A mad man walks through the market, in the full light of day, in the morning, a lit lantern in hand, crying out aloud, unceasingly "I seek God, I seek God". One passer-by thinks he is "lost". Another thinks that he is straying, "like a child". A third thinks he has hidden himself away from the world too long and has grown afraid of seeing real people. The mad man jumps into their midst and transfixes them with his glances. He calls out "Where is God gone?". Nobody answers. He continues:" I mean to tell you! We have killed him--you and I.We are all his murderers" He asks" What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun?...Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards,in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually darker and darker? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction?...God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!" he raves on. He asks:" How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife,--who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this task too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of the it?.." The madman falls silent and looks again at his hearers; they also are silent and look at him in surprise. At last, he throws his lantern on the ground. It breaks into pieces and is extinguished. "I come too early, " he then says, "I am not yet at the right time....Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard..." The same day, he makes his way into different churches and there repeats his message" requiem aeternam deo" and when led out, he always replies "What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?" This is what Nietzsche wrote in "The Gay Science" in late 19th century.
If Nietzsche's madman was too "early" then, he is no longer now. The day of reckoning has come. We see, we hear, we feel that "God is dead" all around us, everywhere we go. Where has God gone? We need look no further than all that's around us: at the quickening and maddening pace of urbanization, industrialization, standardization, technologicalization of our life and at the ubiquity of our information media, our I-pads, I-phones, desktops, our I-banking, I-government services, I-purchases etc. It is said that our old Christian God is almighty, all-knowing and all good. Our information technology seems to have taken the place formerly occupied by that Christian God. Our internet technology and its products and processes have become omnipotent, omnipresent and if someone were to type a question on the keyboard of our super-computer about whether it considers itself moral, the computer screen will most likely display the answer that it thinks itself all good too.
It is reported that Jesus said a long time ago, "man does not live by bread alone." If he is right, the great Roman Empire had long thought of a solution: "bread and circus!." The Roman Empire fell. It was replaced by the Holy Roman Empire, with the Holy Roman Emperor sitting upon his throne at the head of the secular government and the Pope at the head of the realm of man's spirit in Vatican. It lasted a few hundred years more. Then came the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the industrial revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, the age of Western imperialistic expansion and then the world wars, the Communist Revolutions, first in Russia, then in China, then national liberations, decolonization etc and now the emergence of Third World countries. Is the greater part of humanity thereby rendered happier? Do they find their life more satisfactory? Do they find more joy, less stress? Are they more anxious, restless, fearful about their uncertain future or the reverse? Is materialism our only option? Does man still have need of a certain spirituality?
In the West, the number of people who find consolation and peace in the traditional religions are rapidly declining. Its magnificent churches have now become more "tourist attractions" than places of worship. The once universal, Catholic and apostolic church has now splintered into thousands of denominational churches. The Church has plenty of competition. Man' s needs for some kind of spirituality, for meaning and for hope are now satisfied by the thousand and millions of fortune tellers, astrologers, tarot card readers, wija board operators, masters of chi mei calculations, four-pillar fortune telling, feng shui, worship of all sort of idols, including secular rock stars, movie stars, TV celebrity, sports heroes etc if not in person, then in newspapers, magazines, periodicals, on TV or even on the internet. What does that tell us? We don't just have eyes, ears, mouths, noses, stomaches and sex organs. We got brains too. We got what used to be called "hearts" which are supposed to be the seat of our emotions and our "soul". Their needs have to be attended to too. Are they? These are problems on which many thoughtful people have spent a whole life time reflecting and writing. Some of them are making certain tentative suggestions. One of them is Thomas Moore, who wrote inter alia, the following
1. Care of the soul: a Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life (1994)
2. Soul Mates: Honoring the Mystery of Love and Relationship (1994)
3. The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life (1997)
4. The Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism (1998)
5. The soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an act of Love (1999)
6. Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality (2001)
7. Dark Nights of the Soul (2005)
8. A Life a Work: The Joy of Discovery what you were born to do (2009)
To me, Moore always writes with sympathy and a great deal of insight. In the chapter entitled "Theology of the World" in "The Re-Enchantment of Everyday life", he urges us to listen to the "voice of the earth and being in a family relationship to the world". because to him the modern sciences, both physical and social, do not actually foster any "real dialogue between nature and human life". In the sciences, we are the subject and the world is an object. To him, only "theology grants subjectivity and power to nature" and for this reason, he thinks that "only theology can speak adequately" but that nowadays, our conventional theology is "colluding" with the disenchanted logic of our culture at large. The kind of theology he has in mind is much broader in scope and bolder in vision, "a fundamental, life-informing mode of understanding that takes the infinite, the mysterious, and the spiritual into full account as it seeks to formulate our imagination of human events.", one which is nonsectarian, nondenominational, something not defensive, narcissistic, obsessive or jealous and which yet considers the many issues of ordinary life that involve mystery. "We need the specialist who has no need to defend his or her own beliefs but who can speak intelligently and reflectively on how to live ritually, how to deal with death, and how to find deeply rooted attitudes towards marriage, illness, work and community." This is not at all easy. Although we are now in the 21st century, he regrets that there are still "few signs that theology as a field is adjusting to this new world." He thinks that it's not sufficient to shape a theology out of the major religious traditions of the world because to him, even the "smallest religion" has something of value to contribute. Neither does he think it sufficient or appropriate to look for "some intellectual amalgamation of all religious views" i.e. the idea that all religions say the same thing or point in the same direction. We need something which is able to deal with such things as deaths, accidents, meaning, nature, intuitions, rites of passages, sacredness, holy places, ethics, values and educations. He says that the kind of theology he is looking for is "not a blend of all traditions but rather a style of thought that takes spiritual matters into account as we try to deal with daily challenges". He believes that unless we have such a theology, we would continue to think of our problems as merely psychological or sociological when in fact, it requires "a special way of thinking and responding that reaches into the mysteries that underlie human life."
What would the kind of theology Moore thinks of involve? It requires a deep sense of our connections with the mysteries of every day life, what he calls " a profound appreciation for dialogue with the holy, for the limits of human knowledge in the face of mystery, and for emptying our language and idea about the divine so that we can live with an attitude of utter openness to fate, nature and destiny." because to him, secularistic disciplines and methods force us to live in a closed system but only theology may hope to open up our possibilities towards the infinite. He thinks that we should stress love over law, intimacy over understanding, rather like the traditional shaman, the mystics, like Julian of Norwich, going through an initiatory illness in a way that is remarkably shamanic. For him, we have had enough of intellectualization and moralization which has "kept us culturally disenchanted and divided into competitive groups". We need to break these old patterns of response in our spiritual practice: we need a new kind of imagination. As he says, it is less a question of borrowing the idea and practices of one religion from another than of "rediscovering" spiritual perspectives and opportunities within one tradition through association with another. He cites the example of Thomas Merton. I think he might usefully include Thich Nhat Hahn too.
Moore complains that for far too long, "we have imagined that the "theos" of theology to be the limited image of divinity that we jealously protect and hold as the only valid and true version." To him, "theos" or "God" is a word that fails every time it is defined, described or translated. It is an "evocative" word which "calls forth the spirit that is often described as "infinite", "unnameable", "beyond" any statement about it, and yet is "the source of all life". For some, "it is an invitation to silence, the emptying of all understanding, beyond language and story, and yet fully present as the active spring from which time and events flow." In short, we should focus on its connotative and suggestive rather than its denotative possibilities. To me, what he is advocating seems remarkably similar to what the Zen Buddhist are talking about. Moore, however, relies on the what the European theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in the Nazi prison: " God is beyond in the midst of our life. The church stands at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village.", the word "church" to be understood here not in any institutional sense but as the "spirit which gather us together to acknowledge the ultimate mysteries that frame a human life." To him, "theos" is not something set apart from life, but is "the very heart and substance of the most ordinary dimension of everyday life." and as he says, "it is the ultimate source of enchantment, so that to seek the spell of the dreamlike immersion in the boundless sea of life is to live religiously, worshiping the God who is beyond any definition or idea of God, the God who appears, as God appeared to Bonhoeffer, in the face of utterly inscrutable insanity and inhumanity.". He talks a bit like a Christian existentialist philosopher: "taken to the brink of rationality, we look into the absurd abyss and behold pure divinity, beyond any institutional description, far beyond any moral prescription, and infinitely beyond any convenient, defensive, anxious, provincial, narcissistic or belligerently argued notion". To him this kind of theology is "the ultimate basis for an enchanted life": "it restores magic as a principle of mature living rather than an aberration in the course of human experimentation, and it gives utter seriousness to the re-enchantment of everyday life". We need to restore a little of the "magic" of a spirituality conformable to the conditions of modern life and build anew a certain "ritual", a ritual which restores to everyday activities a kind of "sacredness", a kind of "holiness", a sense of its hidden or long suppressed or repressed "connections" with other living things, with the air, the sea, the sky, the mountains, the trees, etc, and feel once again that pounding of our heart beat, that sense of intimacy which has been denied to us for so long by our prolonged exposure to our artificial, dessicated and dessicating urban, intellectual and cultural environment which has drained us from that vital source and fountain of all life: the feeling of connection to everything else in our world..
However, as it is, many people encounter enormous resistance to their tentative efforts to discover or invent this new kind of unattached spirituality emanating not only from the traditional religions, but also perhaps, from their own prejudices built up over the years and manifesting itself by the way they limit themselves by their own particular needs and narrowness of vision. There is no doubt that the practitioner of this new type of spirituality also needs community, something which they will have to build for themselves and they must also be careful not to fall into the trap of the kind of narcissism and narrow-mindedness of the tradition from which they are now trying to escape. To Moore, enchantment needs its own specialist and mystery its own lobbyist. To him "a theology of daily life, practised by us all would open our eyes to a dimension solidly sealed off by the modern secularistic imagination and it would restore soul, because soul is fed by the eternal and spiritual as much as it finds nourishment in the temporal and the physical". Is that not what we, in the UUHK are trying to do? I am so happy to find corroboration of the worth of what we are trying to do from this master of the art of the human soul.
2012年8月5日 星期日
2012年3月23日 星期五
From Soul, to Self, to Annihilation of Self.17
Cont'd
What happens when we follow Ricard's advice and do the relevant meditations.? He says this: "The first things we notice are the currents of thought that are continuously flowing without our even being aware of them." He thinks that our countless thoughts are born of our "sensations, our memories and our imaginations" which constantly stream through our mind. He tell us that underlying them and behind them, there is something else. "There is a quality of mind that is always present no matter what kind of thoughts we entertain", something he calls "pure consciousness." Pure consciousness is "what remains in the rare moment when the mind is at rest, almost motionless, even as it retains its ability to know.". He says, "That faculty, that simple open presence" is called "pure consciousness" because "it exists even in the absence of mental constructs." What is it like? It has neither any particular localization, nor color nor shape and has no intrinsic features of their own. He says, "In pure consciousness, we experience the mind as empty of inherent existence." He realizes that this notion of emptiness is very foreign to Western psychology and I might add, even to the busy mind of the contemporary city man.
Ricard explains. When a powerful emotion or thought arises e.g anger arises, "we are very easily overwhelmed by this thought, which multiplies into numerous new thoughts that disturb and blind us and prompt us to utter words and commit acts, sometimes violent ones, that can make others suffer and soon become a source of regret" But instead of unleashing our anger, we can examine the angry thought itself and come to see that it has been nothing but "smoke and mirrors from the start.". His experience is that "thoughts emerge from pure consciousness and are then re-absorbed in it, just as waves from the ocean and dissolve into it again." Once we understand this, we would have taken a great leap forward toward inner peace. From the moment we realize that, then the force of that anger will have lost its power to disturb us. He asks us during such moments when such angry thought first arises, to try to see where it came from and when it disappears, ask ourselves where it went. He says, "In that instant when past thoughts have fallen silent and future ones have yet to emerge, you can perceive a pure and luminous consciousness unadulterated by your conceptual constructs.
Ricard does not say that it is easy to attain such a state of pure consciousness. But he says it is possible. He cites an example, his friend Francisco Varela, a cognitive scientists who researches on consciousness and who died of cancer and who before his death told Ricard that he had managed to spend all his time in that kind of pure consciousness. According to Varela, the physical pain seemed "very distant to him" and was "no hindrance to his inner peace" and he only needed weak doses of painkillers and his wife, Amy, told Ricard that Varela maintained that "contemplative serenity" until his very last breath.
Ricard gives us an exercise to stay in awareness
Look at what is behind the curtain of discursive thoughts. Try to find a waking presence there, free of mental fabrications, transparent, luminous, untroubled by thoughts of the past, the present, or the future. Try to rest in the present moment, free of concepts. Watch the nature of the gap between thoughts, which is free from mental constructs. Gradually extend the interval between the disappearance of one thought and the emergence of the next. Remain in a state of simplicity that is free of mental constructs, yet perfectly aware,; beyond effort, yet alert and mindful." According to Ricard, we we thus observe the wellspring of thoughts, it is possible to break their endless proliferation.
(To be cont'd):
.
What happens when we follow Ricard's advice and do the relevant meditations.? He says this: "The first things we notice are the currents of thought that are continuously flowing without our even being aware of them." He thinks that our countless thoughts are born of our "sensations, our memories and our imaginations" which constantly stream through our mind. He tell us that underlying them and behind them, there is something else. "There is a quality of mind that is always present no matter what kind of thoughts we entertain", something he calls "pure consciousness." Pure consciousness is "what remains in the rare moment when the mind is at rest, almost motionless, even as it retains its ability to know.". He says, "That faculty, that simple open presence" is called "pure consciousness" because "it exists even in the absence of mental constructs." What is it like? It has neither any particular localization, nor color nor shape and has no intrinsic features of their own. He says, "In pure consciousness, we experience the mind as empty of inherent existence." He realizes that this notion of emptiness is very foreign to Western psychology and I might add, even to the busy mind of the contemporary city man.
