"Having A Soul Changes Everything"
by The Findings
"You are a little soul carrying around a corpse."
- Epictetus
"Call it psyche, inner man, spirit or whatever you prefer, but the fact is that humans have an inner part which operates as both cistern and incubator: an organ of self-development which can itself be developed. Anyone who has become creative or good has used this virtual organ, as has anyone who’s become excellent at something, whether or not they’ve understood how it happened.
Standing opposed to this has been an entitled complex of academic and intellectual types, portraying us as mere mechanisms and possessing nothing that would resemble a soul. These people are committed to a belief that there is no root of consciousness and that consciousness itself is an illusion. I won’t waste time on how and why these people have ensconsed themselves in academic and educational positions, but Erich Hoffer described them quite well back in the 1960s: "There is an element of misanthropy (hatred of humans) in all determinists. To all of them man as he really is is a nuisance, and they strive to prove by various means that there is no such thing as human nature."
What Hoffer noticed back then remains true, and it has left us with a serious problem: With the ejection of soul came the rejection of a powerful inner life. Our unfortunate circumstance is that the concept of the soul has fallen out of public discourse. There is precious little contemporary conversation referencing a rich inner life or the development of such a thing. And if there is no possibility of a rich inner life, we find ourselves doomed to fixed positions, with all attempts to change them being self-delusions.
Self-Fear: Another reason people stay away from anything that sounds like a soul is that they’ve become afraid of their own minds. Pop psychology and a hundred Hollywood productions have familiarized people with the phrase, “the depths of the subconscious,” leaving them afraid of what might be hiding within them. In other words: Pop culture has convinced people that their worst fleeting thoughts were the real them.
That belief is garbage, of course, as is made very simply and abundantly clear by hypnosis. Under hypnosis, with action spurred separately from conscious choice, people cannot be made to do things they wouldn’t normally do… that they wouldn’t consciously do. If you want someone to cluck like a chicken under hypnosis, you’ll have to find someone willing to cluck like a chicken in the first place. And so, the supposedly dark and shameful subconscious is still us; it is not of an alien and sinister character. So, please eject that shame from your mind.
If We Do Have Souls…It’s hard to imagine something more fundamentally human than self-experience. The eviction of the soul, however, has muddied self-experience. And so, rather than working harmoniously with our best parts, many of us have taken to shunning them. Forcing ourselves to turn away from ourselves takes us into rigid, judgmental states of mind, instilling in us a belief that other humans (all except for our little tribe) are fundamental threats. It leads to organization around that which we hate, to the exclusion of openness, cooperation and production.
If, however, we accept that we have souls (of whatever name), and that our souls are where creation and goodness form, healthy things follow. But before I list those things, please understand that if this weren’t true, we would very definitely not have symphonies, hospitals, air travel, refrigeration and all the best of our satisfactions: activities that revolve around ourselves as problem-solving units. All such things begin in the soul and only later move into the larger world. If there were no such thing as a soul, we’d be living like chimps. So, once we acknowledge the soul, these things inevitably follow:
• Our families, friends and neighbors become natural and innate sources, whose proper function is to benefit humanity and the world.
• When something goes wrong, we won’t default to seeing the person making the error as a vile offender, but rather as a source in need of calibration. (We’ll still be able to protect ourselves from truly bad people.)
• We’ll see our souls as wells from which we can draw continually. And so we will, improving ourselves and the world as we go.
• Seeing our internal references as trustworthy, we’ll become self-stable, not requiring externals to support us.
• We will drop the burdensome habit of comparing our every choice to external standards.
• We will become able to observe directly, then to evaluate by our internal operations. Self-reference will be becomes better and more attractive than referring all our thoughts to the opinions and demands of others.
Over time we’ll come to accept that we really are worthy of happiness and satisfaction... that we’re worthy of being appreciated and loved. Fewer and fewer of us will feel like we have to get away with something to get what we want, and will show our true faces, confident in their value. In short, once we get our souls back online and back into shape, we’ll find ourselves on the other side of discontent and self-distrust. We will happily take up great dreams and purposes, and we’ll find that faith and purpose will carry us through the barriers which remain.
I’ll leave you with a wise comment from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Please give it some thought: "The things which pass through our daily life should be valued according to whether or not they enrich the inner cistern."
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