The Soul-Life Link

Among the most interesting cases of out-of-body experience are those where some person spontaneously leaps from the body when anticipating death—as in auto accidents and in mountain-climbing falls. Sometimes the body isn’t even damaged—but the mind evidently thought it would be—and finds the ejection switch. Some kind of linkage must remain, however, because people return to their bodies again and therefore we have these accounts from them.

We do not know what happens in those more drastic case when the body is destroyed—when it doesn’t roll free of the wreckage or the ropes don’t snag on stone and the mountain climber isn’t “caught,” still alive. In those cases, presumably, the last link is broken, and the soul, having made a hasty exit, sees that it’s time to move on.

The body-soul duality is alive in well in ordinary thought. People do not think of themselves as chemical machines—or of the mind as a secondary product of brain function alone. As for what life is, they haven’t a clue. The orthodox scientific explanation is that it arises from chemistry. But let’s suppose that it’s the other way about. Suppose that what we call soul is life—or that life is the most primitive expression of soul. What we certainly know is that a corpse is dead—no soul is manifesting. And that alert people jump out of their bodies occasionally when it looks like the end has arrived.

Aristotle offered us the primitive soul, calling it vegetative. The animal has both a vegetative and an animal soul. Humans have both and, in addition, what Aristotle called the rational soul. Aspects of the same essence in successively developed stages?

Looking at these two concepts, soul and life, our habits of thought blur things. We think of souls as individual, of life as a broad phenomenon. To be sure, each manifestation of life, at whatever scale, is individual. Life, therefore, is a broad generalization of enormously large numbers of individual instances of it. We also think we have a soul—much as we have a body—but what if we are the soul?

Today’s “grown-up” explanation is a form of physicalist monism. There is no soul independent of bodies—no such thing as jumping out of the bodies. Consciousness is neural functioning. It’s chemistry, stupid. Grow up.

At the pace of a slow snail, this view is changing; but it will probably take another century or more before elite thought will have returned to a more comprehensive view in accord with experience and observation. In the lead are people who have unquestionable standing in the field of science, like Charles S. Sherrington (1857-1952) and John Eccles (1903-1997), both neurophysiologists and Nobel Prize winners. It’s difficult to expel them from the reservation, with such credentials, hence a more polite form of disagreement is noted. They are called dualists. To these I might add Wilder Penfield (1891-1976), a neurosurgeon with significant research achievements in the field. I will conclude with two quotes from him. Other prominent voices are those of Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994), a philosopher of science, and Roger Penrose (1931-), a mathematical physicist. And there are quite a few others.

Herewith then two quotes from Penfield, taken from his The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain, Princeton University Press, 1975. The quotes suggest that the snail is moving.

Throughout my own scientific career, I, like other scientists, struggled to prove that brain accounts for the mind. But now, perhaps, the time has come when we may profitably consider the evidence as it stands and ask the question: Do brain-mechanisms account for the mind? Can the mind be explained by what is now known about the brain? If not, which is the more reasonable of the two hypotheses: that man's being is based on one element, or on two? (p. xiii)

Since every man must adopt for himself, without the help of science, his way of life and his personal religion, I have long had my own private beliefs. What a thrill it is, then, to discover that the scientist too can legitimately believe in the existence of spirit. (p. 85)

Empirical Evidence

Is there empirical evidence for the existence of a soul? Well, let’s just see. The word empirical derives from the Greek empeiria, meaning “experience.” If we look more closely, the second half of that word is peira, meaning a trial, and the second part of experience, which is rooted in Latin, is peritus; it also means a test or a trial. Now because one must be alive to make a test or trial, empirical translates to “lived experience.” To be sure, since a “test” or “trial” is implied, the lived experience needs to be noted, it needs to be observed. Something on the lawn might be a stone—or it might be some knick-knack made of plastic that just looks like a stone. We experience our souls; it is the most common of any experience; so how can we doubt that it exists?

Here interesting new aspects arise. The phenomenon of having a self is not in doubt; it certainly isn’t doubted by people who haven’t been corrupted by materialist modes of thought. The issue really is whether or not the phenomenon, that self, is autonomously existent, thus apart from the body and its life. It is clearly related to living. As we pass by the open coffin at a funeral reception, the phenomenon is certainly missing—although an exhaustive examination of the body, of the sort that pathologists engage in, will show that the body is still all there—although it isn’t moving at the levels visible to the naked eye. Something is obviously missing. Is it the soul, life, or both? And is there a difference here? The body is dead, life has fled, but is the soul still there—somewhere?

The answer to the question posed above therefore appears to be: there is empirical evidence for the soul because we experience it, but if all experience is tied directly to the soul, evidence for its survival will not be available to us until, well, we die. Paradoxical.

To be sure, there are reports from people who have experienced other people having death-bed visions. And near-death experience reports convince at least those who have them that there is life beyond the body. But these are not intersubjective experiences; others can’t confirm the experience. They may be empirical for those who undergo them, but not for the public at large.

The above suggests that the evidence is narrowly empirical. The individual can know. The current scientific orthodoxy, however, still maintains that there is no such thing as a soul, merely an ego. And the ego is then defined as an evolved subsystem of a living system, and that that bigger thing is itself a process, not anything autonomous that you can detect apart from its physical manifestations. The ego subsystem, of course, can on occasion construct a wonderful sonnet or write a symphony under chance interactions of instinctual drives and outer stimuli that deform them. But when I wake up in the mornings, take a deep breath, and consider what lies ahead, the last thing on my mind is to remind myself that I’m just a useful subsystem constraining my instincts lest they go astray into maladaptive behaviors.