Ricard explains. When a powerful emotion or thought arises e.g anger arises, "we are very easily overwhelmed by this thought, which multiplies into numerous new thoughts that disturb and blind us and prompt us to utter words and commit acts, sometimes violent ones, that can make others suffer and soon become a source of regret" But instead of unleashing our anger, we can examine the angry thought itself and come to see that it has been nothing but "smoke and mirrors from the start.". His experience is that "thoughts emerge from pure consciousness and are then re-absorbed in it, just as waves from the ocean and dissolve into it again." Once we understand this, we would have taken a great leap forward toward inner peace. From the moment we realize that, then the force of that anger will have lost its power to disturb us. He asks us during such moments when such angry thought first arises, to try to see where it came from and when it disappears, ask ourselves where it went. He says, "In that instant when past thoughts have fallen silent and future ones have yet to emerge, you can perceive a pure and luminous consciousness unadulterated by your conceptual constructs.
Ricard does not say that it is easy to attain such a state of pure consciousness. But he says it is possible. He cites an example, his friend Francisco Varela, a cognitive scientists who researches on consciousness and who died of cancer and who before his death told Ricard that he had managed to spend all his time in that kind of pure consciousness. According to Varela, the physical pain seemed "very distant to him" and was "no hindrance to his inner peace" and he only needed weak doses of painkillers and his wife, Amy, told Ricard that Varela maintained that "contemplative serenity" until his very last breath.
Ricard gives us an exercise to stay in awareness
Look at what is behind the curtain of discursive thoughts. Try to find a waking presence there, free of mental fabrications, transparent, luminous, untroubled by thoughts of the past, the present, or the future. Try to rest in the present moment, free of concepts. Watch the nature of the gap between thoughts, which is free from mental constructs. Gradually extend the interval between the disappearance of one thought and the emergence of the next. Remain in a state of simplicity that is free of mental constructs, yet perfectly aware,; beyond effort, yet alert and mindful." According to Ricard, we we thus observe the wellspring of thoughts, it is possible to break their endless proliferation.
(To be cont'd):
.
2012年3月22日 星期四
From Soul, to Self, to Annihilation of Self.16
Cont'd
Now that we understand a little what true freedom and liberation means, we need to understand something else: the ultimate source of all our unhappiness: our own thoughts. Ricard quotes Alain "When we are unhappy, we can't help thinking that certain images are armed with claws and stingers to torture us with".We sometimes get the feeling that our life is falling apart e.g. when our beloved (our parents, spouse, lover, children) or a close friend or a long time colleague dies, or is in a serious illness, or during a break up with our mate, in a financial or job crisis etc. There seems to be no way out at all. As Ricard says, sadness settles like a pall over the mind...Unable to imagine an end to our pain, we withdraw into ourselves and dread every coming moment." When we lack adequate inner resources to enable us to deal with suhka e.g. the joy of being alive, the conviction that we still got the ability to flourish despite all difficulties, an understanding of the ephemeral nature of all things, our happiness will be afflicted by distress.
According to Ricard, "great external upheavals" may not be what cause most distress to us. Thus depression and suicide rates drop dramatically during times of war and natural disasters often bring out the best in man: courage, solidarity, will to survive, altruism and mutual assistance. What tie knots in our breast that obstinately refuse to be unraveled and sorrow or sadness that refuse be consoled, that oppress us and cause us untold misery are often just "thoughts". Ricard says that "thoughts can be our best friends" but they can become our worst enemies when they make us feel that the entire world is against us, when every perception, every encounter and the very existence of the world become sources of torment. "It is our thoughts themselves that rise up as enemies. They stampede through our mind in droves, each one creating its own little drama of ever-increasing confusion. Nothing is right outside because nothing is right inside." Ricard says that the "knots are not tied in our chest by our unfaithful husband, our object of desire, our dishonest colleague, or our unjust accuser, but by our own mind. It is the result of mental constructs that, as they accumulate and solidify, give the illusion of being external and real." Its ultimate source is our "self", our "ego" or in traditional parlance, our "soul". "What provides the raw material for that knot and allows it to form within us is an exacerbated sense of self-importance" : " anything that does not respond to the self's demands becomes a disturbance, a threat or an insult." According to Andew Solomon, "In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all" (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression 2001). According to a great Buddhist master Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche: "these trains of thought and states of mind are constantly changing, like the shapes of clouds in the wind, but we attach great importance to them. An old man watching children at play knows very well that their games are of little consequence. He feels neither elated nor upset at what happens in their game, while the children take it all very seriously. We are just exactly them." (The Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones 1993)
Unless we acknowledge and understand the true causes of human misery, of our dukkha (suffering) and of our sukha (happiness), "our well-being is at the mercy of the storm." We can "respond to heartbreaks by trying to forget them distracting ourselves, moving away, going on a trip and so on, but these are merely plaster casts on a wooden leg." Ricard quotes Nicolas Boileau: "In vain he flees his troubles on a horse--They shake the saddle and see him on his course" (Epitre V à Guilleragues 1995)
Knowing now that the main cause of our suffering is our natural mental
habit and tendencies to make distinctions in a dualistic fashion, we
must now learn how to avoid suffering and increase the chances of our
happiness. Ricard asks, "How can we prevent the perpetual re-ermergence
of disturbing thoughts?" He says, "If we resign ourselves to being the
perpetual victims of our thoughts, we are like dogs who run after every
stick thrown for them. Closely identifying with every thought, we follow
it and reinforce it with boundless emotional entanglements" Obviously
we do not want to be in that kind of state. Is there anything we can do?
Most certainly yes. And Ricard teaches us how.
And he asks our questions for us: how do we go about making peace with our emotions? He starts at
the beginning. He advises us "first, we have to focus our mind on the raw
power of inner suffering.Instead of avoiding it or burying it away in some dark corner of our
mind, we should make it the object of our meditation, without ruminating
over the events that caused the pain or reviewing every freeze-frame
from the movie of our life.When a painful emotion strikes us, the most
urgent thing is to look at it head-on and to identify he immediate
thoughts that triggered and are fanning it. Then by fixing our inner
gaze on the emotion itself, we can gradually dissolve it like snow in
sunshine". According to his experience, once the strength of the emotion has been sapped, the causes that trigger it will seem less tragic and we will have won ourselves the chance to break free from the vicious circle of negative thoughts."
(to be cont'd)
Now that we understand a little what true freedom and liberation means, we need to understand something else: the ultimate source of all our unhappiness: our own thoughts. Ricard quotes Alain "When we are unhappy, we can't help thinking that certain images are armed with claws and stingers to torture us with".We sometimes get the feeling that our life is falling apart e.g. when our beloved (our parents, spouse, lover, children) or a close friend or a long time colleague dies, or is in a serious illness, or during a break up with our mate, in a financial or job crisis etc. There seems to be no way out at all. As Ricard says, sadness settles like a pall over the mind...Unable to imagine an end to our pain, we withdraw into ourselves and dread every coming moment." When we lack adequate inner resources to enable us to deal with suhka e.g. the joy of being alive, the conviction that we still got the ability to flourish despite all difficulties, an understanding of the ephemeral nature of all things, our happiness will be afflicted by distress.
According to Ricard, "great external upheavals" may not be what cause most distress to us. Thus depression and suicide rates drop dramatically during times of war and natural disasters often bring out the best in man: courage, solidarity, will to survive, altruism and mutual assistance. What tie knots in our breast that obstinately refuse to be unraveled and sorrow or sadness that refuse be consoled, that oppress us and cause us untold misery are often just "thoughts". Ricard says that "thoughts can be our best friends" but they can become our worst enemies when they make us feel that the entire world is against us, when every perception, every encounter and the very existence of the world become sources of torment. "It is our thoughts themselves that rise up as enemies. They stampede through our mind in droves, each one creating its own little drama of ever-increasing confusion. Nothing is right outside because nothing is right inside." Ricard says that the "knots are not tied in our chest by our unfaithful husband, our object of desire, our dishonest colleague, or our unjust accuser, but by our own mind. It is the result of mental constructs that, as they accumulate and solidify, give the illusion of being external and real." Its ultimate source is our "self", our "ego" or in traditional parlance, our "soul". "What provides the raw material for that knot and allows it to form within us is an exacerbated sense of self-importance" : " anything that does not respond to the self's demands becomes a disturbance, a threat or an insult." According to Andew Solomon, "In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all" (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression 2001). According to a great Buddhist master Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche: "these trains of thought and states of mind are constantly changing, like the shapes of clouds in the wind, but we attach great importance to them. An old man watching children at play knows very well that their games are of little consequence. He feels neither elated nor upset at what happens in their game, while the children take it all very seriously. We are just exactly them." (The Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones 1993)
Unless we acknowledge and understand the true causes of human misery, of our dukkha (suffering) and of our sukha (happiness), "our well-being is at the mercy of the storm." We can "respond to heartbreaks by trying to forget them distracting ourselves, moving away, going on a trip and so on, but these are merely plaster casts on a wooden leg." Ricard quotes Nicolas Boileau: "In vain he flees his troubles on a horse--They shake the saddle and see him on his course" (Epitre V à Guilleragues 1995)
Knowing now that the main cause of our suffering is our natural mental
habit and tendencies to make distinctions in a dualistic fashion, we
must now learn how to avoid suffering and increase the chances of our
happiness. Ricard asks, "How can we prevent the perpetual re-ermergence
of disturbing thoughts?" He says, "If we resign ourselves to being the
perpetual victims of our thoughts, we are like dogs who run after every
stick thrown for them. Closely identifying with every thought, we follow
it and reinforce it with boundless emotional entanglements" Obviously
we do not want to be in that kind of state. Is there anything we can do?
Most certainly yes. And Ricard teaches us how.
And he asks our questions for us: how do we go about making peace with our emotions? He starts at
the beginning. He advises us "first, we have to focus our mind on the raw
power of inner suffering.Instead of avoiding it or burying it away in some dark corner of our
mind, we should make it the object of our meditation, without ruminating
over the events that caused the pain or reviewing every freeze-frame
from the movie of our life.When a painful emotion strikes us, the most
urgent thing is to look at it head-on and to identify he immediate
thoughts that triggered and are fanning it. Then by fixing our inner
gaze on the emotion itself, we can gradually dissolve it like snow in
sunshine". According to his experience, once the strength of the emotion has been sapped, the causes that trigger it will seem less tragic and we will have won ourselves the chance to break free from the vicious circle of negative thoughts."
(to be cont'd)
2012年3月19日 星期一
From Soul, to Self, to Annihilation of Self.15
(Cont'd)
In this blog series, I have ranged through the storehouses of various religious traditions to find out what each tradition understands by the concept of what many have found convenient to describe by the everyday word human "sou/spirit", often used by us very loosely to refer to what is conceived of as the reality upon which we base our notions of man's moral accountability, about its "true" nature. Why is it important to find that out? Why should we be concerned at all with whether or not we got a "soul" and if we have one, what its nature may be? To me, such questions would be of purely academic interest only if we were to consider them in isolation from other far more important questions: how to live properly and how to live happily here on earth and the nature of "happiness"..
With the advance of our understanding of the functioning the physical universe, our brain, our memory, our emotions, the functioning of our physiology, the nature of community and morality based on the methods of the empirical and social sciences, it is now far more usual to think of the way we act as based upon our brain, our rational, the emotional processes rather than as based on the activities of our "soul", an outdated concept favored still only by various forms of theologies of reward and punishment and based upon whether and if so, how the human "soul" may be treated by a "supernatural entity" called "God" or gods. According to the Abrahamic faith, the universe is created by a monotheistic God who created inter alia, the human "soul" and who determines the "meaning" or "purpose" of our life here on earth. Our "soul" is supposed to be have an existence independent of that of our body and may continue to exist after our physical death and is in that sense "immortal". Why do we need an immortal 'soul"? Unless we posit such a "soul", what believers think of as the final "day of judgment" would make no sense. Only when we have such a "soul" can it be made to "enjoy" eternal "happiness" of "heaven" and if we have led our lives on earth badly, to "suffer" eternal punishment in "hell". Why do we need to invent the concept of "heaven" and "hell"? To me, its only purpose is to serve as an inducement to us to do good and as a threat to make us avoid doing evil, through the twin psychological mechanisms of "hope" and "fear", by analogy to the way we induce and force such animals as our horse or donkey or ass, which we use as our "beasts of burden" to do physically exhausting and mentally boring work for us: the method of the "carrot" and the 'stick", a trusted and well tested method which human experience has found quite effective.
Can we be induced to do good and avoid doing evil without positing the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and an all perfect God? Is the mysterious, arbitrary and jealous God of the Abrahamic faith absolutely necessary for the practices of human morality? I would submit that we can. The Buddhists do not find the existence of such a God necessary. They rely merely on the use of our reason and on insightful observations of what makes us happy and what makes us miserable. They have through deep meditation and vigilant observation of the functioning of the human mind, the human consciousness and the coming and going of human emotions developed some fairly sophisticated theories of how we may attain happiness in a rather more stable and permanent form.
