing decaying changing rearranging rearranging again until time on the clock runs out.  To borrow the words of Richard Dawkins, “matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you,” and while people attached to the idea of an eternal soul might “find that thought disturbing,” he “find(s) (and I find) the reality thrilling.”

What is the reality?  The reality is that what our ancestors called the human soul is really the cumulative result of the incredibly complex interactions of simple matter.  Your soul is the sum of a life of sensory experience as filtered through the folded canals of your brain, a raft in a sea of physical stuff upon which you ride clothed in the layered garments of crossings past.  The raft and the rider are one and the same, and when the raft someday sinks into the endlessly undulating ocean the rider must perish with it.  At this point in time it’s the only thing that makes any sense.

And it’s alright.  Next time we’ll return to our naturalized Buddhism and discuss how acceptance of this world-view is a giant step down the path to traditional enlightenment.