The Unaging Soul

The difference between the body and soul becomes a matter of actual experience as we advance in age. Our bodies call attention to themselves as their functions slow and problems manifest. The unity of the two structures weakens. This arises one fine day when we pass a mirror and the reflexive thought arises, “Who is that old man?”—and the question, for a nanosecond anyway, is quite sincere. Then comes the time when the unaging soul becomes quite aware of the fact that it is now in charge of a huge pet that’s getting very stumbly. Those who’ve owned an aging dogs and nursed it to its end will know what I’m talking about. As with dogs, so with our bodies. When they’re young they need to be restrained—and the exuberant messes they create need cleaning up—and so with bodies as they age. And in that process, gradually, there is a genuine, visceral sense of separation. The reaction will depend on temperament and situation. Poor old body—on the one hand. Damnation! I can’t do that any more!—on the other.

Some might argue that the soul ages as well, but I’d dispute that. That it doesn’t is quite obvious to those whose inner vigor has always been high, but I’ve also seen quite old, decrepit people suddenly come alive, laugh and joke like children, tell stories in excitement, their eyes suddenly full of light—when appropriately stimulated.

Identification with the body comes naturally in youth, persists in maturity, and then becomes virtually impossible in age. When that identification isn’t allowed to break, the price is depression or, minimally, grumpiness. These are the lessons of experience—rather than the derivations of some theory.  Indeed you can make use of the experience to judge various theories.

The theories are largely built by people in their youth and their maturity. When we get old they have less force; experience has come to rule. That we have unaging souls underlies belief in the afterlife. It is dismissed as the wishful thought of people who can’t go for gusto any more, but that is pure baloney. Death with total disappearance doesn’t phase a person of my age—nor, I’d venture to add, most people, especially those who suffer debilitating ailments. Hey. Let it stop. And if there isn’t anything thereafter, so what? What you don’t know can’t hurt you. The soul, however, isn’t all that sure that it will simply go out like a blown candle. Many people, indeed, hope it will. If it doesn’t, there is that uncertainty again that has plagued us all of our life.

But what has plagued us, all of our life, all arises from our physical dependencies, one way or another—our own and that of those we love and value: their bodies’ health, their children’s bodies’ health, their income, safety, on and on. What that unaging soul anticipates—beyond the body’s final pains—is the pain of separation from people we have loved and once more being reunited with people we haven’t seen for many decades now but who’re still there, we think, in the hereafter.

Contemplative Life

From the vast continents of ordinary life, the contemplative variety appears quite close to what here I call the borderzone—the edge of a flat earth, as it were, where the great chasm of eternity suddenly appears. Contemplatives? They are religious—and not merely nuns or monks or priests or bishops or abbots and abbesses. Such people, to the extent they live an active life, are not living the contemplative (or so it’s said). And certainly not laymen. And least of all the married.

But concepts like that, concepts like the contemplative life, do sprout near the borderzone—and not just within Catholicism—and if we look at them closely, they turn out to mean something other than they signal to the uninterested public. The concept of jihad comes to mind; by that we understand anything from Holy War to terrorism, but to the pious at the core of Islam, the word means spiritual struggle. All right. If you think me a propagandist for Al Qaida, that’ll be my jihad to live down. Or let us take the Buddhist concept of nirvana, defined as extinction, disappearance, the state of being blown-out, like a candle. The Online Etymology dictionary helpfully Latinizes the word as de-spiration—all life sucked out of you. And that is the “pearl of great price” the Buddhists seek? Nothingness? Well, “contemplative life” and “nirvana” are similar in this sense: to most people they suggest something negative, to others something of the greatest value. But to get the second meaning, one has to unfold the concept.

Perhaps the simplest way to approach this is to call contemplative life soul life or inner life. Now the problem is that a certain special way of seeing reality hides beneath these phrases. That way is a hierarchical conception of our dual nature in which the physical, hormonal, outer, and social are at the lower and a corresponding spiritual, empathic, intuitive, and communal are the higher level. And then the contemplative life is minimally defined as one where more of our being takes place inwardly, in the soul, than takes place outwardly, in the body, in the world. It’s as simple as that; but it is difficult because it takes gradual development even to tease these two realms apart enough to recognize that they each have a separate and real existence.

Let me illustrate this by examining words like mental (often associated with contemplation) and emotional (linked to the physical). By mental people mean conceptual, intellectual. By emotional they mean the heat we feel in the chest from anger or joy: the breath increases; you feel it, it moves you. The contemplation of an infinite regress or the square root of minus-one do not, by contrast, have any emotional toning (except for Brigitte, who invariably expresses her disgust!) Now let’s proceed to sort these concepts out.

First of all the mental is much more than merely concept juggling. It includes within it what we call consciousness, the definition of which I leave to those foolhardy enough to try and inevitably to fail. It includes the mysterious will—which is something other than reflexive action. It includes imagination, a faculty I do not (like Aquinas) associate with the lower realm. It does include intellect—which we do not find in the body-machine. It also includes the experience of being drawn toward some and repelled from other things—visible and invisible. Empathy and apathy: the real sources of emotion. That the body should immediately respond when we feel these things by mirroring the soul’s movements by hormonal discharges (hence the heat and the breathing) merely confirms the close linkage between soul and body, not that emotions are physical. The few that genuinely are are also merely reflexes we have in common with all animals. Thus I am absolutely sure that a disembodied soul will have emotions—and that emotions are not, repeat not, grounded in the sensorium.

The reader who nods reading this will do so from experience—thus because his or her inner life has developed its autonomy enough to have noted these two realms, their hierarchical relationship, and their potential independence. For someone like that, the suggestion that the contemplative life is real, outside of temples and cloisters too, will not be surprising—even if she or he is more accustomed to think of it as the creative life.