I return now to the text of Matthieu Ricard I mentioned at the start of this series, "Happiness". Many think that to be "free" is to be master of oneself, involving freedom of action, movement and opinion, the chance to achieve such goals as they have set themselves or "doing anything" that they want. Ricard thinks that although spontaneity is a precious quality, anarchic freedom to fulfill our immediate desires is unlikely to bring happiness. "If we let the hounds of craving (貪) , jealousy (嫉), arrogance (妄) and resentment (嗔) run amok in our mind, they will soon take over." To him, "inner freedom is a vast, clear, and serene space that dispels pain and nourishes peace" and inner freedom is above all, "freedom from the dictatorship of 'me' and 'mine' of the ego that clashes whatever it dislikes and seeks desperately to appropriate whatever it covets". and being free comes down to "breaking down the bond of afflictions that dominate and cloud the mind" . It means, he says, "taking life into one's own hand",instead of abandoning it to tendencies created by habit and mental confusion. It is a way of "becoming fed up with being manipulated like a puppet by selfishness, the scramble for power and possessions, and the never-ending quest for pleasure." Such an approach is merely pragmatic. We must never treat ourselves too harshly. "Understanding that we are neither perfect nor completely happy is not a weakness" but a ":very healthy acknowledgment that has nothing to do with self-pity, pessimism or a lack of self-confidence." For many, the idea of renunciation and non-attachment implies "a dank dungeon of asceticism and discipline" and a "depressing privation of life's pleasures" but to Ricard, "true renunciation is more like a bird soaring into the sky when its cage is opened": suddenly, "the endless concerns that had oppressed the mind are gone, allowing the free expression" of our inner potentials. Renunciation, he rightly points out, is not about "depriving ourselves of that which brings us joy and happiness" . "It is about abandoning what causes us inexhaustible and relentless distress. It is about having the courage to rid ourselves of dependency on the root causes of suffering" It comes down to asking ourselves with certain aspect of our lives: "Is this going to make me happier?" To him, genuine happiness, as opposed to contrived euphoria, endures through life's ups and downs. We need to learn to free ourselves of the burden of the past as well as the burden of future fear. We need to ask ourselves: "What is the point of worrying about things that no longer exist and things that do not yet exist?" Inner freedom will allow us to "savor the lucid simplicity of the present moment", free from the intrusive memories of past pains, hatreds, thoughts of revenge and emancipated from fear of pointless fretting about future. Such clearheadedness allows us the joy to accept things peacefully and to use all life's circumstances, favorable and adverse, as catalysts for personal change and to avoid being arrogant when they are favorable and depressed when they are not.
One of the ways Ricard taught is also taught by Henry David Thoreau, who said, "our life is frittered away by detail...Simplify, simplify". Renunciation involves "simplifying our acts, our speech and our thoughts to rid ourselves of the superfluous." A lot of social conversation consists of torrent of words that are not only useless, but aggravate covetousness, hostility and vanity. "Appropriate speech avoids self-serving lies, cruel words and gossips whose only effect is to distract us and sow discord." Simplicity is always "adapted to circumstances, gentle or firm as required, and the product of an altruistic and controlled mind." But we must not confuse a simple mind with being simple-minded. "Like clear water that lets us see all the way to the lake bottom, simplicity reveals the nature of mind behind the veil of restless thought." As André Compte-Sponville, a French philosopher says, "The simple person lives the way he breathes, with no more effort or glory, with no more affectation and without shame...Simplicity is freedom, buoyancy, transparency. As simple as the air, as free as the air,...The simple person does not take himself too seriously, or too tragically. He goes on his merry way, his heart light, his soul at peace, without goal, without nostalgia, without impatience. The world is his kingdom, and suffices him. The present is his eternity, and delights him. He has nothing to prove, since he has no appearances to keep up, and nothing to seek, since everything is before him. What is more simple than simplicity? What lighter?It is the virtue of wise men and the wisdom of saints."
To Ricard, being free means being able to follow the path of inner transformation, to overcome not only external adversity, but also our innermost enemies: laziness, lack of focus and the habit that constantly distracts us from or defers spiritual practice. Unlike sensual pleasures which appear at first attractive but will soon turn into their opposites, the path of spiritual practice may first appear arduous, but with time, will become easier and easier and gradually will "impart a sense of fulfillment that nothing can replace. Sociological researches have found that happiness rises with social involvement and participation in volunteer organizations, the practice of sports or music, membership in leisure clubs and is closely tied to the maintenance and quality of private relationships. And happiness tends to be more pronounced amongst highly energetic people in good physical condition and leisure activities enhance satisfaction especially amongst those who do not work e.g.the retired, those of independent means, in part because people are more in voluntary control of what they do."
Studies have also shown that in America, people watch an average of 3.5 hours a day i.e. one year in every 7! But those who watch a lot are in general less happy! Research has also shown that beyond a relatively low threshold of wealth, the level of satisfaction remains unchanged even as income continues to rise e.g. in America, real income has doubled since 1949 but the number of people who declared themselves "very happy" has dropped slightly! Richard Layard of London School of Economics summarises the situation: "We have more food, more clothes, more cars, bigger houses, more central heating, more foreign holidays, a shorter working week, nice work and above all, better health. Yet we are not happier." Social scientists have discovered that one the mains sources of people's discontent comes from comparing themselves with others in their family, at their work places and among their acquaintances
(To be Cont'd)
In this blog series, I have ranged through the storehouses of various religious traditions to find out what each tradition understands by the concept of what many have found convenient to describe by the everyday word human "sou/spirit", often used by us very loosely to refer to what is conceived of as the reality upon which we base our notions of man's moral accountability, about its "true" nature. Why is it important to find that out? Why should we be concerned at all with whether or not we got a "soul" and if we have one, what its nature may be? To me, such questions would be of purely academic interest only if we were to consider them in isolation from other far more important questions: how to live properly and how to live happily here on earth and the nature of "happiness"..
With the advance of our understanding of the functioning the physical universe, our brain, our memory, our emotions, the functioning of our physiology, the nature of community and morality based on the methods of the empirical and social sciences, it is now far more usual to think of the way we act as based upon our brain, our rational, the emotional processes rather than as based on the activities of our "soul", an outdated concept favored still only by various forms of theologies of reward and punishment and based upon whether and if so, how the human "soul" may be treated by a "supernatural entity" called "God" or gods. According to the Abrahamic faith, the universe is created by a monotheistic God who created inter alia, the human "soul" and who determines the "meaning" or "purpose" of our life here on earth. Our "soul" is supposed to be have an existence independent of that of our body and may continue to exist after our physical death and is in that sense "immortal". Why do we need an immortal 'soul"? Unless we posit such a "soul", what believers think of as the final "day of judgment" would make no sense. Only when we have such a "soul" can it be made to "enjoy" eternal "happiness" of "heaven" and if we have led our lives on earth badly, to "suffer" eternal punishment in "hell". Why do we need to invent the concept of "heaven" and "hell"? To me, its only purpose is to serve as an inducement to us to do good and as a threat to make us avoid doing evil, through the twin psychological mechanisms of "hope" and "fear", by analogy to the way we induce and force such animals as our horse or donkey or ass, which we use as our "beasts of burden" to do physically exhausting and mentally boring work for us: the method of the "carrot" and the 'stick", a trusted and well tested method which human experience has found quite effective.
Can we be induced to do good and avoid doing evil without positing the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and an all perfect God? Is the mysterious, arbitrary and jealous God of the Abrahamic faith absolutely necessary for the practices of human morality? I would submit that we can. The Buddhists do not find the existence of such a God necessary. They rely merely on the use of our reason and on insightful observations of what makes us happy and what makes us miserable. They have through deep meditation and vigilant observation of the functioning of the human mind, the human consciousness and the coming and going of human emotions developed some fairly sophisticated theories of how we may attain happiness in a rather more stable and permanent form.
I return now to the text of Matthieu Ricard I mentioned at the start of this series, "Happiness". Many think that to be "free" is to be master of oneself, involving freedom of action, movement and opinion, the chance to achieve such goals as they have set themselves or "doing anything" that they want. Ricard thinks that although spontaneity is a precious quality, anarchic freedom to fulfill our immediate desires is unlikely to bring happiness. "If we let the hounds of craving (貪) , jealousy (嫉), arrogance (妄) and resentment (嗔) run amok in our mind, they will soon take over." To him, "inner freedom is a vast, clear, and serene space that dispels pain and nourishes peace" and inner freedom is above all, "freedom from the dictatorship of 'me' and 'mine' of the ego that clashes whatever it dislikes and seeks desperately to appropriate whatever it covets". and being free comes down to "breaking down the bond of afflictions that dominate and cloud the mind" . It means, he says, "taking life into one's own hand",instead of abandoning it to tendencies created by habit and mental confusion. It is a way of "becoming fed up with being manipulated like a puppet by selfishness, the scramble for power and possessions, and the never-ending quest for pleasure." Such an approach is merely pragmatic. We must never treat ourselves too harshly. "Understanding that we are neither perfect nor completely happy is not a weakness" but a ":very healthy acknowledgment that has nothing to do with self-pity, pessimism or a lack of self-confidence." For many, the idea of renunciation and non-attachment implies "a dank dungeon of asceticism and discipline" and a "depressing privation of life's pleasures" but to Ricard, "true renunciation is more like a bird soaring into the sky when its cage is opened": suddenly, "the endless concerns that had oppressed the mind are gone, allowing the free expression" of our inner potentials. Renunciation, he rightly points out, is not about "depriving ourselves of that which brings us joy and happiness" . "It is about abandoning what causes us inexhaustible and relentless distress. It is about having the courage to rid ourselves of dependency on the root causes of suffering" It comes down to asking ourselves with certain aspect of our lives: "Is this going to make me happier?" To him, genuine happiness, as opposed to contrived euphoria, endures through life's ups and downs. We need to learn to free ourselves of the burden of the past as well as the burden of future fear. We need to ask ourselves: "What is the point of worrying about things that no longer exist and things that do not yet exist?" Inner freedom will allow us to "savor the lucid simplicity of the present moment", free from the intrusive memories of past pains, hatreds, thoughts of revenge and emancipated from fear of pointless fretting about future. Such clearheadedness allows us the joy to accept things peacefully and to use all life's circumstances, favorable and adverse, as catalysts for personal change and to avoid being arrogant when they are favorable and depressed when they are not.
One of the ways Ricard taught is also taught by Henry David Thoreau, who said, "our life is frittered away by detail...Simplify, simplify". Renunciation involves "simplifying our acts, our speech and our thoughts to rid ourselves of the superfluous." A lot of social conversation consists of torrent of words that are not only useless, but aggravate covetousness, hostility and vanity. "Appropriate speech avoids self-serving lies, cruel words and gossips whose only effect is to distract us and sow discord." Simplicity is always "adapted to circumstances, gentle or firm as required, and the product of an altruistic and controlled mind." But we must not confuse a simple mind with being simple-minded. "Like clear water that lets us see all the way to the lake bottom, simplicity reveals the nature of mind behind the veil of restless thought." As André Compte-Sponville, a French philosopher says, "The simple person lives the way he breathes, with no more effort or glory, with no more affectation and without shame...Simplicity is freedom, buoyancy, transparency. As simple as the air, as free as the air,...The simple person does not take himself too seriously, or too tragically. He goes on his merry way, his heart light, his soul at peace, without goal, without nostalgia, without impatience. The world is his kingdom, and suffices him. The present is his eternity, and delights him. He has nothing to prove, since he has no appearances to keep up, and nothing to seek, since everything is before him. What is more simple than simplicity? What lighter?It is the virtue of wise men and the wisdom of saints."
To Ricard, being free means being able to follow the path of inner transformation, to overcome not only external adversity, but also our innermost enemies: laziness, lack of focus and the habit that constantly distracts us from or defers spiritual practice. Unlike sensual pleasures which appear at first attractive but will soon turn into their opposites, the path of spiritual practice may first appear arduous, but with time, will become easier and easier and gradually will "impart a sense of fulfillment that nothing can replace. Sociological researches have found that happiness rises with social involvement and participation in volunteer organizations, the practice of sports or music, membership in leisure clubs and is closely tied to the maintenance and quality of private relationships. And happiness tends to be more pronounced amongst highly energetic people in good physical condition and leisure activities enhance satisfaction especially amongst those who do not work e.g.the retired, those of independent means, in part because people are more in voluntary control of what they do."
Studies have also shown that in America, people watch an average of 3.5 hours a day i.e. one year in every 7! But those who watch a lot are in general less happy! Research has also shown that beyond a relatively low threshold of wealth, the level of satisfaction remains unchanged even as income continues to rise e.g. in America, real income has doubled since 1949 but the number of people who declared themselves "very happy" has dropped slightly! Richard Layard of London School of Economics summarises the situation: "We have more food, more clothes, more cars, bigger houses, more central heating, more foreign holidays, a shorter working week, nice work and above all, better health. Yet we are not happier." Social scientists have discovered that one the mains sources of people's discontent comes from comparing themselves with others in their family, at their work places and among their acquaintances
(To be Cont'd)
2012年3月16日 星期五
From Soul to Self to Annihilation of Self.14
Cont'd
4. The Buddhist View of the "Soul"
When we talk about the Buddhist view on the human "soul", we need to be very careful because the beliefs of what has been called original Buddhism (原始佛教)(O-Buddhism) and those of popular Buddhism (民間佛教) ("P-Buddhism") may be quite different.
According to O-Buddhism, what is important is how we live whilst still on earth and it is not important whether there "really" exist what are popularly believed to be the human "body" and the so-called human "soul" and if so, how they may be related. The split between "body" and "soul" is a dualistic view which O-Buddhism does not accept. To the O-Buddhist, in the final analysis, both the so-called "body" and the so-called "soul" are "illusory" in the sense that neither of them is "stable" or "permanent" as both of them, in so far as they exist, are subject to constant changes. The O-Buddhist beliefs in samsara (輪迴), which was "adopted" by the Buddha from the then current Hindu religious beliefs and later modified by him for strategic reasons to encourage his followers to lead what he regarded as a suffering-free life, a strategy and a "belief" "adopted" by him merely as a "convenient" or "expedient" way ("方便法") of leading them towards what he regarded as the true way or path through the then current Hindu concept of good or bad "karma" or "karmic energy"( 業). For the sake of making it sound more comprehensible to the ordinary people, who are either unable to or do not bother to understand the fairly abstract principles of O-Buddhism, the "doctrine" of the samsara posits the existence of so-called "good" and "evil", the so-called "heaven"s and "hells", and so-called "karma" and to conform to "popular" beliefs about the existence of so-called "soul/spirit/ghosts", the Buddha worked on the existing beliefs but made suitable modifications and elaborations on them so that they would become more consistent with what he advocated.
