I travel a county road to work and back during the week, four lanes, then two, gently inclined and barely curving for 9 miles through farm country. I pass a can reclamation center, a pet hotel, a church, and a squat building that sells “storage solutions,” as well as scattered homes and silos and barns. It is the kind of road that can make people impatient, especially when they are late for something or are simply made impatient by empty space. I’ve seen many a car in the culvert at either side, in all seasons, and have driven slowly past the aftermath of at least one fatal crash. I get distressed too, sometimes, and pass others going 10 or even 20 miles below the limit, and always feel chagrined afterwards, but I understand the frustration. I also have things to do.
During today’s drive, a green Lexus SUV ran up on my bumper, then darted out to pass my car, and also the tractor trailer in front of me, causing the car coming in the opposite lane to brake, hard. The tractor trailer turned at the next cross street–this is why it was slowing down–and I went on, stopping at the next stop light right behind the SUV. My face did not smirk, but my mind did, my soul even, and again I felt chagrined, because the soul has no business smirking.
At least, some instinct insists that is so, that the soul is meant for nobler things than a smirk, and then I realize that I don’t really know what I mean by “soul,” that I am, as usual, leaning on some ricketty ideas gifted me by other humans. I do appreciate the concept, but I can’t find any Goldilocks version: the soul as ectoplasmic essence, gifted by the gods or God, communicating with the brain through the pituitary gland–wild stuff, but not right. I’m not convinced of the immateriality of the soul, even as I recognize it is something more than body and some electrical signals blinking on and off until eventually the patterns grow fixed, and lo, a person! Also not right, Mr. Skinner.
I am fascinated by the ancient Hebrew concepts of nepesh and ruach, meaning something like “body” and “breath,” and the way the interaction between the two is the point–per Walter Eichrodt: “If nepesh is the individual life association with a body, ruach is the life-force present everywhere and existing independently over against the single individual.” The body is inert without breath to animate it, and breath exists prior to and even without the body, in other words, and it is easy to see how the Greeks and later Western Christian tradition pried them apart and made the of the soul a separate thing. The body/breath idea also reminds me of Taoism, and the idea that we al emerge from a field of potentiality, the uncarved block, but again, while close, neither concept is quite right, and I may fall asleep in this comfy bed before the bears return.
All these ideas are helping me understand what a soul is not, so I run the risk of discarding the idea entirely unless I can figure out why I believe it exists. First, I am made of the same stuff as everything else is made of, just arranged in a particular manner, so materially, I am ineluctably part of the world. However, the manner in which my material is arranged, the cells and organs and all the rest, allows for the possibility of self-awareness, something that much of the matter around me does not appear to possess, at least in any way I can understand. So maybe the soul is this potential, the conditions by which a person can become a person, interacting with the world, forming attachments and ideas and emotions and other such expressions of selfhood, all connected to that initial set of conditions. That way, the soul becoming a self might be compared to a mushroom, popping out of the soil, and we see the mushroom but not necessarily the network of mycelium that allowed for the mushroom to appear. I guess that is really not so different from what various religious and philosophical traditions have communicated, atman and jiva-atman, which seems a lot like nepesh and ruach again; I am surely mangling what are very subtle traditions and concepts, so once more: the soul is the process by which a certain arrangement of matter is achieved, and thereby allows for the emergence of an individual self. The self is not the soul, but it is inseparable from the conditions which allow it to persist, and what happens to it after we die, well, damned if I know.
What I do find important is the idea that we are, to some degree, in control of what we do with the self that emerges, even though we may be genetically predispositioned in certain directions, and that our learned experience is enormously difficult to analyze and understand. Still, I chose to smirk at the driver of the Lexus, and as I said, it seemed like the smirk came from pretty deep within the layers of myself, and the soul from which it constantly emerges. No one was there to see it, had I even smirked physically, I was simply taking small and stupid schadenfreude, and as soon as I felt it I knew it was not worth feeling, but I’d felt it anyway. As I’ve clarified for myself by writing these words, I was disappointed because I believe the soul is something we should always be working on, improving, perfecting–better be working on your soul, as they say, and I was reminded I still have a long way to go.
A smirk is a conceited kind of smile, an arrogance, a sign that I was placing myself above the person in the Lexus, and my idea of a life worth living is to work to rid my soul of any such feelings, because I know them to be false. I could argue that a smirk, or other pettiness, or even intentional cruelty are simply different ways a soul have of emerging as the self forms, but such relativity means that hurting someone is the same as helping them, that being the best at harming another is aspirational the same way being compassionate is. There are several reasons this is nonsense, not the least of which is that one approach liberates the soul and encourages it to flower (compassion), while the other binds the soul to a perpetually unsatisfying cycle of harm and being harmed, pain and loss, which stunts the soul, rather than helping it grow. To find oneself alive, the incredible unlikelihood of the chain of events that led to the existence of every human being, seems a shame to squander on a cycle of dominance and submission, bootlicking and lip-bloodying, that will only end in pain and shame as the spigot is turned off. We only have to look around to see what it does to people, to those who need power, who need to humiliate and demean others, the burning froth of need and pain in their eyes as they go on trying to feed the beast they have created, the one eating them from the inside. It’s no way to live, and even if avoiding such pain is the motivation for shaping one’s soul toward compassion, it’s a start.