Who really knows what a soul is? I don’t. When I try to hold it, the concept of soul disintegrates like sunlight over the evening horizon. I can sense it. I feel sure I can touch it. But the warmth and glow of the experience – it’s gone long before I have anything definitive to show you.
A picture? It records, yes. But it’s not the same as living, as we know.
How about the understanding that the sun is still there after it sets, that it’s just us who are spinning? That’s helpful because it gives me faith that tomorrow I may once again be able to stand here, with outstretched senses, tasting the air and absorbing the color of another departure.
But it’s not the same. It can never be the same. And we know it.
We witness death routinely. People, animals, plant and other life forms – over the course of a typical human lifetime, the transition from alive to dead, from animated to absent, from here to there, happens all too frequently. Death’s regularity doesn’t diminish its significance; it is heartbreaking, sometimes literally, to lose someone or something we love. Part of us feels wrested away, sometimes abruptly, almost always unwillingly, from the inner reaches of our being.
“I’ll never be the same,” it is often said. And that is true. Loss of a loved one can create a void that vibrates with vulnerability, a rent in the fabric of individual identity that is not easily repaired.
Suppose that is the point? Suppose what we feel when lose a precious person or pet is reminder of the deeply interconnected nature of life?
A few years ago, while walking under an evening sky, it occurred to me that the soul may not be a static, singular thing, that each of us may be ever-changing amalgamations of life forces and essences, that people I’ve lost may not have taken part of me with them but instead left part of themselves with me, that the feeling of space experienced when a loved one dies is the opening necessary for a portion of that loved one to continue living. The possibility stopped me on the path. Might a part of my mom’s soul live within, another part within my siblings, additional parts in other people who loved her enough to make space inside their own identities for someone else’s good to continue? Is it correct to call those soul gifts “parts”? Doesn’t quantum physics open up the possibility of non-binary sharing?
If you’re a religious person, you may not resonate with this idea. The same may be true if you are scientific, or an atheist, or, well, just about anyone trying to find their way through this confusing world. Because you likely sense that you are, well, you. You have a name. You wake up each day in the same body. You have memories. You have photos to prove yourself. You have ample documentation from your years on this planet that you are unique, that you have a solitary and special identity distinct from everyone around you. Cultural and media stories reinforce your, my, and everything’s uniqueness. Our differences. Our separation. Logic follows that our souls should be similarly unique, different, and separate.
The word “soul” descends from the Greeks, by way of Old High German and Old English. It brings with it notions of non-physical essence, and immortality – persistence beyond the physical form. Of course, this belief is not particularly Greek; a number of traditions across human history have similar if somewhat varying linguistic and belief ancestries. Such traditions often promote self-awareness, which brings with it individuality, which brings with it our contemporary crises of self-centeredness.
But the same sense of self also enables conscious experience of things greater than what can be measured. To paraphrase Hamlet, there is more to things in our heaven and earth than what we may dream of in our respective philosophies. For example, I know, without a doubt, that I have felt the essence of life hover outside the human body. I know, without the ability to have you know it the same way, that I have experienced soul at the time of, and after, someone’s death.
I believe in soul, regardless of how it is defined, because my life experience has confirmed it exists. Like all humans, I have felt the gaping void of loss, have stood with others as they have been drawn by the destabilizing pull of such loss. However, I have also felt the same void filled by something that was not me, have listened to others describe a similar experience. We are not statically whole. We are instead dynamically whole, a constellation of emerging and engaging presences and essences that somehow demonstrate the unfolding potential of being.
Does that make me immortal? No, at least not in the sense some narratives may suggest; the state of my own soul at the time of my death relies on who and what I invite into it between now and the second my body takes its last breath. Who I am depends as much on who you and others are and have been during my life. Curiously, that makes us, together, immortal. It makes our best intentions, our blended commitment to each other, to life, to something we might call the common good, immortal. When the unique admixture of psyche and inspiration is freed from our physical forms, perhaps we are releasing ourselves to others in the same way that others have previously offered themselves to us. Should we not do so with love, with compassion, with selflessness – in life as well as death? Why do we hold so tightly to the conviction that we are autonomous and discrete embodiments of existence?
There is nothing for good to embrace when physical form expires – except other physical forms. Life seeks immanence. We might try to remember that when we excessively cling to views reinforcing independence as ideal, achievement as personal. We have always been more than a collection of selves. We are, and always may be, a transpersonal and interdependent whole.
When my time comes, please make space for the better parts of me. Because whatever good enlivens my form undoubtedly came from others, maybe even from you. It only seems right to return it.