Phantasmagoria and You

I closed my last post with an introduction of the terms Atman and Anatman, and I would like to continue pretty much where I left off.  I am writing from my desk during an open period at school so won’t be able to quote him as I perhaps should, but since this isn’t a paper for publication in an academic magazine I’d like to think that I can get away with merely stating that I will be borrowing heavily from Owen Flanagan’s book, The Bodhissatva’s Brain, throughout.

            First let’s introduce the Atman since that is the concept of the self we will ultimately be throwing upon the intellectual scrapheap.  While I’m pretty sure this particular term comes from India and a specifically Hindu kind of worldview, it paints human identity in universal colors, perhaps even the primary sort that all minds will inevitably discover in the absence of often counter-intuitive facts about the natural world.  Simply put, the Atman is the eternal, unchanging, indestructible soul embedded in the temporary and failing flesh.  The ghost in the machine, the imprisoned angel, the animating breath of god blown into a momentary and breakable figure of clay.  Until now we’ve been speaking in roughly Southeast Asian terms, but as it becomes more and more clear that the various faiths of the world represent the same paper dolls dressed in the arbitrary cuts and colors of local fashion, we can with a measure of confidence put the Atman on our interrogative pedestal as a representative of all dualistic interpretations of human nature, regardless of who thought them up or where.  At the glance that up until recently is the only investigation we were capable of, it seems as if the world is split into mind and matter, spirit and flesh, the earthly and the divine, but a careful look suggests that things fit together much more nicely.

            Which is where the Anatman comes in.  The Atman is an emissary from the Cartesian immaterial soul, an invisible, immeasurable, insubstantial thimble of The Great Spirit that is poured into a human reservoir at birth or maybe conception or maybe just awaits its next go-around in the ball-sacs and/or ovaries of the world, a tiny spark of the eternal flame borne by each swimming sperm and periodically ejected egg.  However it gets into the body, it then powers it like an electrical current, turning mundane, corporeal flesh into walking, talking, feeling celestial what’s the word there is no word that makes any sense substance, gives it a personality gives it hopes gives it dreams gives it aspirations that grow and change and twist in the temporal winds until it one day exits the body at death (however irrelevant that seems to become in this scenario) and returns to the collective spirit in the sky unchanged for all of the trials it endured in its however-many-years astride the human brain.  

            When you stretch the Atman out on the clothesline it really doesn’t make a lot of sense, and I suppose I could spend a couple paragraphs with it but for sake of brevity will content myself only with the reflection that an external holy-spirit-style power source for the body seems tenable only until you start to look into what the body is actually capable of.  I’m only beginning to be dimly aware, but even by the flickering light-bulb of my embryonic brain there seems to be plenty of power available in the physical world without needing to posit an immaterial one as a backup generator.

            This is the world populated by the Atman: indistinguishable chunks of invisible (in all spectrums and by any device) light propelling irrelevant avatars through a dream-world that exists only so there is something for them to escape: when an Atman “wins” it finds that its ultimate reward is the eternal oblivion of repatriation into the Soul of Brahma or Nirvana or some similar holy essence.  In some form or another, this is the view of human nature that has prevailed over much of our history, largely because there was a lack of plausible alternatives.

            Or perhaps what was lacking were compelling reasons to believe in said alternatives.  If we aren’t animated by an immutable, celestial flow of angeltrons, then what are we animated by?  If we aren’t single, stable, continuous entities dispatched whole from the heavens, then what are we?  It certainly feels like we are sometimes.  But careful inquiry is leading us toward the probability that we are not.  It seems we are instead Anatman, the soulless, and while that might sound frightening I would like to discuss next time why, a) frightening or not it is far more defensible than the other option, and b) that accepting such a fate might actually be a good way to take the human endeavor to the next level.