The Mountain and the Flashlight Beam

Thoughts about dualism recur for me at right regular intervals (see for instance here), no doubt because we’re all of us quite naturally dualistic in our stance towards reality. It’s not simply a consequence of language that we think that we have rather than that we are bodies. At the same time our collective feeling are echoed by our language. When we’re really sincere, we support something body and soul. My inner intuition isn’t simply that my Mother still exists, but only in my memories—and that in twenty generations (to be massively generous) she will have achieved total nonexistence because no one among the then still living will any longer remember her. No. My intuition is quite otherwise. Is the matter that formed her body at any point in her life still in existence? Certainly. Our physics tells us so. Does she still exist as a person? I’m certain that she does.

Plato’s conceptualization is no doubt the oldest well-known formalization of the dualism we feel. He proposed that eternal Forms exist, of which the soul is one. His formulation, found in Phaedo, rests on the immateriality and therefore indivisibility of the immaterial and the endless divisibility of material. Plato’s formulation served his purpose well; it was to prove the soul’s immortality. It’s very easy to understand that matter is divisible and that a hammer can very easily turn this green cup of mine, not least its pretty crest and its inscription (Harsen’s Island Michigan—irresistible to someone called Arsen) into shards or powder. It is also very easy to intuit one’s own unity. Yes, I’m divided in my mind on many things, but my mind is analogous to my body—even though it is immaterial. I have a mind; but it is I have it, and I can’t imagine that Whatever as divided. It simply is. But Phaedo, of course, is just one book of many hundreds of thousands written on this subject and serves a single argument. It does not exhaust the subject. In effect it may be reducible to just that, dualism: there are two kinds of things—one subject to a certain kind of change and one that is not subject to that kind of change.

The problem in Plato’s formulation is that we have no handy explanation how something immaterial can cause something material to move, to change its position or character. Or vice versa. This problem, the interaction problem, has legs as long as eternal forms. The problem is much worse than saying that a flashlight beam can’t move a mountain. In that particular case, both systems are material, but there is a great distance in powers—the flashlight’s weak little beam and the mountain’s massive inertia. But in truth that weak beam does move the mountain. It causes minute change at the atomic level to a tiny part of the mountain. But we can imagine—vast technocracy that we’ve become—that we could focus gigantic laser guns on that mountain and cause it not only to move a little but literally to vaporize. Thus far, of course, we’ve only done that thing in action movies.

The interaction problem, however, begins to yield ever so gently if we don’t insist on Plato’s conceptualization of the soul as immaterial and, therefore, by definition incapable of exerting any kind of force on anything material. That the soul is different from bodies, and in some genuinely radical way—that I find quite easy to accept. But it must possess some power capable of moving matter, albeit at the extremely small scale.

Let’s transform that mountain into an organism instead of being, as it is, a massive agglomeration of layers of rock. Let it have a nervous system, organs, circulatory mechanisms, muscles, tendons, and, underneath it all, a powerful skeleton as well. Let’s also make it very sensitive to light at night—hating any kind of light whatever, however faint. This monstrous beast will therefore react to our weak little flashlight. How will it do that? Well, its skin will detect the light beam. Nerves will signal this unwelcome event to the mountain’s not very smart but adequate brain. No sooner has the signal reached that presumably massive brain than the mountain will move—will move just enough to one side or the other to escape the irritation of that beam. Being so vast a creature, it might take a while before the movement actually develops, but here it comes! Could the soul, by just a tiny amount of energy proper to its nature, also move a neuron or two in our brain to signal an action that it wants the body to undertake—like my hand right now scratching my ear? It’s possible—not if it is deprived of all power whatsoever by a word like “immaterial,” but Yes if, while radically different from the domain in which it finds itself, it can actually communicate at a low level with neurons too small even for our best microscopes sharply to resolve.

NDEs: Speculating on the Data

The impetus today is still Pin Van Lommel’s book on near-death experiences (see last post). Van Lommel comes from a scientific background; not surprisingly he spends a great deal of time on examining the interaction between the brain and consciousness; he concludes that the brain does not produce consciousness. He doesn’t go beyond that—and that’s fine. Here the saying applies: “Sufficient unto the day the evil thereof” [Matthew 6:34]. His aim is to make a credible case for the survival of consciousness. But I’ve been certain of that for a long time myself, and my interests range beyond that issue.

The three facts I want to examine are these. First, that people in states of coma, with flat EEGs and no sign of brain function, experience themselves alive, alert, able to see, hear, and to move—to think, feel, remember, and, indeed, with sharply intensified powers. Second, that such people, despite these powers, cannot touch anything material. Third, that the brain certainly mediates between physical and mental levels.

That the brain has such a function is one of the data points; another is that the brain—indeed our bodies taken as a whole—behave like machines, like tools. They represent technology—although not technology we have made. Tooling always has the essential quality of “in order to…” Now here is the puzzle. If a spirit sees and hears, has a functioning consciousness, and greater freedom of movement outside than in a body—if it functions well, even better, without tooling than while in possession of it, what parallels does that suggest?

The first that comes to mind is a diving suit—thus something that enables its wearer to function in an environment in which he or she couldn’t function at all or for very long without tooling. But what is this function we can’t engage in without bodies? What the disembodied spirit cannot do is interact with matter. It can’t vibrate the air and thus cannot be heard by the embodied. It cannot touch matter; it passes through it. This suggests…

This suggests that bodies are a tool by means of which we can experience the material dimension. Doing so we give up certain powers. We can’t reliably communicate mind to mind, although sporadic telepathic powers are known; we cannot move at will and instantaneously from one point to another. Our intellectual powers are also seemingly dimmed. This in turn suggests that some kind of linkage or binding takes place to hold us inside bodies; this link, once it is established, seems effectively to blind us to the other or wider dimension but, by means of the body’s tooling, enables us to act on matter—using matter. Indeed it seems to prevent us from acting in any other way.