When Buddhism entered China, probably for the same reasons, many Chinese monks infused into Chinese Buddhism popular Chinese beliefs in the existence of "soul" (魂) and "soul-manifestation" (魄) and the need of ancestral worship (拜祖) as a convenient method of inducting them into true Buddhist beliefs. In doing so, they were merely following in the footsteps of the Buddha who always tailored his teachings according to the ability of the relevant disciples and followers to comprehend what he was teaching (因才施教) and fitted his teaching to the relevant time and circumstances (因時濟宜).
In O-Buddhism, the way to "transcend" the mundane pleasures, joys, pains, suffering and miseries of this world and hence reach "nirvana/nibbana", a state of relatively permanent and stable "peace" and "calm" is to cease to make any dualistic distinction between conventional dualistic pairs, between life on earth and the so-called "next life" in the otherwise endless so-called cycle or "reincarnation" "as if" the so-called "spirit/soul" were the "owner" of the relevant "bodies" the way we "own" or "change" our houses or clothes in which the relevant "spirit/soul" occupies for the time being. Some of the Chinese monks e.g Master Wai Yuan (慧遠 (CE 334～416）of Lushan (廬山) in the Eastern Chun (東晉) Dynasty adapted the then Buddhist doctrine with the traditional Chinese concepts of the 5 elements (五行) by comparing the 'soul/spirit" which he thought would never cease to exist to "fire"(火) and the impermanent "body" to "tree/wood" (木) such that during samsara, a "soul/spirit" will burn in and thus give life to one "body" after another in a succession "reincarnations" or trans-migration of the "soul/spirit" until it attains nirvana/nibbana. Thus belief in the existence of some kind of "soul" is only confined to the followers of P-Buddhism. In fact, he caused a controversial storm of debates on whether the spirit is mortal or immortal (神滅不滅論爭).
When the great Buddha was asked whether man has a "soul/spirit" and "heaven/hell", he refused to make a commitment one way or another. (無記). His attitude can be compared to that of Confucius who, when asked about what would happen to man after death, replied " if we don't know about life, how can we be expected to know about death" (未知生, 焉知死) and advised his disciples to respect the "ghosts/spirits" but distance themselves from them. (敬鬼神而遠之).
Thus according to O-Buddhism, if a Buddhist firmly believes in the permanence of an indestructible "soul/spirit", he cannot be considered a right thinking Buddhist because according to the Buddhist doctrine of "Eight right paths" (八正道), an important right path is "right belief" (正信). To the right-thinking and right-believing Buddhist, there is only what they call "consciousness/awareness" (識) i.e. the activity of the "mind" and the purpose and aim of Buddhist practice is to transform troubled consciousness into pure wisdom (轉煩悔惱識成清淨智). When a Buddhist attains this, then he can be liberated from his troubles, his worries, his fears, his anger, his greed, his desires, his longings, his hopes, his despair, his pains, his suffering, his emotional ups and downs and live in a way which "transcends" even the boundaries between life and death.
(To be cont'd)
4. The Buddhist View of the "Soul"
When we talk about the Buddhist view on the human "soul", we need to be very careful because the beliefs of what has been called original Buddhism (原始佛教)(O-Buddhism) and those of popular Buddhism (民間佛教) ("P-Buddhism") may be quite different.
According to O-Buddhism, what is important is how we live whilst still on earth and it is not important whether there "really" exist what are popularly believed to be the human "body" and the so-called human "soul" and if so, how they may be related. The split between "body" and "soul" is a dualistic view which O-Buddhism does not accept. To the O-Buddhist, in the final analysis, both the so-called "body" and the so-called "soul" are "illusory" in the sense that neither of them is "stable" or "permanent" as both of them, in so far as they exist, are subject to constant changes. The O-Buddhist beliefs in samsara (輪迴), which was "adopted" by the Buddha from the then current Hindu religious beliefs and later modified by him for strategic reasons to encourage his followers to lead what he regarded as a suffering-free life, a strategy and a "belief" "adopted" by him merely as a "convenient" or "expedient" way ("方便法") of leading them towards what he regarded as the true way or path through the then current Hindu concept of good or bad "karma" or "karmic energy"( 業). For the sake of making it sound more comprehensible to the ordinary people, who are either unable to or do not bother to understand the fairly abstract principles of O-Buddhism, the "doctrine" of the samsara posits the existence of so-called "good" and "evil", the so-called "heaven"s and "hells", and so-called "karma" and to conform to "popular" beliefs about the existence of so-called "soul/spirit/ghosts", the Buddha worked on the existing beliefs but made suitable modifications and elaborations on them so that they would become more consistent with what he advocated.
When Buddhism entered China, probably for the same reasons, many Chinese monks infused into Chinese Buddhism popular Chinese beliefs in the existence of "soul" (魂) and "soul-manifestation" (魄) and the need of ancestral worship (拜祖) as a convenient method of inducting them into true Buddhist beliefs. In doing so, they were merely following in the footsteps of the Buddha who always tailored his teachings according to the ability of the relevant disciples and followers to comprehend what he was teaching (因才施教) and fitted his teaching to the relevant time and circumstances (因時濟宜).
In O-Buddhism, the way to "transcend" the mundane pleasures, joys, pains, suffering and miseries of this world and hence reach "nirvana/nibbana", a state of relatively permanent and stable "peace" and "calm" is to cease to make any dualistic distinction between conventional dualistic pairs, between life on earth and the so-called "next life" in the otherwise endless so-called cycle or "reincarnation" "as if" the so-called "spirit/soul" were the "owner" of the relevant "bodies" the way we "own" or "change" our houses or clothes in which the relevant "spirit/soul" occupies for the time being. Some of the Chinese monks e.g Master Wai Yuan (慧遠 (CE 334～416）of Lushan (廬山) in the Eastern Chun (東晉) Dynasty adapted the then Buddhist doctrine with the traditional Chinese concepts of the 5 elements (五行) by comparing the 'soul/spirit" which he thought would never cease to exist to "fire"(火) and the impermanent "body" to "tree/wood" (木) such that during samsara, a "soul/spirit" will burn in and thus give life to one "body" after another in a succession "reincarnations" or trans-migration of the "soul/spirit" until it attains nirvana/nibbana. Thus belief in the existence of some kind of "soul" is only confined to the followers of P-Buddhism. In fact, he caused a controversial storm of debates on whether the spirit is mortal or immortal (神滅不滅論爭).
When the great Buddha was asked whether man has a "soul/spirit" and "heaven/hell", he refused to make a commitment one way or another. (無記). His attitude can be compared to that of Confucius who, when asked about what would happen to man after death, replied " if we don't know about life, how can we be expected to know about death" (未知生, 焉知死) and advised his disciples to respect the "ghosts/spirits" but distance themselves from them. (敬鬼神而遠之).
Thus according to O-Buddhism, if a Buddhist firmly believes in the permanence of an indestructible "soul/spirit", he cannot be considered a right thinking Buddhist because according to the Buddhist doctrine of "Eight right paths" (八正道), an important right path is "right belief" (正信). To the right-thinking and right-believing Buddhist, there is only what they call "consciousness/awareness" (識) i.e. the activity of the "mind" and the purpose and aim of Buddhist practice is to transform troubled consciousness into pure wisdom (轉煩悔惱識成清淨智). When a Buddhist attains this, then he can be liberated from his troubles, his worries, his fears, his anger, his greed, his desires, his longings, his hopes, his despair, his pains, his suffering, his emotional ups and downs and live in a way which "transcends" even the boundaries between life and death.
(To be cont'd)
2012年3月15日 星期四
From Soul to Self to Annihilation of Self.13
Cont'd
3 The Chinese Taoist View of the "Soul"
According to Chinese tradition, there are two related concepts concerning the human spirit: what may be called his "soul" (魂) and his "soul manifestations" (魄). Per the explanation of Chan's Book of Li (陳氏禮記), the soul is the spirit of yang or sun or the positive (陽之靈) and the highest expression of Chi (氣之英). "Chi" (氣) according to the Taoist is the principle of life because life is conceived of as the result of the concentration or the accumulation of Chi to a point (生, 氣之聚) and "soul manifestation" (魄) is the spirit of the Yin or the negative (陰之靈) and the essence of the body (體之精). According to Sung scholar Wang Min Chai (黃勉齋), the "soul" is concerned with actively guiding and operating, the "soul manifestation" is concerned with passively receiving (魂主經營, 魄玄受納). Therefore, each human being only has one "soul" and its expression or manifestation in the body.
But according to a Northern Sung (北宋) Taoist text "Yun Ka Chi Chen"( 雲笈七籤 ) Vol. 54 edited by Chang Chun Fang (張君房) a book consisting of a total of 122 volumes of all important Taoist texts written prior to 1017 in about 1.7 million words and forming a part of the Taoist Collection (道藏), a man has 3 "souls" and 7 "soul manifestations" (三魂七魄). The three "souls" are called respectively "the light of the embryo" (胎光), supposed to be the chi of the primordial yang or the sun (太清陽和之氣) "the crisp spirit" (爽靈), supposed to be the variation of the chi of the yin or the dark (陰氣之變) and "essence of the dark" (幽精), supposed to be the leftovers or mixes of various types of chi of the yin or the dark (陰氣之雜). . The seven "soul manifestations" are respective called 1. dog corpse (屍狗) 2. lurking arrow (伏矢) 3. yin of the bird (雀陰) 4. swallowed thief (吞賊) 5. negative toxin (非毒) 6. eliminating dirt (除穢) 7. stinking lungs (臭肺) and are considered to the spirit of dirt or pollution in the human body. According to Taoist Religious theory, it is believed that after a person dies, then he would lose of these 7 "soul manifestation" each week so that after 49 days or 7 weeks, all his "soul manifestations" will be gone or completely dissipated. When he dies, one of man's soul will stay in hell (hall of the earth) ( 地府) , one of his souls will stay at the tomb (墓地) or grave and one will stay at the ancestral tablet. (祖先牌位). Thus whilst the "soul" will exist forever, the "soul manifestation(s)" is/are tied to the human body and will come and go with it.
However, according to 許衡山, a contemporary, the three "souls" are 1. "spiritual soul" (靈魂)
or heavenly soul (天魂) or "master soul" (主魂), the seat of "conscience" 2. "conscious soul" ( 覺魂)
or "earthly soul) (地魂) or "seeing soul" (視魂) which he thinks of as the monitor of the "master soul" normally involved in right and wrong and 3. "life soul" (生魂)
or "human soul" (人魂) or "phenomenal soul" (象魂) and the seven "soul manifestations are respectively: 1. joy(喜) 2. anger (怒), 3 sorrow (哀) 4. fear or anxiety (懼 )5 affection or love (愛) 6. hatred or disgust or distaste (惡) 7. desire or longing (慾). Therefore the three "souls" are concerned with the human spirit whilst the seven "soul manifestations" are concerned with the matter and the human body.and when a man dies, his "heavenly soul" will report to heaven, his "earthly soul" will report to the hall of the dead or hell because that's where it will be decided if a man will go to heaven or will return to earth according to Buddhist theory of the samsara and his "human soul" will return to his grave and his ancestral tablet because a man got his body from his ancestors.
Who is right? Who is wrong? Which version is true? Which version is false? Does it matter?
(To be cont'd)
3 The Chinese Taoist View of the "Soul"
According to Chinese tradition, there are two related concepts concerning the human spirit: what may be called his "soul" (魂) and his "soul manifestations" (魄). Per the explanation of Chan's Book of Li (陳氏禮記), the soul is the spirit of yang or sun or the positive (陽之靈) and the highest expression of Chi (氣之英). "Chi" (氣) according to the Taoist is the principle of life because life is conceived of as the result of the concentration or the accumulation of Chi to a point (生, 氣之聚) and "soul manifestation" (魄) is the spirit of the Yin or the negative (陰之靈) and the essence of the body (體之精). According to Sung scholar Wang Min Chai (黃勉齋), the "soul" is concerned with actively guiding and operating, the "soul manifestation" is concerned with passively receiving (魂主經營, 魄玄受納). Therefore, each human being only has one "soul" and its expression or manifestation in the body.
But according to a Northern Sung (北宋) Taoist text "Yun Ka Chi Chen"( 雲笈七籤 ) Vol. 54 edited by Chang Chun Fang (張君房) a book consisting of a total of 122 volumes of all important Taoist texts written prior to 1017 in about 1.7 million words and forming a part of the Taoist Collection (道藏), a man has 3 "souls" and 7 "soul manifestations" (三魂七魄). The three "souls" are called respectively "the light of the embryo" (胎光), supposed to be the chi of the primordial yang or the sun (太清陽和之氣) "the crisp spirit" (爽靈), supposed to be the variation of the chi of the yin or the dark (陰氣之變) and "essence of the dark" (幽精), supposed to be the leftovers or mixes of various types of chi of the yin or the dark (陰氣之雜). . The seven "soul manifestations" are respective called 1. dog corpse (屍狗) 2. lurking arrow (伏矢) 3. yin of the bird (雀陰) 4. swallowed thief (吞賊) 5. negative toxin (非毒) 6. eliminating dirt (除穢) 7. stinking lungs (臭肺) and are considered to the spirit of dirt or pollution in the human body. According to Taoist Religious theory, it is believed that after a person dies, then he would lose of these 7 "soul manifestation" each week so that after 49 days or 7 weeks, all his "soul manifestations" will be gone or completely dissipated. When he dies, one of man's soul will stay in hell (hall of the earth) ( 地府) , one of his souls will stay at the tomb (墓地) or grave and one will stay at the ancestral tablet. (祖先牌位). Thus whilst the "soul" will exist forever, the "soul manifestation(s)" is/are tied to the human body and will come and go with it.
