_____________________________________________________________
What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet lose or forfeit his very self?
................Luke 9:25 (NIV)
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Mechanical Purposelessness
We were sitting in the lounge of the hotel in Berlin. It was the end of a long day of sales meetings and strategizing. The lounge was too dark, too loud. After about thirty minutes of listening to more sales and strategizing, I asked my colleague to tell me about how he got into the business.
“I was a doctor,” he said, “but it wasn’t fulfilling to me. An opportunity opened up where I could take over running IT and to learn about computer networking and programming, so I took it…”
We talked for a while about what kind of medicine he studied, how he struggled though medical school. We talked about my background a little. I decided to spin the conversation in a new direction.
“So tell me,” I said, “what is the medical definition of the human soul?”
He laughed. “This is a difficult question, one which many in the field avoid answering. Most will say it is a part of metaphysics.”
“And what do you say?”
“It is a combination of many things, of emotion, of expressions, of thoughts, chemical-electrical impulses across synapses, all functions of the body and all measurable and quantifiable. Doctors are scientists, and if a thing cannot be measured and quantified, then it is better to leave it up to those who study such things. For me, I can say I do not know.”
“So if we assume then that each quality of what we might consider a ‘soul’ is simply the functioning of an organ, with what are we left as we eliminate each organ? Is there a ‘something more than the sum of the parts’?”
We talked long about the prevailing
wisdom. Some think that a soul does not exist without the body that conducts it; that we are chemical-electrical machines, nothing more. To them the soul then is simply an illusion, an imaginary friend made up of many measurable pieces, a warm and comfortable quilt of emotion, thought, superstition, stitched together and draped around us in an attempt of our unusually powerful and imaginative brains to invent some kind of higher purpose for our existence. We are glorified apes jabbing highly complex sticks into highly complex termite mounds, dreaming with our advanced imagination and creativity that there is a greater meaning for us than to simply die and rot back into the dust. In this imagining and creating and choosing we invent purpose where there really is none, and in this choosing and creating we invent destiny, we invent Heaven and suddenly our animal, mechanical purposelessness becomes bearable.
I am twenty months away in my mind, standing in my bother’s kitchen. It is around 9 PM, May 3rd, 2006. I am talking with another doctor.
“What was the time of death?”
“8:12. It was very beautiful and peaceful. He fell asleep and we lowered the oxygen so gradually he didn’t even notice that he was dying. At the end, the only time he moved was an involuntary twinge in his face at the moment of death. The girls thought he was smiling because he was going up to heaven.”
He says it as if it is sweet that the children could think such a foolish thing, that it was one of those random little spasms of life or death that the naive believe have meaning, but since they are children, and had just lost their father, it is nice, it is ok to let them think this. We are adults, we know better…
I am sad for the doctor. He did a brilliant job, he was kind and helpful to my brother and sister-in-law and the girls to go through such a terrible evening, but I am sad for his medicinal emptiness, his distant professionalism. How many people must one watch die to lose the sense loss?
What is the Soul?
I have wrestled with this question for months: how can the soul be defined without using religious or metaphysical dogma? Remove every existing definition of soul (spirit, ghost, life force, electricity), disassociate the concept of soul from every philosophy, every religion, every science, and with what are you left? This is the problem for me—I am not interested in understanding the soul in dogmatic terms. The soul—like God Himself—cannot be captured, pinned down, bottled up, grown in a dish, sliced and diced and set on a slide to peer at through a microscope.
The problem with thinking about the soul in traditional ways (ghost, spirit, electricity, etc) presents me with the same problem presented to searchers of the electron. The soul exists within this reality and yet simultaneously does not conform to the rules of this reality. It is both here and “there” simultaneously. So using terms based on “here” doesn’t really work.
