Religious Scholar

Do we have souls? Scientists cannot measure or weigh anything called “the soul,” and have rightly concluded, based on their own material criteria, that it does not exist.

But the question remains:  Is there such a thing as the soul? Of course there is! It’s just that we’re using a word to represent it that may no longer have meaning.

When we talk about soul we really mean the essential nature or who we really are. This nature is deeper than personality or appearance. It goes right to the root of our being. The Hindu scriptures ask, “When you taste, who is it that tastes? When we see, who is it that sees?” What animates us? These questions imply that there is more to each individual than meets the eye. People we identify as good (Mother Theresa) as well as those we call bad (Hitler) equally can be said to have an essential nature, though how it is expressed in the world may vary widely.

By this new definition of soul, human beings are not the only creatures that have essential being. My cat, Charlie, racing through the house in pursuit some imaginary prey, certainly has a core of being, an essential nature that animates and enlivens him, and makes him unique from any other being. Charlie has this core nature, and I can’t imagine it will just vanish into thin air when his body stops working (though it could be argued that the soul decomposes with the flesh, if we are in fact a mind-body continuum).

“Soul” is not the only religious or spiritual term that may not work for all people. The word “God” suggests to some the Bearded Old Man in the Sky, the deity of slave-owners, fascists, homophobes and misogynists. . Depending on one’s personality and intellectual bent, more descriptive terms such as Ultimate Reality, Divine Being or Great Spirit may work better. I suspect many have turned from a religious perspective altogether because they could not stand the conventional imagery provoked by the word “God.” Aldous Huxley addressed this question in the mid-20^th century by referring to God as the Ground of All Being, though this is a bit antiseptic for my taste. I like images of the divine that have a bit of flesh and bone on them.

Then there’s the word “mysticism.” Most people associate this with mumbo-jumbo, being “way out there” or simply with mental derangement. Quite a different definition comes from Evelyn Underhill, an English scholar who worked in the first half of the last century. For Underhill, mysticism was the study and experience of reality. Appearances and the phenomenal world count and matter deeply. But there is an essential reality underlying everything, and it’s each person’s charge to discover, explore and experience this holistic source. Like Thoreau, we each must find our own Walden, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if (we) could learn what it had to teach, and not, when (we) came to die, discover (we) had not lived.”

Since it is easy to go off the deep end, especially if one is unbalanced to begin with (and who isn’t in this wacky world of ours), the safest route is to embark on this exploration in the context of tried and true religious traditions. Blow the dust off your own half-forgotten faith and see if there’s a framework there that will steady you on your journey. If not, and your friends and family members attest to your basic sanity, be a trailblazer and discover truth on your own terms.

By viewing it as a key to practical knowledge, we are flipping the conventional definition of mysticism and making it the most stable, concrete and foundational practice we could and should embrace.

Sometimes the greatest obstacle to understanding is the way in which we are defining the terms. Pry the words up from their sticky context, clean them up, examine them and see if there’s more meaning there than meets the eye.