However, according to 許衡山, a contemporary, the three "souls" are 1. "spiritual soul" (靈魂)
or heavenly soul (天魂) or "master soul" (主魂), the seat of "conscience" 2. "conscious soul" ( 覺魂)
or "earthly soul) (地魂) or "seeing soul" (視魂) which he thinks of as the monitor of the "master soul" normally involved in right and wrong and 3. "life soul" (生魂)
or "human soul" (人魂) or "phenomenal soul" (象魂) and the seven "soul manifestations are respectively: 1. joy(喜) 2. anger (怒), 3 sorrow (哀) 4. fear or anxiety (懼 )5 affection or love (愛) 6. hatred or disgust or distaste (惡) 7. desire or longing (慾). Therefore the three "souls" are concerned with the human spirit whilst the seven "soul manifestations" are concerned with the matter and the human body.and when a man dies, his "heavenly soul" will report to heaven, his "earthly soul" will report to the hall of the dead or hell because that's where it will be decided if a man will go to heaven or will return to earth according to Buddhist theory of the samsara and his "human soul" will return to his grave and his ancestral tablet because a man got his body from his ancestors.
Who is right? Who is wrong? Which version is true? Which version is false? Does it matter?
(To be cont'd)
2012年3月14日 星期三
From Soul to Self to Annihilation of Self.12
Cont'd
2. Bahai's view of the Soul
The Bahai faith is a little known religious faith but then they still got between 5 or 6 million adherents spread over 200 countries. They are a monotheistic religion worshipping the same God as the Christians and the Muslims. Founded in 19th century Persia, now Iran, they believe that God has revealed himself through a series of prophets including Buddha, Abraham, Jesus and Muhammad with Báb Bahá'ulláh as its latest prophet. Believing in the unity of God, of religion and of mankind, they think that God is too great to be fully understood through one religion alone.
To the Bahais, all human beings have a "rational soul" and a duty which enables them to recognize God's creative power and status and how man is related to him through his messengers, which will come once every thousand year or so in times of turmoil and uncertainty, to follow his teachings of regular prayers and spiritual practice so that our "soul" becomes closer to God. They believe that before being born, we have no "soul" and that it is the
destiny of our "soul" to evolve away from materialism towards God. Like the Christians, they believe that when a man dies, his "soul" will pass on to the next world where he will be judged but to them, heaven and hell are not "physical places" of reward or punishment after death, only "spiritual states" of our distance or nearness to God.
Bahais believe that all human beings are equal and that hierarchies based on race, culture, nationalism, caste, social class and gender are artificial impediments to human solidarity. They think that all men are free to explore their faith in their own way in an ordinary daily life setting and do not believe that they need any professional priests. In fact they forbid a mendicant and ascetic lifestyle. However, they do believe that we must use our work, done in a spirit of service, as our form of worship and prayer to our creator God. They have suffered much persecution in Islamic countries.
I find that the Bahai's views about what "heaven" and "hell" are are very close to what I think. My only difference with them is that I believe that we do not experience "heaven" and "hell" only "after" death. To me, we do not have to wait for the arrival of the "kingdom of heaven" or for that matter, "hell" until the day of our death. I believe that every time we think, every time we feel, every time we act in a way contrary the principle of love preached by Moses, Jesus or Muhammad, the principle of compassion preached by Buddha, the principle of "benevolence"(仁) preached by the Confucians, the principle of Tao (道) preached by the Taoists, the principle of the universal good preached by the Hindus, we are already experiencing "hell" ( which is just the opposite of "heaven") and that the concepts of "heaven" and "hell" are merely metaphors of how far we have strayed from the path towards "God" or the Tao.
Like the Bahai, I believe that the human "soul" is just another "metaphor" to describe the "kind" of flesh and blood person that we "were/are/can be" i.e. the totality of all that we "were/are/may be", all that we "think", all that we "feel", all that we "do" to our "body" and to other "people". and to the "external physical universe" in the past, at present and in future until the moment of our death in this world. But unlike Bahais, I don't believe that our "soul" is something different from our "personality" and our "moral biography". nor that our souls will be judged by an entity called "God" after death. I believe that we are already constantly "judged" by the standards of human decency even in this life but that such standards are merely internalized social values we have adopted for ourselves based on criteria in the societies and cultures in which we happen to live and that we simply do not know for certain if there is "another world" after death. Many people claim to have "seen" another world and to have "seen" "spirits" or "souls" or various "gods" or even "the Buddha" or "God" or even that they have "heard" or "talked" with such "entities" and many people claim that they "know" that there is another world before we come into this world and after we shall be gone. To me, their "claims" remain just that: subjective "claims" and "beliefs". I have yet to be convinced of the "truth" of their claims. Whenever they encounter phenomena which they cannot explain by the principles of present day science or "common sense" and very often even when such phenomena can be perfectly explained by the application of the known principles of present day science (but are still unknown to them owing to the lack of the necessary educational opportunities available to them) without resort to "supernatural" principles, they immediately jump to the conclusion that it must be a "miracle" or must be the work of their "God" or their "boddhisattvas" or other gods that they worship or "spirits" or "ghosts" because they have offered the required "sacrifices" to such entities, through their "intermediaries", the priests, the monks, who have little hesitation to "cash" in on the "sale" or euphemistically called their "contribution" or "donations" or "gifts" towards the expenses of the requisite "offerings" in the form of flowers, fruits, animals, candles, joss sticks and other so-called "ritual" paraphernalia and for their intercessory "services" which they agree to perform on their behalves out of their "sympathy" for the plights of the relevant faithfuls or believers..
(To be cont'd)
2. Bahai's view of the Soul
The Bahai faith is a little known religious faith but then they still got between 5 or 6 million adherents spread over 200 countries. They are a monotheistic religion worshipping the same God as the Christians and the Muslims. Founded in 19th century Persia, now Iran, they believe that God has revealed himself through a series of prophets including Buddha, Abraham, Jesus and Muhammad with Báb Bahá'ulláh as its latest prophet. Believing in the unity of God, of religion and of mankind, they think that God is too great to be fully understood through one religion alone.
To the Bahais, all human beings have a "rational soul" and a duty which enables them to recognize God's creative power and status and how man is related to him through his messengers, which will come once every thousand year or so in times of turmoil and uncertainty, to follow his teachings of regular prayers and spiritual practice so that our "soul" becomes closer to God. They believe that before being born, we have no "soul" and that it is the
destiny of our "soul" to evolve away from materialism towards God. Like the Christians, they believe that when a man dies, his "soul" will pass on to the next world where he will be judged but to them, heaven and hell are not "physical places" of reward or punishment after death, only "spiritual states" of our distance or nearness to God.
Bahais believe that all human beings are equal and that hierarchies based on race, culture, nationalism, caste, social class and gender are artificial impediments to human solidarity. They think that all men are free to explore their faith in their own way in an ordinary daily life setting and do not believe that they need any professional priests. In fact they forbid a mendicant and ascetic lifestyle. However, they do believe that we must use our work, done in a spirit of service, as our form of worship and prayer to our creator God. They have suffered much persecution in Islamic countries.
I find that the Bahai's views about what "heaven" and "hell" are are very close to what I think. My only difference with them is that I believe that we do not experience "heaven" and "hell" only "after" death. To me, we do not have to wait for the arrival of the "kingdom of heaven" or for that matter, "hell" until the day of our death. I believe that every time we think, every time we feel, every time we act in a way contrary the principle of love preached by Moses, Jesus or Muhammad, the principle of compassion preached by Buddha, the principle of "benevolence"(仁) preached by the Confucians, the principle of Tao (道) preached by the Taoists, the principle of the universal good preached by the Hindus, we are already experiencing "hell" ( which is just the opposite of "heaven") and that the concepts of "heaven" and "hell" are merely metaphors of how far we have strayed from the path towards "God" or the Tao.
Like the Bahai, I believe that the human "soul" is just another "metaphor" to describe the "kind" of flesh and blood person that we "were/are/can be" i.e. the totality of all that we "were/are/may be", all that we "think", all that we "feel", all that we "do" to our "body" and to other "people". and to the "external physical universe" in the past, at present and in future until the moment of our death in this world. But unlike Bahais, I don't believe that our "soul" is something different from our "personality" and our "moral biography". nor that our souls will be judged by an entity called "God" after death. I believe that we are already constantly "judged" by the standards of human decency even in this life but that such standards are merely internalized social values we have adopted for ourselves based on criteria in the societies and cultures in which we happen to live and that we simply do not know for certain if there is "another world" after death. Many people claim to have "seen" another world and to have "seen" "spirits" or "souls" or various "gods" or even "the Buddha" or "God" or even that they have "heard" or "talked" with such "entities" and many people claim that they "know" that there is another world before we come into this world and after we shall be gone. To me, their "claims" remain just that: subjective "claims" and "beliefs". I have yet to be convinced of the "truth" of their claims. Whenever they encounter phenomena which they cannot explain by the principles of present day science or "common sense" and very often even when such phenomena can be perfectly explained by the application of the known principles of present day science (but are still unknown to them owing to the lack of the necessary educational opportunities available to them) without resort to "supernatural" principles, they immediately jump to the conclusion that it must be a "miracle" or must be the work of their "God" or their "boddhisattvas" or other gods that they worship or "spirits" or "ghosts" because they have offered the required "sacrifices" to such entities, through their "intermediaries", the priests, the monks, who have little hesitation to "cash" in on the "sale" or euphemistically called their "contribution" or "donations" or "gifts" towards the expenses of the requisite "offerings" in the form of flowers, fruits, animals, candles, joss sticks and other so-called "ritual" paraphernalia and for their intercessory "services" which they agree to perform on their behalves out of their "sympathy" for the plights of the relevant faithfuls or believers..
(To be cont'd)
2012年3月7日 星期三
From Soul to Self to Annihilation of Self.11
Cont'd
The mainstream Christian view of what the "soul" is represents however only one amongst tens of other kinds of views on the same subject. There are different views of what the distinguishing feature(s) of the "soul" or its equivalent may be, on whence the "soul" comes and whither it may go after our bodily death. But what I have found is that no matter what religious or non-religious (psychological or philosophic) tradition it is that is talking about the human "soul", or its modern equivalent the "self", the "psyche", the "brain" or "body and mind", the "personality" it seems clear that the human "soul" or its modern day equivalent is that which gives life to the human body, that which gives it a "will", that which provides it with an ability to decide what to do and what not, i.e. the capacity for "moral" choices, that which is the motivating power behind our behavior although they differ on whether it is mortal or immortal and whether it may have an existence independent from that of the body and whither it may continue to exist after our bodily death and if it can continue, where it may go. Some of such views follow.
1. The Ancient Egyptian view
The ancient Egyptians thought that the human "soul" had 5 different parts with certain supplementary functions or capacities viz.
(a) the Ib which is the metaphysical heart, believed to be formed from one drop of blood from the child's mother's heart at conception, the seat of all emotion, thought, will and intention, surviving
death in the nether world, where it would give evidence for or against its
possessor in the Weighing of Heart Ceremony where it would be examined by Anubis and other deities such that if it weighed
more than the feather of Maat, it would be immediately consumed by the
monster Ammit.)