There are no pictures of an
electron. It does not exist in this universe in a way that allows it to be photographed, or even seen. But you can see evidence of electrons around you everywhere. Turn on the light in your house, it is charged with electricity—electrons. At most you can see the orbit of an electron around its nucleus, blinking in and out of our reality so quickly that all you can really detect is where it was, and after enough blips you can understand its orbit, or what is called the electron cloud. Similarly, you can shoot electrons through a cloud chamber (look up the Wilson Cloud Chamber) and only see their vapor trails. How do you grab onto something moving just shy of the speed of light?
The soul, like God Himself, is not something that I can fully understand. It is enough for me, then, to look for evidence of the soul without ever really having to capture one in a jar.
The soul is like this. You cannot see it, but you can see the evidence of it everywhere. Perhaps the very things we take for granted, our creativity, our inventiveness and creativeness, our capacity for such broad ranges of emotion, the complex interactions of human history, all the things that are attributed to well-fed brain lobes and good weather over the past few millennia, maybe these are the vapor trails of the soul. It is all these things that make us so different from banana slugs, starfish and squirrels. Perhaps all of this is not merely evidence of a good evolutionary run in an otherwise meaningless clockwork orange, but rather it is evidence of something more in us than exists in any other life on Earth, anywhere else in the galaxy that we can see—the very image of God, the human soul.
Here, There, Everywhere
Every culture on Earth somehow addresses the existence of soul. The only cultures to abandon the idea are the new political and scientific cultures spawned by the Industrial Revolution, the age of machines. The view that the soul is an illusion, hallucinatory residue of the evolutionary engineering of our big, powerful, animal brains, is a new explanation on the world stage, relatively speaking. The flaw in this thinking, the danger, really, is that machines can be shut down and turned back on again at will, no harm done. If you take this kind of thinking and apply it to humanity you get the Twentieth Century. But what if the thinking is turned upside down—the energy that dwells in every human is not the source of the hallucination modern man calls eternity, but is the essence of eternity itself, dwelling both in this universe and the next simultaneously.
You can destroy the body, but the soul cannot be shut down—it is our eternal essence, that part of us that is both here and “there” at the same time. Whereas the electricity that drives the Internet and all of its virtual reality is physical, mindless, collective energy, it is bound to the laws of our physical reality. What if this universal thing that exists within every culture, within every imagination, within every body is power from God's otherverse used to animate us within His virtual eternity (our reality)? The soul then would have a dual reality, of our universe and of God's otherverse, existing under the laws of both realities simultaneously. How can this be? How can this make sense? It makes sense in the same way that light is both a particle and a wave—it cannot and yet it does. Perhaps the soul does not exist because it is dependent on our external reality, but rather our external reality exists because of the soul?
Models Revisited
The soul is the eternal, ethereal thing that God fashioned in his own image and which exists here and now. It is the independent, eternal, unique and aware power that permeates every other aspect of self and the essence of that thing which is created in the image of God Himself. What is the color of God's skin, the number of His legs, the color and texture of His hair? It doesn't matter—what does matter is the nature of God's soul, because that is what we are fashioned after, not the paper box that it sits in now. It is God's capacity for thought and emotion, the nature of His personality, the essence of His love that is the blueprint of mankind. Like God, the soul cannot be pigeon-holed within the observable rules of this limited universe. It is both here and not here simultaneously—that part of us that exists both within us and within eternity at the same time.
Soul is the gift from God to us that makes us special, unique and different from all other life just as the combined DNA from me and my wife is that special bit of ourselves that makes our children uniquely related to us, and without which they would not exist.
In the previous section I modeled a human being after the computer like this:
The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized this model cannot work. Using a Venn diagram, you can better see the problem:
In this model, the soul is a subset of the body, and therefore the body takes precedence over the soul. This is exactly the problem we are facing, and the driver for much of the violence and destruction in the world. We focus on tiny differences in the casing, ignoring the connectedness and relationship we have to eachoether at a deeper level.
