Last weekend at a talk I gave to the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (PhACT), someone asked me, “I’m confused. Do you or don’t you believe in something called the soul, the spirit, or God?”
I had been talking about the historical abstraction of spirit from matter, and my questioner wanted to know on which side of the fence I stood. Am I an atheist like him, my beliefs firmly grounded in logic, reason, and reality? Or have I bought into a fairy-tale about some non-material realm?
I explained that the answer is neither, and that in fact the very terms of his question contained a trap. Our very conception of spirit is as something separate from matter; our very conception of soul is as something distinct from the body; our very conception of God is as something not of this world. But there is another way to understand these concepts.
In fact, the views of atheists and the views of many believers are only superficially different. While they may disagree about the existence of an extra-material God, they do agree that the world of matter is just the world of matter. They both assume that spirit – if it exists – exists in a separate realm. They both agree that the soul – if it exists – is contained in but separate from the body. They are in fundamental agreement on the mundanity of the material world in which our flesh-and-blood bodies live.
This fundamental agreement is why our culture generally treats the world as if it were not sacred and the body as if it were not holy. The separation of spirit from matter (whether or not the former is believed to exist) is perhaps the most damaging ideology of our civilization, for it has allowed us to despoil the planet and its inhabitants with seeming moral impunity. This ideology says that the spiritual realm (again, if it exists) lies within, and is to be found in the inner realm of prayer and meditation, or the non-material realm of otherworldly experiences and visions. This is a spirituality for which I have little use.
The alternative I offered the group was that matter and spirit are not separate – matter is spiritual. “And this,” I said, thumping my chest, “is what a soul looks like.” I do not contain a soul, I am a soul. Do you want to see God? Look around you.
But here again I ran into the limitations of language, because it sounded like I was saying that spirit, soul, and God don’t really exist – all there is is matter. So I explained further. What I mean when I say that matter is spiritual, is that matter possesses the qualities that we ordinarily associate with spirit. When I say that the body is the soul, it means that it possesses the qualities we ordinarily associate with soul. You see, the deflation we feel when we consider, “There is no such thing as soul or spirit, it’s all just matter” arises from the implications of that word, “just". Matter is not just matter.
Matter, in fact, is far far more than we ever imagined it to be – and the same goes for the human body. And this is not some consolation prize for the denial of spirit. Spirit exists! Spirit is all around us, in everything and everyone. No, not quite. It is not “in” everything and everyone, it is everything and everyone. By that I mean that matter has all the properties of spirit: specialness, uniqueness, sacredness, sentience. And this is true of all matter, down to the very atoms and sub-atomic particles that make it up.
Until the 20th century, science left no room for such a claim. The program of science, after all, was to reduce everything to mere combinations of a few generic building blocks, whose behavior was fully determined by the impersonal laws of physics. In this paradigm, there would be no limit to our power to engineer and control the universe, because each particle, having no individuality, would behave in a way fully determined by the forces brought to bear upon it. And we humans are made up of such particles, a fact that motivated the attempts of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics to derive the “laws” of human behavior. There was no room for uniqueness, no room, at bottom, for self-determination, whether of an atom or of a person. The world was populated by automatons and the soul, at best, was a ghost in the machine.
All of that changed in the 20th century, when it was discovered that fundamental particles possess an irreducible uniqueness. An electron traveling through an aperture changes its course in a way that is irreducibly random. Or at least, “random” is the word we use to describe it. But another way to look at it is that the electron chooses its path. Crucially, this choice is not determined by any other hidden variables. Each electron is unique because each electron will eventually make different choices when subjected to enough “measurements” – that is, interactions with the world. Another word for measurements is relationships. The sum total of all a particle’s relationships makes it unique.
And we are composed wholly of such particles. While orthodox scientific opinion has it that quantum interdeterminacy routinely cancels out in systems of more than a few dozen particles, the very fact that we can be understood as a vast interacting collection of constantly choosing particles, each a unique individual, provides at least a metaphoric basis for seeing ourselves the same way.
Significantly, the choice of a particle only ever occurs in relationship to another being – an observer in the laboratory, for instance, or even another particle. In the absence of relationship, all choices exist as potentials only; they are not real. The same could be said for us humans. We only define ourselves through our relationship to each other and the world. As I titled a previous essay, we are our relationships.
I bring this up here because it gets at another important characteristic of soul, and therefore, of ourselves. We are unique, yes, but we are not separate. Our uniqueness comes from the totality of our relationships, which is different for each of us, but we are not separate from those relationships. Our relationships define who we are. With this in mind, I offered the following exercise to one of the attendees at my talk, and I offer it to you now. It is quite simple, and designed to put into practice the realization that we are not the discrete, separate beings we think we are.
Here is what to do: simply walk around and go through your day, and every time you interact with someone, see yourself looking out at you from their eyes. For me, this exercise has an extraordinary power that words cannot do justice. It isn’t just an intellectual exercise, a metaphor, an idea, and it won’t work unless you actually do it. When I do it, I really get it. You are me. I am you. We are the same being looking out at each other from different eyes. What other name could we give such a being, but God?