(b) the sheut (or shadow, usually painted black), with whom a person is inseparably joined. For this reason, the statues of people and deities were sometimes referred to as their
shadows)
(c) the Ren , the name given to a person at birth and continuing to exist only as long as such name is spoken which explains why people's names are constantly repeated by their family members even after their death and why their names are inscribed in numerous writing e.g part of
the Book of Breathings, a derivative of the Book of the Dead, was a
means to ensure the survival of the name and why a cartouche (magical rope)
is often used to surround the name and protect it and why the
names of deceased enemies of the state, such as Akhenaten, were hacked
out of monuments in a form of damnatio memoriae such that the
greater the number of places a name was used, the greater the
possibility it would survive to be read and spoken)
(d) the Ba or roughly a man's personality or everything that makes an
individual unique, something believed to continue after death, sometimes depicted as
a human-headed bird flying out of the tomb to join with the 'Ka' in the
afterlife. In the Coffin Texts one form of the Ba that comes into existence after
death is corporeal, eating, drinking and copulating but some e.g. Louis Zabkar argued
that the Ba is not part of the person but is the person himself, unlike
the soul in Greek, or late Judaic, Christian or Muslim thought. The
idea of a purely immaterial existence was so foreign to Egyptian thought
that when Christianity spread in Egypt they borrowed the Greek word
psyche to describe the concept of soul and not the term Ba.So particular was the concept of Ba to ancient Egyptian
thought that it ought not to be translated because there is simply no equivalent and iIn another mode of existence the Ba of the deceased is depicted in the
Book of Going Forth by Day returning to the mummy and participating in
life outside the tomb in non-corporeal form, echoing the solar theology
of Re (or Ra) uniting with Osiris each night.),
(e) the Ka (or a person's vital essence or the vital spark or spirit or roughly the equivalent of the Chinese "chi", something which distinguishes a living from a dead person, something which leaves the body at death. The Egyptians believed that Khnum created the
bodies of children on a potter's wheel and inserted them into their
mothers' bodies and some believed that Heket
or Meskhenet was the creator of each person's Ka, breathing it into them
at the instant of their birth as the part of their soul that made them
be alive, something which resembles the concept of spirit in other religions.They also believed that the ka was sustained through food and
drink and for this reason, like the Chinese, food and drink were offered to the
dead, although it was the kau (k3w) within the offerings that was
consumed, not the physical aspect. The ka was often represented in
Egyptian iconography as a second image of the king, leading earlier
works to attempt to translate ka as double and finally
(f) the Akh (meaning the magically effective one, associated with thought, but not as an action of the mind;
rather, it was intellect as a living entity..It was believed that following the death of the Khat, the Ba and Ka would be reunited to reanimate the Akh but such reanimation of the Akh was only
possible if the proper funeral rites including the
"opening of the mouth (wp r)"(, aimed not only to restore a person's
physical abilities in death, but also to release a Ba's attachment to
the body).were performed, followed by
constant offerings. The ritual was termed: se-akh 'to make (a dead
person) into an (living) akh.' In this sense, it even developed into a
sort of ghost or roaming 'dead being' (when the tomb was not in order
any more) during the Ramesside Period. An Akh could do either harm or
good to persons still living, depending on the circumstances, causing
e.g., nightmares, feelings of guilt, sickness, etc. It could be evoked
by prayers or written letters left in the tomb's offering chapel also in
order to help living family members, e.g., by intervening in disputes,
by making an appeal to other dead persons or deities with any authority
to influence things on earth for the better, but also to inflict
punishments.)The separation of Akh and the unification of Ka and Ba were brought
about after death by having the proper offerings made and knowing the
proper, efficacious spell, but there was an attendant risk of dying
again. Egyptian funerary literature (such as the Coffin Texts and the
Book of the Dead) were intended to aid the deceased in "not dying a
second time" and becoming an akh. Ancient Egyptians believed that death occurs when a person's ka leaves
the body. Ceremonies conducted by priests after death, This allowed the Ba to be united with the Ka in the afterlife,
creating an entity known as an "Akh"
Ancient Egyptians
conceived of an afterlife as quite similar to normal physical existence
— but with a difference. The model for this new existence was the
journey of the Sun. At night the Sun descended into the Duat (the
underworld). Eventually the Sun meets the body of the mummified Osiris.
Osiris and the Sun, re-energized by each other, rise to new life for
another day. For the deceased, their body and their tomb were their
personal Osiris and a personal Duat. For this reason they are often
addressed as "Osiris". For this process to work, some sort of bodily
preservation was required to allow the Ba to return during the night
and to rise to new life in the morning. However, the complete Akh was
also thought to appear as stars. Until the Late Period, non-royal
Egyptians did not expect to unite with the Sun deity, it being reserved
for the royalty only.
The "Book of the Dead", the collection of spells
which aided a person in the afterlife, had the Egyptian name of "The
Book of Going forth by Day". They helped people avoid the perils of the
afterlife and also aided their existence, containing spells to assure
"not dying a second time in the underworld", and to "grant memory
always" to a person. In ancient Egyptian religion, it was possible to die even in one's afterlife and if so, such death was thought to be permanent.
(To be Cont'd)
The mainstream Christian view of what the "soul" is represents however only one amongst tens of other kinds of views on the same subject. There are different views of what the distinguishing feature(s) of the "soul" or its equivalent may be, on whence the "soul" comes and whither it may go after our bodily death. But what I have found is that no matter what religious or non-religious (psychological or philosophic) tradition it is that is talking about the human "soul", or its modern equivalent the "self", the "psyche", the "brain" or "body and mind", the "personality" it seems clear that the human "soul" or its modern day equivalent is that which gives life to the human body, that which gives it a "will", that which provides it with an ability to decide what to do and what not, i.e. the capacity for "moral" choices, that which is the motivating power behind our behavior although they differ on whether it is mortal or immortal and whether it may have an existence independent from that of the body and whither it may continue to exist after our bodily death and if it can continue, where it may go. Some of such views follow.
1. The Ancient Egyptian view
The ancient Egyptians thought that the human "soul" had 5 different parts with certain supplementary functions or capacities viz.
(a) the Ib which is the metaphysical heart, believed to be formed from one drop of blood from the child's mother's heart at conception, the seat of all emotion, thought, will and intention, surviving
death in the nether world, where it would give evidence for or against its
possessor in the Weighing of Heart Ceremony where it would be examined by Anubis and other deities such that if it weighed
more than the feather of Maat, it would be immediately consumed by the
monster Ammit.)
(b) the sheut (or shadow, usually painted black), with whom a person is inseparably joined. For this reason, the statues of people and deities were sometimes referred to as their
shadows)
(c) the Ren , the name given to a person at birth and continuing to exist only as long as such name is spoken which explains why people's names are constantly repeated by their family members even after their death and why their names are inscribed in numerous writing e.g part of
the Book of Breathings, a derivative of the Book of the Dead, was a
means to ensure the survival of the name and why a cartouche (magical rope)
is often used to surround the name and protect it and why the
names of deceased enemies of the state, such as Akhenaten, were hacked
out of monuments in a form of damnatio memoriae such that the
greater the number of places a name was used, the greater the
possibility it would survive to be read and spoken)
(d) the Ba or roughly a man's personality or everything that makes an
individual unique, something believed to continue after death, sometimes depicted as
a human-headed bird flying out of the tomb to join with the 'Ka' in the
afterlife. In the Coffin Texts one form of the Ba that comes into existence after
death is corporeal, eating, drinking and copulating but some e.g. Louis Zabkar argued
that the Ba is not part of the person but is the person himself, unlike
the soul in Greek, or late Judaic, Christian or Muslim thought. The
idea of a purely immaterial existence was so foreign to Egyptian thought
that when Christianity spread in Egypt they borrowed the Greek word
psyche to describe the concept of soul and not the term Ba.So particular was the concept of Ba to ancient Egyptian
thought that it ought not to be translated because there is simply no equivalent and iIn another mode of existence the Ba of the deceased is depicted in the
Book of Going Forth by Day returning to the mummy and participating in
life outside the tomb in non-corporeal form, echoing the solar theology
of Re (or Ra) uniting with Osiris each night.),
(e) the Ka (or a person's vital essence or the vital spark or spirit or roughly the equivalent of the Chinese "chi", something which distinguishes a living from a dead person, something which leaves the body at death. The Egyptians believed that Khnum created the
bodies of children on a potter's wheel and inserted them into their
mothers' bodies and some believed that Heket
or Meskhenet was the creator of each person's Ka, breathing it into them
at the instant of their birth as the part of their soul that made them
be alive, something which resembles the concept of spirit in other religions.They also believed that the ka was sustained through food and
drink and for this reason, like the Chinese, food and drink were offered to the
dead, although it was the kau (k3w) within the offerings that was
consumed, not the physical aspect. The ka was often represented in
Egyptian iconography as a second image of the king, leading earlier
works to attempt to translate ka as double and finally
(f) the Akh (meaning the magically effective one, associated with thought, but not as an action of the mind;
rather, it was intellect as a living entity..It was believed that following the death of the Khat, the Ba and Ka would be reunited to reanimate the Akh but such reanimation of the Akh was only
possible if the proper funeral rites including the
"opening of the mouth (wp r)"(, aimed not only to restore a person's
physical abilities in death, but also to release a Ba's attachment to
the body).were performed, followed by
constant offerings. The ritual was termed: se-akh 'to make (a dead
person) into an (living) akh.' In this sense, it even developed into a
sort of ghost or roaming 'dead being' (when the tomb was not in order
any more) during the Ramesside Period. An Akh could do either harm or
good to persons still living, depending on the circumstances, causing
e.g., nightmares, feelings of guilt, sickness, etc. It could be evoked
by prayers or written letters left in the tomb's offering chapel also in
order to help living family members, e.g., by intervening in disputes,
by making an appeal to other dead persons or deities with any authority
to influence things on earth for the better, but also to inflict
punishments.)The separation of Akh and the unification of Ka and Ba were brought
about after death by having the proper offerings made and knowing the
proper, efficacious spell, but there was an attendant risk of dying
again. Egyptian funerary literature (such as the Coffin Texts and the
Book of the Dead) were intended to aid the deceased in "not dying a
second time" and becoming an akh. Ancient Egyptians believed that death occurs when a person's ka leaves
the body. Ceremonies conducted by priests after death, This allowed the Ba to be united with the Ka in the afterlife,
creating an entity known as an "Akh"
Ancient Egyptians
conceived of an afterlife as quite similar to normal physical existence
— but with a difference. The model for this new existence was the
journey of the Sun. At night the Sun descended into the Duat (the
underworld). Eventually the Sun meets the body of the mummified Osiris.
Osiris and the Sun, re-energized by each other, rise to new life for
another day. For the deceased, their body and their tomb were their
personal Osiris and a personal Duat. For this reason they are often
addressed as "Osiris". For this process to work, some sort of bodily
preservation was required to allow the Ba to return during the night
and to rise to new life in the morning. However, the complete Akh was
also thought to appear as stars. Until the Late Period, non-royal
Egyptians did not expect to unite with the Sun deity, it being reserved
for the royalty only.
The "Book of the Dead", the collection of spells
which aided a person in the afterlife, had the Egyptian name of "The
Book of Going forth by Day". They helped people avoid the perils of the
afterlife and also aided their existence, containing spells to assure
"not dying a second time in the underworld", and to "grant memory
always" to a person. In ancient Egyptian religion, it was possible to die even in one's afterlife and if so, such death was thought to be permanent.
(To be Cont'd)
2012年2月23日 星期四
From Soul to Self to Annihilation of Self.9
(Cont'd)
We now know a little about how the ancient Greek Christians, the so-called early Church Fathers or Patricians think about the soul. What about the views of St. Thomas Aquinas, upon whose theology the present day Roman Catholic Church relies? According Anthony Kenny, in his article "Body, Soul, and Intellect in Aquinas", Aquinas got into serious trouble with the mainstream Church when he first tried to apply the Aristotelian theory of form and matter to the nature of the human "soul" and its relation to the human "body".
For Aristotle, animals and vegetables had souls no less than human beings (the vegetative/nutritive soul being the principle behind the growth and propagation of plants and the sensitive soul being the explanatory principle for animal's sensory activities. What made human beings special was that he is thought to possess a rational/intellective soul. To Thomas' contemporaries, there was not just a single form, the intellective soul but also sensitive and nutritive souls and some theorists even thought that human beings had a "corporal form", in more or less the same way that a stick would have a "stick form" and a stone, a "stone form". But Aquinas held that there was no need for man to have so many forms and that only one form would be sufficient to explain all of man's various functions.viz. the rational/intellective soul and that when a man died, there would be no further relationship between the formerly living person and his corpse other than his basic prime matter. For this view, Aquinas was condemned at Oxford in 1277. To Aquinas, even animals possessed some form of intellect which enabled it to think simple thoughts. What was special about human beings was that only man had the ability to think thoughts not only by sensory images but also by and in language. Man's "intellect" was special because his "intellect" had two kinds of power: "agent power" which enabled him to abstract universal ideas from particular sense experience (something which animals did not have) and "receptive power" which formed the storehouse for the ideas, concepts, beliefs thus abstracted. However, he thought that what was abstracted from individual or particular matters (each with individual and particular forms), was not its particular form but only its universal form. But he thought that it was impossible for the pure intellect to grasp "material objects" by itself. Knowledge of "material objects" can be obtained only through the joint efforts of both our intellect and our sensory faculties, which he thought included also perception, imagination and memory.Thus it is only by enlisting the assistance of our "sensory" experience that our " agent intellect" can "know" individual/particular objects/persons and is thereby enabled to "form" singular propositions about such particular objects/persons e.g a proposition like "Socrates is a man." Aquinas called this relationship of the intellect to the sensory context of its activity "reflection upon phantasms." ("phantasm" including effectively the whole range of our "sensory" experience, which for Aquinas, included what we now call our "perception" and our "imagination"). To Aquinas, if something is physically absent from our sight, we can only "see" it by means of our "mental images" of it or (and this is special to man) the imagined sounds and shapes of the relevant "words" representing such picturable objects and with regard to non-picturable "spiritual" entities like souls, spirits, God, we can only use words corresponding to such entities, which we "perceive" or "see" in our fragmentary inner monologues.
Like Aristotle and Plato, Aquinas thought that the real "object" of all human "knowledge" was "form", both with regard to sensory "objects" or "objects" forming the subject matter of human "intellectual understanding". To Aquinas, our senses perceive only the "accidental forms" of the relevant objects appropriate to each of our sensory modalities (eyes/sight, ears/audition, tongue/tasting, nose/smelling, skin/tactile feeling) e.g with our eyes, we can see the colors, the shape, the size of sensory objects and with our nose, we perceive its smell but all such colors, shape, size and smell etc. are considered its "accidental forms" specific to one object e.g. this particular rose. Its "substantial/essential form" is not perceived by our senses but can only be grasped by our "intellect". To Aquinas, all "material objects" are composed of both "matter" and "form" but the "individuality" of a parcel of matter is not something that can be grasped by our "intellect" . Thus our "intellect" can grasp with its "agent power" what makes Socrates "human" but not what makes him "Socrates" as an individual person.To Aquinas, there is no such thing as the "form of humanity" or "human nature" considered as a species outside of the human mind. But how does the human "agent power" of our "intellect" act or function according to Aquinas? Faced with individual/particular/specific embodied human persons consisting of both form and matter, the "agent power" of our intellect acts by abstracting from such particular individuals and create therefrom an "intellectual object" a "universal form" called "humanity" only with the help of both our "senses" and our "imagination". But he did not elaborate on how exactly this was done. We can't really blame him because in his days, he simply could not be expected to have the kind of knowledge about the functioning of the human body, the human mind and the human emotions or the human psyche which we now have.