But why should the spirit want to be bound in this way? What purpose does that serve—seeing that in disembodied form the spirit can indeed communicate very effectively with other disembodied spirits?

Here the technological, machine-like structure of bodies comes into full focus. That bodies are machines of sorts cannot be denied. The very existence of defects in this machinery—even early on at the genetic level—suggests an agency behind the body which is, like us, limited in its powers and doing a terrific engineering job in a hostile environment. Chance cannot have created living bodies; they are far too complex and exhibit purpose. I find it impossible to imagine life without an agency in the background—also impossible to imagine this agency to be God. Only limited agencies are, well, limited—and therefore obliged to reach for tooling.

These are the issues of interest. They rise to that level only if you accept as fact that consciousness is able to survives death and is therefore independent of its vehicle—the brain, the body. Van Lommel does a superb job proving that case. But it would be far more enlightening to understand why, in a sense, we are imprisoned in these tools of ours, why we can escape them, briefly, only under extraordinary circumstances—and at death more certainly. But even after that, can we remain in that other dimension? Or is there in us, or independent of us, something pulling us down here? Or did we come here out of curiosity—by the billions and billions—as some people are drawn to descend into deep dark caves, equipped with diving gear, to spelunk in the depths at the risk of their lives?

This is a very interesting frontier, I submit. None more fascinating. None with greater potential for good or ill.

The Hungry Ghost

Here is a curious paradox inherent in the notion of a body-soul duality. Such a duality (I here note) only signifies something meaningful if we assume that the soul is immortal. But if the soul survives the body’s passing, what role does the body play? I like to ponder such mysteries without reference to revelation, thus, as it were, as a scientific problem; by “science,” here, of course, I understand a strictly rational approach rather than hypothesis formation followed by confirmation or falsification by experiment. The hypothesis of duality cannot be tested experimentally—not while we continue to breathe. But suppose that it is true?

One strictly rational hypothesis would be to say that the soul needs the body for some very practical, down-to-earth reason. A corollary is that this need is temporary; all bodies die, and that we know as a matter of fact.

This line of thought recurred to me reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, The Woman Warrior, in which she speaks of a curious entity. It is the hungry ghost of Chinese folk belief. Who is this ghost? This ghost is a departed soul, an ancestor deprived of proper worship by neglectful descendants—and is thus starved of a kind of spiritual nourishment. It becomes a potent symbol if you think about it sitting in the summer shade watching the bees and butterflies visiting the herbs and flowers. Suppose that souls need food of a certain subtle kind, if not to live at least to unfold their higher potentials. And then suppose that subtle energy occurs quite naturally but very, very thinly in the dimension in which we find ourselves; never mind how we got here. It may be a—to us—immeasurable part of ordinary energy especially potently present in material situations that manifest complexity. Thus the hungry ghost able to link itself to complex bodies may gain access to a nutrient it needs—needs in order to develop, first of all, and then to develop those organs that enable it, by spreading wings, even to depart this dimension for realms where “grace” flows richly and unimpeded by the coarser energies that dominate at the diminishing end of an ever out-flowing reality.

Reading Kingston’s book coincided with our discovery of a wonderful green-black caterpillar feeding on our dill plants here. We soon learned that it is the larva destined to become the magnificent Black Swallowtail butterfly (black wings, golden dots). The caterpillar and the butterfly, earthbound and then, transformed, taking flight, has long served humanity as an apt symbol for what may be our destiny.

Returning to my starting thought, we may need the temporary body—not to be, not to persist. For that, no matter what our condition as a soul, we may always have enough. But to achieve our natural ends we may need the body to realize our full potential. Here is another interesting thought. It might be that the whole vast structure of our civilization—of our moral, spiritual, artistic, and intellectual life—may be an early and primitive manifestation of what happens when we are enabled to exist in our normal, grown-up way.

Theorizing: Awakening from Physical Sleep

In a recent post I’ve speculated about entering the sleep state. There I theorized that as we leave the body behind, as our body quiets down, indeed as higher ranges of mentation shut down, we enter a more subtle world. Today I want to look at the reverse of that, the process of awakening. Here analysis is more difficult because, I think, awakening has multiple and diverse forms. Quite arbitrarily I’ll suggest three broad categories of awakening—not in the least implying that these exhaust the range.

1. Our brain awakens. This means that mental processes, consciousness, resumes. We start to mull things, but more or less passively, thus in the same manner as we might when setting off on a drive to the store. Idle thoughts, immediate concerns or memories, are freely associating. As in the dream state so in idle waking states, this isn’t really thinking; it is the stream of consciousness. As awakening approaches, the stream resumes its flow. Depending on the situation, we may experience this sort of mulling as a story or sorts, meaning that images are present; or, alternatively, images may be at best peripheral; in that latter case the thoughts have a conceptual framing; they’re words colored by feelings, but the abstract qualities are to the front—as indeed they always are in the waking state.

2. External events draw our attention. This may take the form of an abrupt awakening, thus as when we hear a sharp noise, fall out of bed, or someone shakes us awake. The stimulus for awakening is some event, in other words. The brain may first show us the stimulus in a picture story. Thus a loud knocking noise produced by the wind banging a shutter may be represented by a scene of some man hammering. This combination of external stimulus and its internal dream depiction is sometimes explained as the brain’s attempt to resist awakening. The parsimonious explanation is simply that dream-thought is symbolical and uses images, and before we wake up to hear the banging, we think of it (and see it) as hammering. We tend to see living agents as responsible for stimuli—rather than inanimate phenomena like the wind.