Focusing on that tiny bit of bodily variance in our DNA causes a lot of trouble. How many wars have been fought and are still being fought because people A believed in the sub-humanness of people B. Time for a new paradigm. What if the Venn diagram looks like this:
Body, Intellect and Emotion are animated by the force of Spirit. Each sphere overlaps the other spheres within the larger plane of the soul. In this model the body is no more or less important or vital than the mind and the heart, all of which are only possible within the presence of the soul that gives them life. Now the shape at the middle, the piece that is made up of the overlapping of all the pieces, is the kernel.
The kernel, in a computer's OS, is where all the action takes place. This is ground zero, the pivot point where all the decisions are made related to the applications above and the hardware below. For a human being, the kernel is the convergence of all pieces, the intersection where the influences of body, mind, heart and soul converge.
The Question of Abortion…
The argument about when a human is a human is rather twisted. Think about it, the reason we are arguing about it is so we don’t have to feel bad about killing someone. The argument is currently couched entirely in biological terms—it’s all about the relative development of a body and the assumption that the intellect and emotions of such a thing are not there. What about the soul? When does a person get a soul, and is it the soul that really makes a person a human and not simply an animal? The real agony of abortion for me is that I believe that the soul is the true residue of conception, not the convergence of lifeless DNA. Pre- and new born babies are all about soul, all about possibility and potential. To relegate the question of human Life to mere biological mechanics, the lowest possible denominator, and dismissing all else as superstition or ignorance positions us to see all human life—unborn, children, adults, the aged—as a matter of throwing the switch, 1 or 0, on or off, and the ones who protest the least will be turned off the most.
When I think human-being, I think potential. When I look at a baby, I don't see color or gender, I see possibility. Who could this person become? Is this the next Einstein, or the next Hitler? What will I do, what will her parents do, and what will her community do to make her reach or lose her potential?
Enter other.
What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet lose or forfeit his very self?
................Luke 9:25 (NIV)
_____________________________________________________________
| The long and short of it.... We are special because of the soul. We are not fundamentally bodies that also have a soul; we are fundamentally souls that inhabit bodies. The main connection between every person, then, is spiritual--through the soul. But if we view each other as mere bodies, it is all too easy to dismiss the eternal in favor of flesh. It is easy to step on a bug, and so to view others as no more than bugs makes it all the easier to step on them. |
Mechanical Purposelessness
We were sitting in the lounge of the hotel in Berlin. It was the end of a long day of sales meetings and strategizing. The lounge was too dark, too loud. After about thirty minutes of listening to more sales and strategizing, I asked my colleague to tell me about how he got into the business.
“I was a doctor,” he said, “but it wasn’t fulfilling to me. An opportunity opened up where I could take over running IT and to learn about computer networking and programming, so I took it…”
We talked for a while about what kind of medicine he studied, how he struggled though medical school. We talked about my background a little. I decided to spin the conversation in a new direction.
“So tell me,” I said, “what is the medical definition of the human soul?”
He laughed. “This is a difficult question, one which many in the field avoid answering. Most will say it is a part of metaphysics.”
“And what do you say?”
“It is a combination of many things, of emotion, of expressions, of thoughts, chemical-electrical impulses across synapses, all functions of the body and all measurable and quantifiable. Doctors are scientists, and if a thing cannot be measured and quantified, then it is better to leave it up to those who study such things. For me, I can say I do not know.”
“So if we assume then that each quality of what we might consider a ‘soul’ is simply the functioning of an organ, with what are we left as we eliminate each organ? Is there a ‘something more than the sum of the parts’?”