As briefly mentioned above, to Aquinas, human "intellect" has, not only what he called an "agent power", but also what he called a " receptive power". something we nowadays would refer to as our capacity to remember the things previously learned (stored in the form of ideas, concepts, beliefs, "knowledge") or our "memory", which Aquinas conceived of as a kind of tabula rasa into which we deposit such new ideas etc. as and when they are "formed", a process which Aquinas thought was quite passive (contrary to what our present day psychologists and cognitive scientists tell us). This kind of thinking however has left its traces even nowadays in the way we talk e.g. we speak of being "informed" about a matter and we call gaining "knowledge" about something the acquisition of "information."
How is Aquinas' "intellect" related to our sensory perception? To Aquinas, "sense perception" was, like the acquisition of "intellectual information", also a matter of "reception" of the "forms" of "immaterial matter" e.g. our sense takes in the color of gold, without the gold and the "forms" thus received by our senses were then passed to or stored in the "fancy" (phantasm) ) (our "imagination" in the original sense of formation of internal mental "images" of the object perceived by our sensory organs) which can be reshuffled later to produce images of whatever we later wish to think about. Thus when we "see" the sun, what enters our "eyes" is not the "actual sun" with all its mass, light, colors etc: we "perceive" only the various "forms" associated with the sun. In the same way, when I "think" of a horse, what appears in my "intellect" is the immaterial and universal "form" of the horse. What makes a "real horse" a "horse" is the "form" of a "horse". It is just the universal and immaterial "form" of the horse which exists in my mind, individualized and materialized in the "real horse". What we would call the "real horse" has a natural existence in the "real world" and when Aquinas "perceives" it or when he "thinks" about it, it has an "intentional existence" in Aquinas' "intellect".
Although Aquinas distinguishes between the "universal form" of a horse and "my mental image" of it as it is embodied in my own mind and thus peculiar to "me", he is not very clear about the exact relations between the two. It seems that to Aquinas, as far as we can gather, our thoughts are "ours" in so far as they must be "expressed" through "our" mind (what we would now call our "brain) which in turn is contained in "our" body. Kenny thinks that this is just as well because he thinks that terms "me", "my self" , "my ego" and "I" are not different from or do not refer to anything different from the human being to which such terms are applied. In his words, "the belief in a self which is different from the human being whose self it is is a grammatical illusion generated by the reflexive pronoun. It is as if a philosopher was puzzled what property of "own-ness" was which my own room possesses in addition to the property of being mine."
To Kenny, the "grammatical error which is the essence of the theory of the self is a deep error" but this mistaken notion or "illusion" of the "self" has a number of different roots the most important of which according to him, are what he calls the "epistemological root" and the "psychological root".
The epistemological root of the notion of the "self" is what Kenny calls "Cartesian skepticism" initiated in Descartes' Meditations in which he convinces himself that he can doubt whether the world exists and whether he has a body but not that he has a mind: "I can doubt whether I have a body, but I cannot doubt whether I exist; for what is this I which is doubting". Thus the "I" must refer to something not involving the body but nonetheless forming a part of Descartes as a human being. Thus to Descartes, his ego or self is a substance whose essence is pure thought: the mind or res cogitans.(the thing which thinks). The psychological root comes from the idea that "imagination" is an interior sense of a posited "self", which according to the Lockean empiricism, is the "subject" of the relevant inner sensation, the eye of inner vision, the ear of inner hearing and the mystical possessor of both inner eye and inner ear and whatever inner organs of sensations may be "fantasized". To Kenny, "What sense the thoughts in my mind have depends on my mastery of the language in which they occur, in my decoding of the symbols and imagery in which they are embodied" and "What reference they have depends on the history of this body, making the links between the current image and the remembered events which provide the context for the reflections of" what Aquinas calls "phantasms" (or "images"). Currently some philosophers regard "memory" as the key to our "personal identity" whilst others see "bodily continuity" as its essence, whilst still others would use both memory and bodily continuity as the relevant criteria. Those who separate personal identity from bodily identity follow those medievals who argued for the plurality of forms whilst those who identify the two effectively subscribe to the thesis for which Aquinas was condemned.
However the "illusion" of the "self" or the "ego" arose, it is certain that it is a question which has interested people besides philosophers. What is the right way to think of the continuity between a foetus and a baby, between the "soul" of the baby as his foetus or as his born body( an issue related to the present day debate about whether abortion should be permitted) as the continuance what Aquinas calls his "vegetative soul" in an unconscious human body be looked upon as an indication of the "permanence" of a "rational soul" which is charged with his "moral duty"? Since 1914, the Catholic church has accepted that "the same rational soul is united to the body in such a way that it is one and the only substantial form and through it a human being is animal, living, bodily and substantial." But it remains an issue for many philosophers.
Gerard Manley Hopkins in his treatise on St. Ignatius' spiritual exercises, wrote: "We learn that all things are created by consideration of the world without or of ourselves, the world within. The former is the consideration commonly dwelt on, but the latter takes on the mind more hold. I find myself both as man and as myself something most determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see: I find myself with my pleasures and pains, my powers and my experiences, my deserts and guilt, my shame and sense of beauty, my dangers, hopes, fears and all my fate, more important to myself than anything I see...And this is much more true when we consider the mind, when I consider my self-being, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, or I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: What must it be to be someone else. Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it or resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the same feeling. But this only multiplies the phenomena to be explained so far as the cases are like and do resemble. But to me, there is no resemblance: searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being."
Hopkins is not alone. David Hume also tried to find out the nature of this "self" by introspecting and looking within himself and by trying to reflect on what is going on in his own mind and his own consciousness but failed to find anything which could reasonably be identified as his own "self". All he found was a bundle of sensations: " When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception."
Kenny explains why this is so. He argues: "This is because the self is a mythical entity. A taste of which everything tasted would not be a taste, since taste is a faculty of discrimination; a self which is perceived no matter what it perceived is no better than a self which is not perceived at all.". In so finding, he mirrors the view of the great Buddha, to whom the concept of "self" is "empty" because there is nothing in the so-called "self" which stays the same from moment to moment. The self is not something "concrete" like a stone, which "has" or more accurately "is" what we normally understand as "substance/matter" which as Descartes says, has "extension" and takes up physical "space". It is something intangible. something which exists nowhere except in our own "mind" (which "mind" is itself nothing but a concept we created inside our "brain" and only insofar as we give it a name). Are we our body? If so, is the body we have at birth, the body we have at age 7 when we enter primary school, the body we have at age 17 or 18 when we graduate from high school, the body we have at age 21 or 22 when we graduate from college and the body we have when we die the same body or a different body? Are we our personal biography? If so, isn't it true that with each moment, with the happening of more and more "events" in our lives, our biography too is changing all the time? Are we what we own or possess? A house, a car, a spouse, children, bank accounts, stocks and shares? Is our ownership of these just "notional" or what lawyers refer to by the legal fiction as "chose in action" (literally, "things in action" or metaphorical "things" which have meaning only in so far as they form part of certain legal relations between people recognized by the law courts but in reality just a "bundle" of abstract rights and obligations which themselves are nothing but abstract "concepts" invented by our minds) with only such "reality" as people will continue to treat them "as if" they were truly "ours". Physically, it is quite clear that "we" are not the same as our house, our car, our spouse, our children, our bank accounts, our stocks and shares etc. except as Fromm says, we choose to live and relate to others and to the world in a "having" mode of existence. Are we our "fame". our "reputation", our "honours", our "qualifications"? Again, are these things as "real" as say, an egg, a table, a chair? If they exist, where in the world do they exist except in our "imagination" (in its original meaning of forming or creating an image in our mind)? In so far as they are "real" in the sense of being "recognized" by others, how long will they last? Do they have any true or real permanence or stability at all? Did not the Pharoahs build pyramids? Are the pyramids now nothing but the objects of curiosity and wonder by people who are anxious only to click on their cameras and then hurry away to their salads and barbecued chicken or beef? Where or what or how exactly is that "self" we normally so treasure and stress "ourselves" out to protect, defend and whose interest we try so desperately to promote? Shall we not find the kind of emptiness at the core of our psyche that Peer Gynt found in Henrik Ibsen's play as he followed the troll's motto, ""Be thyself and to hell with the world!" ?.
(To be cont'd).
We now know a little about how the ancient Greek Christians, the so-called early Church Fathers or Patricians think about the soul. What about the views of St. Thomas Aquinas, upon whose theology the present day Roman Catholic Church relies? According Anthony Kenny, in his article "Body, Soul, and Intellect in Aquinas", Aquinas got into serious trouble with the mainstream Church when he first tried to apply the Aristotelian theory of form and matter to the nature of the human "soul" and its relation to the human "body".
For Aristotle, animals and vegetables had souls no less than human beings (the vegetative/nutritive soul being the principle behind the growth and propagation of plants and the sensitive soul being the explanatory principle for animal's sensory activities. What made human beings special was that he is thought to possess a rational/intellective soul. To Thomas' contemporaries, there was not just a single form, the intellective soul but also sensitive and nutritive souls and some theorists even thought that human beings had a "corporal form", in more or less the same way that a stick would have a "stick form" and a stone, a "stone form". But Aquinas held that there was no need for man to have so many forms and that only one form would be sufficient to explain all of man's various functions.viz. the rational/intellective soul and that when a man died, there would be no further relationship between the formerly living person and his corpse other than his basic prime matter. For this view, Aquinas was condemned at Oxford in 1277. To Aquinas, even animals possessed some form of intellect which enabled it to think simple thoughts. What was special about human beings was that only man had the ability to think thoughts not only by sensory images but also by and in language. Man's "intellect" was special because his "intellect" had two kinds of power: "agent power" which enabled him to abstract universal ideas from particular sense experience (something which animals did not have) and "receptive power" which formed the storehouse for the ideas, concepts, beliefs thus abstracted. However, he thought that what was abstracted from individual or particular matters (each with individual and particular forms), was not its particular form but only its universal form. But he thought that it was impossible for the pure intellect to grasp "material objects" by itself. Knowledge of "material objects" can be obtained only through the joint efforts of both our intellect and our sensory faculties, which he thought included also perception, imagination and memory.Thus it is only by enlisting the assistance of our "sensory" experience that our " agent intellect" can "know" individual/particular objects/persons and is thereby enabled to "form" singular propositions about such particular objects/persons e.g a proposition like "Socrates is a man." Aquinas called this relationship of the intellect to the sensory context of its activity "reflection upon phantasms." ("phantasm" including effectively the whole range of our "sensory" experience, which for Aquinas, included what we now call our "perception" and our "imagination"). To Aquinas, if something is physically absent from our sight, we can only "see" it by means of our "mental images" of it or (and this is special to man) the imagined sounds and shapes of the relevant "words" representing such picturable objects and with regard to non-picturable "spiritual" entities like souls, spirits, God, we can only use words corresponding to such entities, which we "perceive" or "see" in our fragmentary inner monologues.
Like Aristotle and Plato, Aquinas thought that the real "object" of all human "knowledge" was "form", both with regard to sensory "objects" or "objects" forming the subject matter of human "intellectual understanding". To Aquinas, our senses perceive only the "accidental forms" of the relevant objects appropriate to each of our sensory modalities (eyes/sight, ears/audition, tongue/tasting, nose/smelling, skin/tactile feeling) e.g with our eyes, we can see the colors, the shape, the size of sensory objects and with our nose, we perceive its smell but all such colors, shape, size and smell etc. are considered its "accidental forms" specific to one object e.g. this particular rose. Its "substantial/essential form" is not perceived by our senses but can only be grasped by our "intellect". To Aquinas, all "material objects" are composed of both "matter" and "form" but the "individuality" of a parcel of matter is not something that can be grasped by our "intellect" . Thus our "intellect" can grasp with its "agent power" what makes Socrates "human" but not what makes him "Socrates" as an individual person.To Aquinas, there is no such thing as the "form of humanity" or "human nature" considered as a species outside of the human mind. But how does the human "agent power" of our "intellect" act or function according to Aquinas? Faced with individual/particular/specific embodied human persons consisting of both form and matter, the "agent power" of our intellect acts by abstracting from such particular individuals and create therefrom an "intellectual object" a "universal form" called "humanity" only with the help of both our "senses" and our "imagination". But he did not elaborate on how exactly this was done. We can't really blame him because in his days, he simply could not be expected to have the kind of knowledge about the functioning of the human body, the human mind and the human emotions or the human psyche which we now have.
As briefly mentioned above, to Aquinas, human "intellect" has, not only what he called an "agent power", but also what he called a " receptive power". something we nowadays would refer to as our capacity to remember the things previously learned (stored in the form of ideas, concepts, beliefs, "knowledge") or our "memory", which Aquinas conceived of as a kind of tabula rasa into which we deposit such new ideas etc. as and when they are "formed", a process which Aquinas thought was quite passive (contrary to what our present day psychologists and cognitive scientists tell us). This kind of thinking however has left its traces even nowadays in the way we talk e.g. we speak of being "informed" about a matter and we call gaining "knowledge" about something the acquisition of "information."
How is Aquinas' "intellect" related to our sensory perception? To Aquinas, "sense perception" was, like the acquisition of "intellectual information", also a matter of "reception" of the "forms" of "immaterial matter" e.g. our sense takes in the color of gold, without the gold and the "forms" thus received by our senses were then passed to or stored in the "fancy" (phantasm) ) (our "imagination" in the original sense of formation of internal mental "images" of the object perceived by our sensory organs) which can be reshuffled later to produce images of whatever we later wish to think about. Thus when we "see" the sun, what enters our "eyes" is not the "actual sun" with all its mass, light, colors etc: we "perceive" only the various "forms" associated with the sun. In the same way, when I "think" of a horse, what appears in my "intellect" is the immaterial and universal "form" of the horse. What makes a "real horse" a "horse" is the "form" of a "horse". It is just the universal and immaterial "form" of the horse which exists in my mind, individualized and materialized in the "real horse". What we would call the "real horse" has a natural existence in the "real world" and when Aquinas "perceives" it or when he "thinks" about it, it has an "intentional existence" in Aquinas' "intellect".