3. Our body awakens and we reenter it. This third case is much more speculative than the other two and is the point of my focus today. In my case it takes the form of a meandering journey—always through a vast city or a great hospital. Perhaps I ought to reverse this exposition and say that I frequently awaken in the morning after convoluted dreams which are journeys (through a city, hospital), and I interpret these as reentering the body. Let me get into this third case in more detail.

Such dreams have a uniform structure but an endless variation of detail. I’m always underway and trying to get somewhere. That somewhere is always “home,” but there isn’t anything like a realistic picture of my actual house in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, inside my dream thoughts. The journey isn’t realistic in that sense at all. In those cases where I’m in a building—and invariably it is a huge one and I interpret it to be a hospital—I’m trying to find somebody in the hospital, but this person has no identity. Other elements of the structure are: (1) crowds of people with members of which I interact; (2) a frustration because I have a sense of the direction I’m supposed to follow, but nonetheless I still don’t know the way; and (3) as the dream’s end approaches (but I’m unaware that the end is coming), the crowds get ever more dense, the route I’m following narrows. Finally I find myself facing a claustrophobically tight opening I’m supposed to go through. Invariably I refuse to go forward. And in that moment I wake up.

I used to interpret that claustrophobic “closing in” as due to loss of breath in snoring; and, indeed, that might be the best explanation. But in paying close heed to such dreams over the last year or so, I’ve noticed that I wake up feeling perfectly fine on awakening, not out of breath at all. This has led me to theorize, and that’s all that it can be, of course, that reentering the body, which from a spirit perspective would appear as a vast city or building as I approach it, means a narrowing, a confinement, the loss of a much greater freedom that, until reentry, I enjoyed in the spirit realm.

This reminds me of Carl G. Jung’s account of his near death experience in the wake of a heart attack, related in his autobiography, written with the help of Aniela Jaffé (Memories, Dreams, Reflections). In that account, compelled to return to “life,” Jung recounts bitter feelings about being forced to return to the confining world of “boxes.” As in my earlier post (here) I spoke of the stunning vistas of magical landscapes that open as we fall asleep—but conscious enough to remember the “opening”—so we may also find a panicky resistance to reentry. Paradoxically, awakening from such a dream, it is a relief to have escaped the dilemma. But the truth may be that we actually suffer the confinement that we thought we had escaped.

Posts of this kind may appear to be excessively subjective. To this I would respond that in the “sciences” of the Borderzone, such accounts as this one serve as data. The responsibility is to render the experience as accurately as possible, not least its interpretation, which is an important element. This sort of thing may actually have public value and has nothing to do with me as such.

The Borderzone Within

There is a borderzone right inside us too—as there is one out there in the macrocosm—but we don’t think of it in mumbo-jumbo or in mystical terms because it is a matter of direct experience. Humanity has treated this matter in countless ways, but it is summed up by that all-too-familiar phrase, body and soul. If we use that duality as the whole, then the “borderzone” in question is really the point where body and soul meet and interact. But that interaction is so puzzling and mysterious, that we’ve dismissed it altogether, conceived of it as a point, have ignored it, have formed all kinds of fantastic theories about it, and have often simply thrown up our hands.

The modern way is to deny it. There is no soul. Enough already. We’re strictly chemistry arranged in a certain dynamic pattern—and that pattern has a kind of tenacious tendency to maintain itself, like a whirlpool does—but no more mysteriously than a whirlpool does; we call that tenacity survival. End of story.

Aristotle proposed that everything has body and soul if only we call the one matter and the other form. The combination of the two is the only real thing. He called it substance, and to this day, if we mean that something’s real, we say that it’s substantial. A consequence of this, of course, is that after our bodies fall apart, what we call “we” disappears. But Aristotle was not quite sure that intellect disappeared; he cut himself some slack, as it were. Almost to a man—and it usually is a man—our deep thinkers imagine the “high” element within us as intellectual. My explanation is that they expend most of their lives in thought; they get to know that faculty genuinely well; but, perhaps, they fail to experience other facets of their beings equally as fully—or observe them with the same care. There are other ways of being—there are other paths: action, art, and love come to mind. Thomas Aquinas, among the greatest thinkers of the medieval era, had a mystical experience shortly before he died. He stopped writing abruptly. Asked why, he answered that all that he had written until then (and it was a monumental opus, still avidly studied today) was “mere straw.” (1) I’ve always valued Aquinas’ thought—but I have valued this story as its crown. Paradoxically, perhaps, it holds a practical as well as a deeper truth.

Descartes, who, in a way, gave modern philosophical thought its original shape, carried simplification to a great height. He proposed two realities, the extended thing (call that the body) and the thinking thing (call that the soul). They were radically different; they communicated and met at one point in the body, in the pineal gland. No, this is not a tongue-in-cheek dismissal; but to get into the complexities of Descartes’ thought on the subject you have to look elsewhere (2). My point is that humanity has struggled with this subject. The borderzone within is a very mysterious aspect of reality—and this despite the fact that it is, for us, the most familiar.

It is our inability to pinpoint precisely where higher and lower meet, to describe in mechanical (or even electromechanical) terms how spirit moves matter, our inability to capture and hold the spirit that has led to the materialistic theories of life. But modern thought had its ancient analogues too—and functionally quite similar. Lucretius was one of these theorists: everything is atoms, he said. They move deterministically, but at unpredictable times they suddenly “swerve.” This accounts for what we would call mental events and the illusion of volition. But atoms that form into bodies by law and swerves, dissolve back into free atoms, ranging from coarse to superfine. All is a dance of occasionally swerving atoms. (3) Modern theories of physics are now approaching the Lucretian level. Statistical explanations of everything real are beginning to eat away even at the claim that laws of nature exist (which, of course, suggests a law-giver) to make everything a product of chance. This is what I call throwing up the hands.