We talked long about the prevailing
wisdom. Some think that a soul does not exist without the body that conducts it; that we are chemical-electrical machines, nothing more. To them the soul then is simply an illusion, an imaginary friend made up of many measurable pieces, a warm and comfortable quilt of emotion, thought, superstition, stitched together and draped around us in an attempt of our unusually powerful and imaginative brains to invent some kind of higher purpose for our existence. We are glorified apes jabbing highly complex sticks into highly complex termite mounds, dreaming with our advanced imagination and creativity that there is a greater meaning for us than to simply die and rot back into the dust. In this imagining and creating and choosing we invent purpose where there really is none, and in this choosing and creating we invent destiny, we invent Heaven and suddenly our animal, mechanical purposelessness becomes bearable.I am twenty months away in my mind, standing in my bother’s kitchen. It is around 9 PM, May 3rd, 2006. I am talking with another doctor.
“What was the time of death?”
“8:12. It was very beautiful and peaceful. He fell asleep and we lowered the oxygen so gradually he didn’t even notice that he was dying. At the end, the only time he moved was an involuntary twinge in his face at the moment of death. The girls thought he was smiling because he was going up to heaven.”
He says it as if it is sweet that the children could think such a foolish thing, that it was one of those random little spasms of life or death that the naive believe have meaning, but since they are children, and had just lost their father, it is nice, it is ok to let them think this. We are adults, we know better…
I am sad for the doctor. He did a brilliant job, he was kind and helpful to my brother and sister-in-law and the girls to go through such a terrible evening, but I am sad for his medicinal emptiness, his distant professionalism. How many people must one watch die to lose the sense loss?
What is the Soul?
I have wrestled with this question for months: how can the soul be defined without using religious or metaphysical dogma? Remove every existing definition of soul (spirit, ghost, life force, electricity), disassociate the concept of soul from every philosophy, every religion, every science, and with what are you left? This is the problem for me—I am not interested in understanding the soul in dogmatic terms. The soul—like God Himself—cannot be captured, pinned down, bottled up, grown in a dish, sliced and diced and set on a slide to peer at through a microscope.
The problem with thinking about the soul in traditional ways (ghost, spirit, electricity, etc) presents me with the same problem presented to searchers of the electron. The soul exists within this reality and yet simultaneously does not conform to the rules of this reality. It is both here and “there” simultaneously. So using terms based on “here” doesn’t really work.
There are no pictures of an
electron. It does not exist in this universe in a way that allows it to be photographed, or even seen. But you can see evidence of electrons around you everywhere. Turn on the light in your house, it is charged with electricity—electrons. At most you can see the orbit of an electron around its nucleus, blinking in and out of our reality so quickly that all you can really detect is where it was, and after enough blips you can understand its orbit, or what is called the electron cloud. Similarly, you can shoot electrons through a cloud chamber (look up the Wilson Cloud Chamber) and only see their vapor trails. How do you grab onto something moving just shy of the speed of light?The soul, like God Himself, is not something that I can fully understand. It is enough for me, then, to look for evidence of the soul without ever really having to capture one in a jar.
The soul is like this. You cannot see it, but you can see the evidence of it everywhere. Perhaps the very things we take for granted, our creativity, our inventiveness and creativeness, our capacity for such broad ranges of emotion, the complex interactions of human history, all the things that are attributed to well-fed brain lobes and good weather over the past few millennia, maybe these are the vapor trails of the soul. It is all these things that make us so different from banana slugs, starfish and squirrels. Perhaps all of this is not merely evidence of a good evolutionary run in an otherwise meaningless clockwork orange, but rather it is evidence of something more in us than exists in any other life on Earth, anywhere else in the galaxy that we can see—the very image of God, the human soul.
Here, There, Everywhere
Every culture on Earth somehow addresses the existence of soul. The only cultures to abandon the idea are the new political and scientific cultures spawned by the Industrial Revolution, the age of machines. The view that the soul is an illusion, hallucinatory residue of the evolutionary engineering of our big, powerful, animal brains, is a new explanation on the world stage, relatively speaking. The flaw in this thinking, the danger, really, is that machines can be shut down and turned back on again at will, no harm done. If you take this kind of thinking and apply it to humanity you get the Twentieth Century. But what if the thinking is turned upside down—the energy that dwells in every human is not the source of the hallucination modern man calls eternity, but is the essence of eternity itself, dwelling both in this universe and the next simultaneously.
