Originally posted by AThousandYoung
[b]An analogy that might help -- you want to go to certain country. Someone gives you a map. You can study the map, and memorize names, places, etc. But none of that can replace the actual experience of traveling to the country.
No, but someone can tell me that the country exists and that the map represents real terrain features in the c ...[text shortened]... ThousandYoung (of course I have a real name). What am I? I am a human male. That wasn't hard.[/b]
No, but someone can tell me that the country exists and that the map represents real terrain features in the country. It would be silly to tell someone that they have to go to France and live there in order to know what France is.
To know France intellectually, you can read about France, sure. But to know France
experientially, you are going to have to go to France yourself. And even better then just touring the country, would be to make a long stay there. Even better than that, would be to live there and learn the language. And so on.
I've been stressing the experiential part with you in these analogies, because my own understanding of "soul" ("spirit", "God", etc.) is that it really only make sense from the experiential angle. An intellectual view of "soul" is basically empty. It's like a postcard of Paris. It won't satisfy if you really want to know Paris. You'll soon lose the postcard or forget about it.
Likewise with the menu. You don't need to eat the food to know what it is.
Food is meant to be eaten. If you want to "know" what curry chicken tastes like, you most certainly are going to have to eat it. Otherwise your knowledge of curry chicken remains second hand, borrowed. It is not really yours. It'll be a fantasy curry chicken.
Yes you can write about food, talk about food, even copy recipes, etc. This would be the intellectual approach to food. The experiential approach however will only be known by
eating the food. Much how the experiential approach to love is only known by loving, or the experiential approach to sex is only known by having sex, or the experiential approach to baseball is only known via playing baseball.
So, by analogy, I may need to meditate or whatever to develop an emotional attachment to "the soul", and I might learn a lot about it by doing so, but I shouldn't need to do all this just to know what a soul is.
All depends on the angle of approach. Someone can tell you what their idea of the soul is -- "for me, the soul is pure energy, or my higher self, or God's light reflected in my higher mind, or my Jungian individuated unconscious, blah blah blah" -- but in the end, what good are such descriptions going to do you? You might nod your head, and say, "ah, so that's what the soul is" -- and then after thinking a bit, you might add, "yeah, but wait! You're just telling me what the soul is for you! How do I know what you say is true?" And, your questions at that point would indeed be perfectly valid. Not only that, it's a totally appropriate question.
The spiritual path really consists of two levels -- the mind level, and the practice level. The mind level is study of writings, memorizing concepts, learning the various languages, and so on. But this level can never give you real knowledge of what soul is. It can only give you the various highly subjective viewpoints of spiritual seekers. That doesn't mean that these viewpoints are "wrong" for these seekers, but they are
their viewpoints, not yours.
The second level is "practice". For some seekers, that practice is prayer. For others, it's service of some kind. For others, meditation, or contemplation. Some even use visualization or mantras, or affirmations, and so on. There are many forms of practice. But what all hold in common is that they involve a movement into the crucially important level of
direct experience. They lead to the experiential. God, soul, spirit, etc., are subjective realities are basically meaningless without an experiential contact with them.
A good example is in the question "Who am I?"
I am AThousandYoung (of course I have a real name).
Are you your name? If you changed your name tomorrow -- say, from John Smith to Fred Jones -- would you in fact cease to exist?
Clearly not. In fact, very little would change about you at all, if anything. So from that it's not hard to conclude that you are clearly something much more than just a name. That would seem obvious, yes?
What am I? I am a human male. That wasn't hard.
"Human male" remains simply part of a conceptual designation -- in this case, it describes your species and your gender. But clearly there is much more to you than just your species and gender.
In Zen Buddhism -- to use one example of experiential practice -- a practitioner will tackle what is called a "koan". A koan is a rationally insoluble problem, like "what is the sound of one hand clapping" or "show me your face before your parents were born". On the surface these seem like absurd questions, and indeed they are from the intellectual perspective -- perhaps as absurd as "what is the soul?" -- but when concentrated on eventually the mind "shifts gears" and opens up to a deeper, fuller understanding of reality. The idea there is that the intellect tends to interfere with our capacity to experience our lives to the fullest, as it is constantly interpreting things and projecting ideas onto the world, and other people.
Intellect is very useful to certain areas of investigation, especially science, but it tends to break down in terms of its usefulness when it comes to knowing transcendent realities like God, spirit, or soul. There, practice -- experiential work -- is needed. And there are many paths to look at there -- Christian prayer/contemplation (see Thomas Merton, Meister Eckhart, etc.), Buddhist meditation (Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh), Hindu metaphysics (Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Sri Aurobindo), Sufi mysticism (Kabir, Rumi), Native Indian mysticism (Black Elk, Sun Bear, etc), and many other approaches. All of these facilitate experiential progress on one's spiritual path and thus can help one begin to "know" what soul/spirit/God/enlightenment is.
I'm not making a sectarian argument here, of course. Most people have their favourite religion (or none at all). My point has been to define the difference between study and practice, between intellect and experience in the spiritual realm, because it's crucial to understand the difference between the two when it comes to matters like the idea of "soul" and what it is.
What is a "soul"?
24 Aug '05 20:22
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