I’m of a mind to see value in all of these approaches. All of them produce raw materials, all of them spin twine useful for making a meaningful cosmology—or an understanding of the self. What we need is the right loom to weave it into fabric. (4) That loom is projected, I think, by emanationist conceptions of reality. I’ve discussed these recently under the heading of “Angels: Heavenly Schematics.” There I have suggested that reality is indeed a creation of two distinct fundamentals; they interact at every level and dynamically—thus either rising toward complexity or moving away from it. Within this dynamic spiral are regions of relative equilibrium. Borderzones are spatially conceived areas where a transition is taking place— from one region to the other. They are spatially conceived because, for us, living where we live, space is a decent concept for locating activity. But let me put this projection into more visual or linear terms.

God created two kinds of realities. One of these are agents, that which we call “we”: persons; selves. The other is what we call matter—but this matter may manifest in a vast range of subtlety—thus more than just what we call matter. We live our lives in a borderzone. What do I mean by that? I mean that both a higher and subtler and a lower and coarser kind are both present in it, mixed, as it were. We are keenly aware of the lower. And, being lower, it has a greater grip on us; why that is so I’ll try to explain in a moment. But we’re also aware of the higher. It charms and draws us. The matter of that world, however is more subtle. It is invisible to us because we are still more aware of the lower region than the higher. The higher is an imaginal (but not an imaginary) world. We sometimes dismissively label it “mental,” signaling that such worlds are unreal. Yet mental creations and realities are very real for us: great myths, great music, great works of art, great structures of thought, grand tales, personal and collective memories. And also personifications like the United States of America or the Red Menace. Lady Macbeth, meet Don Quixote. There’s also our honor—produce it for me to touch if you can—and our shame. With only the slightest of careful observation, we can easily discover that most of the things that really move us, in our daily lives, are structures of the insubstantial kind—impossible to touch although, of course, they have tangible manifestations as print on paper, images on screens, or the bodies of people whose intangible attitudes, thoughts, intentions, benevolence (or lack thereof) are the source of our pleasures and our pains. The lower order, the material aspect, sometimes touches us most irritatingly too. And their disarray, as in Haiti these days, is a great source of pain.

We live our lives in tension here because we’ve entered a developmental region, a borderzone. We come from the lower and are headed upward. But because the lower is more familiar to us, has long been our home, it has more claim on us. Hence we are more aware of it. But, at the same time, we hear the call (but cannot see) a higher region. We interact with both. But after we are freed of bodies, which way shall we go? That is the question. If in some greater scheme we are on a vector, we are lucky to be in a borderzone; we’re also at risk. If we don’t develop, we won’t be able to resist the downward pull of the lower region after death; to be sure, it is the one we already inhabit now. But if we do manage to acquire new powers sufficient to continue in the higher direction, then, at the end of life, awakening to that ability, and finally seeing the higher dimension directly, without the interference of this level’s coarser materiality, we shall look back on all our works, and like Thomas Aquinas, declare them all as “mere straw.”

Held Incognito Inside Bodies

While we are inside bodies, we cannot see anything except by means of our sensory machinery—and the interpretation of sensory data by our brains. We can’t hear, feel, or smell anything either. By contrast, we seem to be able to see and hear just fine if we are outside of our bodies. Let’s take a look at these two cases.

Inside and Outside

The first assertion is obvious and amply documented. Special cases merely underline known facts. One such is the case of Helen Keller, which I’ve discussed here on this blog. Another are the experiences of Jill Bolte Taylor mentioned in a recent post here. The second assertion is less obvious. It depends on what I call experiential evidence—based on what people experience. The first can be established by scientific means, thus by physical measurements of physical phenomena. Subjective experiences cannot be replicated or checked independently nor yet measured. They cannot be reached by physical means. It is for this reason that scientists shy away from the paranormal; the blind also refrain from visiting picture galleries: what’s the point if you can’t see things?

Experiential evidence, however, does exist for seeing and hearing ordinary reality without the help of the sensory apparatus and the brain. The clearest cases come from near-death experiences (NDEs)—especially in those situations where a patient is declared clinically dead but, nonetheless, reports his or her observations of accident scenes or hospital surroundings—not least the actions and words of doctors or of the police—during that span of time. The patient is unconscious and comatose. The heart may have stopped beating. The eyes are closed. The EEG reading is flat.

For my own purposes I classify NDEs as this-worldly and other-worldly. In the first case people report about what they see in this world—the accident, the operating room. In the other they talk of seeing other-worldly environments, people, luminous beings, and so on. I’ve written multiple posts on this subject on Borderzone. A striking case, reported by C.G. Jung, is here. A discussion of the worldly phases is presented here. Now my presumption is that people who report seeing real events in this word, while cut off from their senses, also see real events in some other world. Why do we assume that the first instance is real and the is second illusory?

Let me restate the issue again to sharpen it. Why it is that in ordinary life—and also when medical conditions prevail, as during a stroke—our view of reality is restricted to matters that come to us only through the biological machinery we call our body? And yet, under the extraordinary circumstance of being on the brink of death, we’re suddenly enabled to examine, usually from a certain height, the scenes of accidents, operating theaters, hospital beds—and our own body, lying there. If we have the power to see and hear outside of the body, doesn’t that strongly suggest that inside the body something inhibits a power we have as souls? Does this inhibition arise because we are fused to matter in some way while we are what we call alive?

This isn’t merely idle musing or philosophical speculation. We do have evidence for both cases—if, that is, we’re willing to accept experiential evidence. And such evidence often comes from highly credible sources—including pilots reporting on dangerous mishaps, mountain climbers who’ve experienced falls, educated people, young people, mothers, technicians—not merely the feeble and the addled old.