You can destroy the body, but the soul cannot be shut down—it is our eternal essence, that part of us that is both here and “there” at the same time. Whereas the electricity that drives the Internet and all of its virtual reality is physical, mindless, collective energy, it is bound to the laws of our physical reality. What if this universal thing that exists within every culture, within every imagination, within every body is power from God's otherverse used to animate us within His virtual eternity (our reality)? The soul then would have a dual reality, of our universe and of God's otherverse, existing under the laws of both realities simultaneously. How can this be? How can this make sense? It makes sense in the same way that light is both a particle and a wave—it cannot and yet it does. Perhaps the soul does not exist because it is dependent on our external reality, but rather our external reality exists because of the soul?
Models Revisited
The soul is the eternal, ethereal thing that God fashioned in his own image and which exists here and now. It is the independent, eternal, unique and aware power that permeates every other aspect of self and the essence of that thing which is created in the image of God Himself. What is the color of God's skin, the number of His legs, the color and texture of His hair? It doesn't matter—what does matter is the nature of God's soul, because that is what we are fashioned after, not the paper box that it sits in now. It is God's capacity for thought and emotion, the nature of His personality, the essence of His love that is the blueprint of mankind. Like God, the soul cannot be pigeon-holed within the observable rules of this limited universe. It is both here and not here simultaneously—that part of us that exists both within us and within eternity at the same time.
Soul is the gift from God to us that makes us special, unique and different from all other life just as the combined DNA from me and my wife is that special bit of ourselves that makes our children uniquely related to us, and without which they would not exist.
In the previous section I modeled a human being after the computer like this:
The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized this model cannot work. Using a Venn diagram, you can better see the problem:
In this model, the soul is a subset of the body, and therefore the body takes precedence over the soul. This is exactly the problem we are facing, and the driver for much of the violence and destruction in the world. We focus on tiny differences in the casing, ignoring the connectedness and relationship we have to eachoether at a deeper level.Focusing on that tiny bit of bodily variance in our DNA causes a lot of trouble. How many wars have been fought and are still being fought because people A believed in the sub-humanness of people B. Time for a new paradigm. What if the Venn diagram looks like this:
Body, Intellect and Emotion are animated by the force of Spirit. Each sphere overlaps the other spheres within the larger plane of the soul. In this model the body is no more or less important or vital than the mind and the heart, all of which are only possible within the presence of the soul that gives them life. Now the shape at the middle, the piece that is made up of the overlapping of all the pieces, is the kernel.
The kernel, in a computer's OS, is where all the action takes place. This is ground zero, the pivot point where all the decisions are made related to the applications above and the hardware below. For a human being, the kernel is the convergence of all pieces, the intersection where the influences of body, mind, heart and soul converge.The Question of Abortion…
The argument about when a human is a human is rather twisted. Think about it, the reason we are arguing about it is so we don’t have to feel bad about killing someone. The argument is currently couched entirely in biological terms—it’s all about the relative development of a body and the assumption that the intellect and emotions of such a thing are not there. What about the soul? When does a person get a soul, and is it the soul that really makes a person a human and not simply an animal? The real agony of abortion for me is that I believe that the soul is the true residue of conception, not the convergence of lifeless DNA. Pre- and new born babies are all about soul, all about possibility and potential. To relegate the question of human Life to mere biological mechanics, the lowest possible denominator, and dismissing all else as superstition or ignorance positions us to see all human life—unborn, children, adults, the aged—as a matter of throwing the switch, 1 or 0, on or off, and the ones who protest the least will be turned off the most.
When I think human-being, I think potential. When I look at a baby, I don't see color or gender, I see possibility. Who could this person become? Is this the next Einstein, or the next Hitler? What will I do, what will her parents do, and what will her community do to make her reach or lose her potential?
Enter other.
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