The Soul, Enduring Self, or Spirit

Of Man it is said there exists in him something phantasmagorical, which is characterized in the traditional Western mind by the faith in an enduring Self known as Soul or Spirit. This immaterial body is said to rest within, acting as the animating principle of one's personality, existing between now, then, and the afterlife as an everlasting spiritual quality, unique to the individual, and expanding in knowledge much the same way Mind grows with memory. From whence the Soul came, and whereto it travels after the body returns to dust are ideas best left to sages & theologians. But what is the Soul or Self? And, what makes this ghost in our shell us?

Descartes asserts that it is the continuity of the thinking Mind/Soul (as one) that is the enduring Self, as long as this thinking Mind/Soul continues exists; the moment it ceases to think, is the moment he no longer exists. Opposed to Descartes continuity of thinking Soul, John Locke argues that it is Memory alone which determines the existence of an enduring Self. Further removed from the Western Self-concepts is the idea of No-self, or the traditional Eastern view, which holds that due to the impermanence of reality, the ever-changing elements, & the transient, composite nature of things, No-Thing actually exists - it is this very Illusion from which Eastern practitioners seek to break free.

This non-dualistic, mystical approach views this illusion of separateness as the root of all evil and suffering. Whether I am not, or I am a vessel through which my Soul may experience earthly delights & hope to travel onward to Heaven makes little difference when truly considering the question: what makes me not you? My body is the sepulcher of the Soul, and through its material impermanence, my psyche seeks to attain the infinite; the Western heaven may as well be the Eastern enlightenment - where one as Self returns or evolves to reach God, the other as no-Self is alleviated from Samsara into Nirvana or Enlightenment. Thus you and I while alike in impermanence, as no-Self become Self, an evolving thing whose true home is to be attained through removal from the lesser realms of human nature in its entirety. The dream I dream of me seeing you, the memory I have of me being me, the future I imagine of me imagining futures, the now I choose to use me feeling me, the thoughts through language which I think to understand myself through outside of myself, & the Soul/Mind that stores them beyond biological means (whether corporeal or unreal), assists me in recognizing the feet with which I tread the earth yesterday are likely the same with which I will walk today.

Now, of course my feet today are not my feet yesterday, nor are they my feet a moment ago - everything is in constant flux, atoms buzzing about like worker bees, imagination seeping in & out of linear moment-to-moment thought, picturing yellow & black bumblebees, hearing their swarm, or tasting their honey on the tip of the Mind's tongue, while balancing the mental vision with the translation of thought into action through language, by which I transmit the aforementioned; surely my feet a moment ago are in a different physical position, whether ½ a centimeter, or a step away; surely my socks have ruffled a bit from yesterday, if not completely changed, along with the shoes; surely Time has passed, as we have not yet learned how to stop it! Taking into consideration all of the above, I am still able to conclude, my feet are my feet. What about my Self? And if there is my Self, where exactly is it in relation to your Self? If, as my feet were surely not the same yesterday as they are today, then one may assume my body will have been altered as well; it is this immaterial thing from which consciousness extracts itself & provides a basis for the ethereal understanding of the enduring Self. Even if my Self is an illusion, I am able through language and logic to deduce that 'I' is separate from 'You', yet may be connected on alternate planes of [non]reality forming an 'Us'. This 'Us' could be an Oversoul; or a great sea of consciousness (of Spirit/Mind) from which sprouts each person's Soul, and uses each body as a medium between the physical and the infinite; the Soul becomes nearly an atomic seed.

Now, through such conjecture, one may propose another question: if Soul exists, is the individual dependent upon the Soul, or is the Soul dependent upon the individual? I was born essentially blind, deaf, dumb, naked, bloody, & crying - removed from my comfortable abyss of the womb, slapped on the ass & welcomed to the world with tears, cigars, and photographs. If my soul existed inside of me as an infant, and if that infant grew into me now, did the Soul grow too? Does a Soul have a size? A shape? Through imagination it might; as many see ghosts of the deceased, so too may they say their Soul has not yet found rest or peace, it may as well be that there are some alive who have not yet come to terms with the death, somehow displacing their imagined spirit (a mirrored smoky resemblance of the once living) onto the physical plane. Because memory & imagination are essentially linked by unconscious chains, every experience of the past is an imagined event - the colors, tastes, noises, are all reevaluated & confirmed by the mind to exist if they are relevant to an event in the Now. These imagined truths may be what makes the Soul exist; we may imagine our Soul to be a thing outside of Time, through which memory, experience, consciousness, & future coexist, yet is something we only come to understand as we grow mentally, intellectually, emotionally, and physically - essentially seeking to reach union with our preexisting Soul. Until now I have combined Mind & Soul as one, which we shall now separate.

The dark night of the Soul is the union of our tripartite existence - Body, Mind, Soul. Through our physical body we reach our Mind - intellect, memory, experience, emotion, opinion; through our Mind we reason & seek to grow in spirit, or to know our Soul - existence beyond physical limitation, the infinite, the eternal; and through an understanding of our Soul we merge the three. This combination is an equilibrium of unities, the dual nature of Man being physical and emotional (a duad), formed with the perfect nature of Soul (a monad), resulting in harmony (a triad); 3 often being symbolic of wisdom, for as spiritual & sentient beings we organize the present, foresee the future, and benefit through past experience. So what of the Self? The Self, which endures only if one recognizes its existence, is something which must be earned or attained through reason, experience, & imagination. There are many ways one may obtain a Self, & many ways one may remain ignorant of the conceptual Self; if one so chooses one may garner a Soul through conscious understanding of their personal relation so the world without & the universe within.