Additional Aspects

The cases of greatest interest—especially for documenting body-soul duality—come from accidents and near accidents. In some of these the person involved may not even be hurt. These are sometimes out-of-body experiences (OBEs) rather then near-death experiences. Death was threatened by the circumstances, but nothing harmful actually took place—seen from the future. In these cases the soul literally jumps out of the body almost as if trying to escape the calamity—but the calamity does not develop. The pilot is suddenly outside the airplane, about to crash, and views himself from outside the cockpit inside of which he sees his body still fighting the controls. Or the subject is a mountain climber who loses his hold and is falling—but is, moments later, saved by a rope snagging on a rock. Yet other such cases involve motor cycle accidents in which the rider, about to be crushed, is thrown free and lands safely without harm—beyond having been knocked out. What we get here is an odd feeling that the soul—but surely not the person’s conscious self—takes an action it is able to take under extraordinary stimulus. I say, not the conscious self, because there is neither time to think in such circumstances, nor a knowledge of what to do, and invariably the conscious person is very surprised by that which suddenly happens, namely the body’s release. And once we contemplate that the soul may be able to release the body—yes, conditions have to be extraordinary—it occurs to me, anyway, that the soul may also be able to attach to a body in the same way.

Speculation

In these ranges of experience, we’ve barely begun to explore what we have learned in the twentieth century. Most of those who study NDEs are motivated to establish that indeed the soul does journey on. And once that fact is satisfactorily established, the job is done. These studies are costly and difficult and don’t have much practical value. They are and remain in the category of experiential evidence, hence won’t ever lead to a Nobel Prize in any category of science. Nevertheless, it seems to me, study of this phenomenon is potentially very valuable in orienting ourselves. Hence I’ll indulge in speculation.

Perhaps a start might be made by looking at some assumptions. It seems that disembodied souls are capable to seeing the physical world but unable to interact with it except in unusual or narrowly defined circumstances. If so, it appears that when they do—do interact in some way—they may link up to a living organism. They may be the very cause of life. To put this in other words, it may be that all living things represent a suitable organic structure which is enlivened by fusion with a soul from a vast disembodied pool of souls. Does all this make you feel, reading this, that you’ve wandered into the mind of a madman? Sorry about that. Discovery sometimes produces that kind of rearing back at the seemingly preposterous. But the idea is not at all weird, actually. What we do know, certainly in the case of humans, is that when the soul departs, life departs as well. It’s not that big a leap to imagine that life may be a spiritual fact—and that some spirits may be conscious while vastly many are not.

Let me make one more wild assumption. For the soul to leave the body—even when the body is still a working machine—requires extraordinary circumstances, namely a life-threatening set of events. It would seem to me logical, therefore, to assume that an equally unusual event, certainly an event of enormous emotional intensity, would also be required to cause a soul to fuse with matter. This would require that the soul could do so—therefore that, at some level of matter—a bridge between two kinds of reality should exist. I can’t help but remember the Tibetan Book of the Dead in this context. There we encounter the suggestion that a soul, unwilling to follow the light into the higher regions, finds itself attracted to men and women as they copulate. The soul then, as it were, plunges in. Don’t laugh. A huge intensity of emotion—some ranges of which may draw the soul almost irresistibly—are often involved when bodies meet in love.

But then, once the fusion has been accomplished—willingly or unwillingly—it may take something equally extraordinary, after that fusion, once more to loosen the soul from its newly minted prison in the lower dimension.

Forms, Forms, Forms

The big disagreement between Plato and Aristotle had to do with the reality of “forms.” As Plato saw things, if we have actual trees growing all around us—and we do—there must be an immaterial and eternal pattern of the “tree” somewhere in a higher realm. The “idea” had to be there somewhere before trees could form—and its existence must be at least as real as that of the keyboard on which my fingers dance. Aristotle shook his head. He had major difficulty picturing this Warehouse of Eternal Forms hidden somewhere in eternity.

I side with Plato because I have no problem with eternal forms—nor, for that matter, with forms that originate in time. The keyboard is an example. So is the fork, the knife, or shoelaces. These latter day forms were surely not always present in that Warehouse of Eternity where Eternal Forms reside. Nonetheless, we all know what these objects are.

In philosophy this clash has produced the Realist and Nominalist schools. The first asserts that eternal forms are real; the second holds that forms are merely names (nomina in Latin). In the philosophical context forms can also be rendered as essences, meaning exactly what Plato meant by forms.

I side with Plato because, in struggling with this subject myself, in trying to understand it viscerally, really, from the gut, I hit upon the notion that the problem goes away if we think of these forms, ideas, essences, or archetypes not as things but as intentions. Eternal ideas don’t need a warehouse. They need a mind. This line of thought brings the products of nature and the products of humanity under a single roof. Both are the consequence of intentions. The tree embodies God’s intention, the shoelace a human’s. Seeing forms, eternal or otherwise, under the rubric of intention also nicely explains why the form is immaterial and invisible and yet may be manifested in matter. Thus the weird status of form in the Aristotelian conception, form independent of matter, namely as a potential and therefore suffering a kind of not-quite-real status, is put on more solid footing. Essences are created by minds. Until they manifest as substances, thus taking on materiality, they remain ideas. But ideas are real. They are invisible because the mental order is invisible.

Now those who’re reading this entry having comes from the last (“Bodies, Bodies, Bodies”) might wonder: Is this discussion at all related to bodies? Yes. Thinking of essences and their manifestation may be the explanation of bodies, be they flesh-and-blood or subtle.

If we suppose that Reality itself must be God’s creation—and without that assumption all meaning disappears, hence that’s a good start—the Platonic view suggests the process of creation. It is the same on high as it is in our own humble circle. The new arises from intentions and then develops (or evolves, if you like) into a visible actuality in which the intention takes on a body. What this means is that matter itself is necessary in order to separate, to manifest, ideas—whether they originate in human or in higher minds. God’s creation generates the very matter in which divine ideas manifest. Lesser beings, like ourselves, cannot create matter but may form it.

This general idea underlies theosophical, Neoplatonic, and related conceptions of the subtle body. The idea expresses the feeling that actuality must always involve some kind of embodiment, gross or subtle. Without such embodiment, the essence remains still entirely absorbed in God. Actuality may thus be understood as separation from (but not independence of) God. The creation must then be pictured as a kind of separation in which matter plays a crucial role. The creation is not identical with God. Why God creates is the ultimately mystery. The emanationist theory suggests an overflow of benevolence—but that is, surely, just a human conceptualization. How can the Absolute be said to overflow?

This general view of the matter has certain merits. It suggests that transcending orders above us (and possibly below us) are structured like this one, but the match between our powers and the matter in those worlds is better—so that our minds can form our bodies. It suggests that angels also have a dual character. Here I side with St. Bonaventure (who believed that all creatures, not least angels, were made of form and matter) rather than with his contemporary, St. Thomas Aquinas (who held that angels had no bodies). I like the structure because it permits me to imagine that the vast physical cosmos that we see may indeed be entirely alive—that suns may be the bodies of very high beings. This notion, I hasten to add, is not original with me at all—but pleasing because, looking out at the vastness of the visible cosmos, I’m choked by the meaningless incommensurability of that vastness unless I think that so much glory may actually have meaning.

Later: Having read this she who completes me had this comment: “For me, after having re-read this ‘unpacking,’ a very satisfying (pleasingly simple?) thought is that ‘this creation strives toward completion!’ The entire universe is EVOLVING towards the completion of God’s idea of his creation.”

Bodies, Bodies, Bodies

My heart is sad and lonely
For you I pine, for you dear only
Why haven’t you seen it?
I’m all for you, body and soul.

The body-soul duality is deeply embedded in language and thought—and has been from times long forgotten—not because we are subjects to illusion, as the materialists would have it, but because we sense both the difference between and the union of the two as a matter of course.

One of the intellectual habits that has always amused me is the use of the word “naïve” to characterize the way ordinary people see things. Thus it is naïve of us to think that we have selves or souls; the “advanced” view is that we’re mere coils of chemical adaptation. For this reason also I enjoyed first hearing of Dr. Johnson’s reaction to Berkley’s idealism. The quote is from James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — “I refute it thus.”

Humanity’s spontaneous feeling is that substantiality is anchored in matter. Common sayings bear witness to this feeling. “He is just a shadow of the man he used to be.” The Greeks thought of the dead—deprived of bodies—as shades. But a shadow is, nevertheless, a something, even if thinned out. The word ghost has the same connotations: somewhat translucent, so to say, not a very good light reflector, but still good enough to see.

The tough persistence of the Aristotelian matter-form substantiality is testimony to the fact that it’s easy to follow the conceptualization and to accept a duality in which one of the two elements is receptive (the yin of the I Ching, for instance) and the other is active (yang). Matter receives form and form imposes itself on matter. Functionally the western matter-form duality is identical with the yin-yang duality of Chinese thought.

Now you might say that the real is always substantial. You can’t see the form without matter and you never find matter without form. And here lies a problem. There is a problem if we think of the soul as the form of the body. The problem is that a soul separated from its manifestation is insubstantial. It is indeed the sound of one hand clapping. And some of us, anyway, don’t like this idea.

This spontaneous recoil from the thought of insubstantiality has produced interesting philosophical ideas, namely that bodies, other than those made of flesh and blood, actually exist. These other bodies are imagined to be the vehicles of the soul after our current “bag of bones” is buried or cremated. These vehicles are pictured either as “higher” or “lower” kinds of bodies. In Greek thought lower kinds of bodies, those of the shades in Hades, were thought to be of an order inferior to ordinary bodies, thus linked to the element of water only: moist bodies. And those of the higher kind were imagined as partaking of fire. Lower meant sinking; higher meant rising. Note please that in that era the words earth, water, air, and fire carried meanings somewhat analogous to our conceptions of chemical elements or subatomic particles. These people were neither stupid nor naïve; and they intended to be understood by their peers, not some future generation habituated to regard anything ancient as inferior. Therefore, saying what I say here, I’m not talking tongue in cheek. I take these people seriously.

Notice next that in theosophical circles the concept of the “subtle body” is accepted as one of these bodies beyond the “bag of bones.” Here the terminology we encounter includes terms like energy, as in energy body, and also the word vibration, which is suggestive of frequency, hence evokes images (in me, at any rate) of the electromagnetic, hence the energetic, spectrum. Notice further that in the Christian conceptualization, the resurrection body is spoken of as the glorified body—and glory is always associated with light—another pointer in the direction of energy. The glorified body is thus another way of saying subtle body; the difference is that in theosophical conceptions more than one higher body exists, in the Christian conception only one. One more note along these lines. In paranormal circles, we encounter the notion that ordinary bodies are surrounded by an aura, thus, again, an energetic sort of emanation, which is perceptible by certain gifted individuals.

These circles accept a curious conceptualization of nesting bodies—imagine Russian babushka dolls that fit inside each other. The outer body is the one we see; within is a spirit or subtle body; within that may be another yet; the glorified or luminous body. Part of the second is visible as the aura.

Bodies, bodies, bodies. I will return to this and say more the next time. For now the point I wish to emphasize is that at least a subset of humanity recoils from a simple notion of a matter-form substance in which the breakup of the union means the disappearance of the form at least, never to be found again. Therefore the human mind has projected the duality of body and soul beyond this dimension and imagines not only a higher environment for the soul but also the presence, there, of a higher form of matter. How else could the soul retain its substantiality. An examination of this cluster of suppositions will follow.