Although Aquinas distinguishes between the "universal form" of a horse and "my mental image" of it as it is embodied in my own mind and thus peculiar to "me", he is not very clear about the exact relations between the two. It seems that to Aquinas, as far as we can gather, our thoughts are "ours" in so far as they must be "expressed" through "our" mind (what we would now call our "brain) which in turn is contained in "our" body. Kenny thinks that this is just as well because he thinks that terms "me", "my self" , "my ego" and "I" are not different from or do not refer to anything different from the human being to which such terms are applied. In his words, "the belief in a self which is different from the human being whose self it is is a grammatical illusion generated by the reflexive pronoun. It is as if a philosopher was puzzled what property of "own-ness" was which my own room possesses in addition to the property of being mine."
To Kenny, the "grammatical error which is the essence of the theory of the self is a deep error" but this mistaken notion or "illusion" of the "self" has a number of different roots the most important of which according to him, are what he calls the "epistemological root" and the "psychological root".
The epistemological root of the notion of the "self" is what Kenny calls "Cartesian skepticism" initiated in Descartes' Meditations in which he convinces himself that he can doubt whether the world exists and whether he has a body but not that he has a mind: "I can doubt whether I have a body, but I cannot doubt whether I exist; for what is this I which is doubting". Thus the "I" must refer to something not involving the body but nonetheless forming a part of Descartes as a human being. Thus to Descartes, his ego or self is a substance whose essence is pure thought: the mind or res cogitans.(the thing which thinks). The psychological root comes from the idea that "imagination" is an interior sense of a posited "self", which according to the Lockean empiricism, is the "subject" of the relevant inner sensation, the eye of inner vision, the ear of inner hearing and the mystical possessor of both inner eye and inner ear and whatever inner organs of sensations may be "fantasized". To Kenny, "What sense the thoughts in my mind have depends on my mastery of the language in which they occur, in my decoding of the symbols and imagery in which they are embodied" and "What reference they have depends on the history of this body, making the links between the current image and the remembered events which provide the context for the reflections of" what Aquinas calls "phantasms" (or "images"). Currently some philosophers regard "memory" as the key to our "personal identity" whilst others see "bodily continuity" as its essence, whilst still others would use both memory and bodily continuity as the relevant criteria. Those who separate personal identity from bodily identity follow those medievals who argued for the plurality of forms whilst those who identify the two effectively subscribe to the thesis for which Aquinas was condemned.
However the "illusion" of the "self" or the "ego" arose, it is certain that it is a question which has interested people besides philosophers. What is the right way to think of the continuity between a foetus and a baby, between the "soul" of the baby as his foetus or as his born body( an issue related to the present day debate about whether abortion should be permitted) as the continuance what Aquinas calls his "vegetative soul" in an unconscious human body be looked upon as an indication of the "permanence" of a "rational soul" which is charged with his "moral duty"? Since 1914, the Catholic church has accepted that "the same rational soul is united to the body in such a way that it is one and the only substantial form and through it a human being is animal, living, bodily and substantial." But it remains an issue for many philosophers.
Gerard Manley Hopkins in his treatise on St. Ignatius' spiritual exercises, wrote: "We learn that all things are created by consideration of the world without or of ourselves, the world within. The former is the consideration commonly dwelt on, but the latter takes on the mind more hold. I find myself both as man and as myself something most determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see: I find myself with my pleasures and pains, my powers and my experiences, my deserts and guilt, my shame and sense of beauty, my dangers, hopes, fears and all my fate, more important to myself than anything I see...And this is much more true when we consider the mind, when I consider my self-being, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, or I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: What must it be to be someone else. Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it or resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the same feeling. But this only multiplies the phenomena to be explained so far as the cases are like and do resemble. But to me, there is no resemblance: searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being."
Hopkins is not alone. David Hume also tried to find out the nature of this "self" by introspecting and looking within himself and by trying to reflect on what is going on in his own mind and his own consciousness but failed to find anything which could reasonably be identified as his own "self". All he found was a bundle of sensations: " When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception."
Kenny explains why this is so. He argues: "This is because the self is a mythical entity. A taste of which everything tasted would not be a taste, since taste is a faculty of discrimination; a self which is perceived no matter what it perceived is no better than a self which is not perceived at all.". In so finding, he mirrors the view of the great Buddha, to whom the concept of "self" is "empty" because there is nothing in the so-called "self" which stays the same from moment to moment. The self is not something "concrete" like a stone, which "has" or more accurately "is" what we normally understand as "substance/matter" which as Descartes says, has "extension" and takes up physical "space". It is something intangible. something which exists nowhere except in our own "mind" (which "mind" is itself nothing but a concept we created inside our "brain" and only insofar as we give it a name). Are we our body? If so, is the body we have at birth, the body we have at age 7 when we enter primary school, the body we have at age 17 or 18 when we graduate from high school, the body we have at age 21 or 22 when we graduate from college and the body we have when we die the same body or a different body? Are we our personal biography? If so, isn't it true that with each moment, with the happening of more and more "events" in our lives, our biography too is changing all the time? Are we what we own or possess? A house, a car, a spouse, children, bank accounts, stocks and shares? Is our ownership of these just "notional" or what lawyers refer to by the legal fiction as "chose in action" (literally, "things in action" or metaphorical "things" which have meaning only in so far as they form part of certain legal relations between people recognized by the law courts but in reality just a "bundle" of abstract rights and obligations which themselves are nothing but abstract "concepts" invented by our minds) with only such "reality" as people will continue to treat them "as if" they were truly "ours". Physically, it is quite clear that "we" are not the same as our house, our car, our spouse, our children, our bank accounts, our stocks and shares etc. except as Fromm says, we choose to live and relate to others and to the world in a "having" mode of existence. Are we our "fame". our "reputation", our "honours", our "qualifications"? Again, are these things as "real" as say, an egg, a table, a chair? If they exist, where in the world do they exist except in our "imagination" (in its original meaning of forming or creating an image in our mind)? In so far as they are "real" in the sense of being "recognized" by others, how long will they last? Do they have any true or real permanence or stability at all? Did not the Pharoahs build pyramids? Are the pyramids now nothing but the objects of curiosity and wonder by people who are anxious only to click on their cameras and then hurry away to their salads and barbecued chicken or beef? Where or what or how exactly is that "self" we normally so treasure and stress "ourselves" out to protect, defend and whose interest we try so desperately to promote? Shall we not find the kind of emptiness at the core of our psyche that Peer Gynt found in Henrik Ibsen's play as he followed the troll's motto, ""Be thyself and to hell with the world!" ?.
(To be cont'd).
From Soul to Self to Annihilation of Self.8
Cont'd
Ware next examines whether the notion of the "soul" is coterminous with reason or can extends "downwards" to include the Greek notion of "pathos" (emotions and the passions, there being no English word corresponding exactly with the Greek "pathos" ) and upwards to include the faculty of spiritual insight or vision higher than discursive reason. As far as "pathos" is concerned, some Greek Fathers follow the Stoics and see it negatively as a disease of the soul, something unnatural, excessive and disordered which needs to be eliminated through "apatheia" (dispassion or passionlessness or absence of passion) e.g. Clement of Alexandria states that the truly good person has no passions ( Stromateis 7:11 ed. Stahlin 47:1) and Evagrius of Pontus (d.399) highly influential amongst the Greek ascetic tradition, associates them with the "daimon" ("demon", not to be confused with "devil" but more in the sense of uncontrollable passions) and excludes them from the soul but other Greek Fathers, following Plato and Aristotle rather than the Stoics e.g. Theodore of Cyrus (c 393-460) and Abba Isaias (d.489) and Maximus the Confessor (c 580-662) (Triads 3.3. 15 ) view the passions as neutral such that whether they are good or bad depends to how we use them. Thus when they use the word "apatheia", they mean not the elimination of passion but their purification and per Palamas, our aim with regard to the passions is not "nekrosis" or their "mortification" but rather "metathesis" or their "transposition" or "redirection" and "epithymia" (desire) is to be turned into "eros" (an intense longing for God) and "thymos" (wrath or anger) is to become unselfish agape (an generalized love or unconditional love for even strangers) ( On Love 248)) and thus, on such views, the passions are not in themselves parasitic distortions but have a place in the true nature of the soul. Instead of eliminating, suppressing, and destroying our passion, we are to educate, re-orient, re-direct and transfigure them.
Can we re-orient our passions and our emotions and transfigure to achieve a spiritual understanding superior to the our reasoning. Some Greek Christians follow Plato in distinguishing between thinking (dianoia) in the sense of reasoning from premises to a conclusion and intellect or intellection (nous, noesis) but view that through the nous (serving as an eye of the soul), truth is simply “seen” to be true and whilst "dianoia" is marked by plurality, "noesis "is seen as unified so that at its higher level, the subject-object dichotomy vanishes: through dianoia we "know about" God but through "nous", we know God. Whilst "dianoia" forms general concepts by a process of abstractions from the data of sense-perception, by manipulating these concepts, dianoia then argues to a conclusion through the use of classification and analysis. In dianoia, the mind derives its information from outside of itself but on the level of nous, we participate directly in the reality we contemplate: “the direct experience (peira) of a thing suppresses the concept (logos) which represents that thing” per Maximus: we do not simply contemplate about the thing but we ourselves enter into it or it enters into us, so our knowledge ceases to be multiform and becomes simple and integrated. (To Thalassius, question 60 PG 90.624A; ed. Laga and Steel, 77).
It is often said that "language" is the "essence" of the human "mind". Maximus would readily agree that this is true of the "dianoia" but they would be more hesitant to say such a thing about the "nous" because at higher levels, intellection may reach out beyond language, visual images and mental concepts to include what we today would call “mystical experience” (which doesn't include such things as levitation, telepathy, trances or other paranormal phenomena) but includes the "direct awareness" of "supra-normal reality": we are never more authentically human when through this exercise of noesis, we "transcend" ourselves and enter into communion with the Eternal and in this sense, "nous" as our highest and our most God-like faculty, expresses our own "true self". If so then, the imagination (phantasia) understood by" the Greek Fathers as the image-forming faculty dependent on sense-perception, stands on a level below "noesis". Ware notes that all the references to "phantasia" in Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon carry a pejorative meaning. In fact, Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain (1748-1809) states that “the devil has a very close relationship and familiarity with the imagination” and goes so far as to style the "phantasia" as “a bridge of the devils”. This analysis shows that to the Greek Fathers, there are two kinds of thinking in the human "soul": a natural and rational thinking not involving any emotions and a more emotionally committed and more intuitive type of thinking which enables us to "know" and to "encounter" God.
Can the concept of "soul" be extended to include animals? Do animals have souls? There is no lack of texts which suggest that animals do have some kind of soul too. In the Euchologion (or Book of Prayers) used officially in the contemporary Greek Orthodox Church, there are several prayers for animals “…if a righteous man shows pity to the souls of his animals (cf. Prov.12:10), how should you not take pity on them, for you created them and you provide for them? In your compassion, you did not forget the animals in the ark. ..Through the good health and the plentiful number of oxen and other four-footed creatures, the earth is cultivated and its fruits increase; and your servants, who call upon your name, enjoy in full abundance the products of their farming." (Prayer of St. Modestos which is attributed to Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain) Origen argues at some lengths that animals have souls: “No one, I suppose, will doubt that all living creatures whatever, even those that live in water, have souls” and quotes Scripture in support of his view (Gen. 1: 21, 24 (LXX); Lev. 17:14 (LXX) On First Principles 2.8.1). In addition, Origen thinks that the animal souls has certain similarities with the human soul: “The instinct (physis) in hunting dogs and in war horses comes near, if I may say so, to reason itself” (ibid 3.1.3) but Theophilus of Antioch (c180) goes further and say that the instinct in all animals, wild and domesticated, which leads them to mate and care for their offspring shows they possess understanding” (To Autolycus 1.6). Other Greek Fathers maintain that animals share with humans, not only a certain reason and understanding but also memory and a wide range of emotions and affections e. g. Basil of Caesarea. says that they display feelings of joy and grief and they recognize those whom they have met previously (Hexaemoron 8.2 PG 29.168A) and John Climacus says they express love for each other, for “they often bewail the loss of their companions” (Ladder of Divine Ascent 26 PG 88.102A) and we might add, recalling the story of Balaam’s ass in the Book of Numbers 22: 22-34 that animals also possess spiritual vision, sometimes perceiving things to which we humans are blind and the Italian G-P Monti (1713-83) even thinks that animals can have a genuine spiritual life though only at a rudimentary level (See E Amann Dictionnaire de theologie catholique 10:2 (1929) col 2394). If so, Nemesius of Emesa is right to affirm that all living things—plants, animals and human beings share together the same vital energy (zoe); creation as a whole constitutes a single unity. This seems to also to be the view of the Buddha. But to Origen, ,there is a crucial difference: the human soul is made in the image of God but not the animal soul (Against Celsus 4.83 ): they have no conscious relationship with God and are not endowed with immortality. According to Basil, the animal soul is made from the earth and after death is dissolved into earth again (Hexaemeron 8.2 PG 29.168A) but human being possessed “the breath of life” breathed into them directly by God (Gen 2:7) and it is this which enables them to attain the realm of eternity: they expect individual human beings in all their particular personal characteristics, will rise from the dead but not the animals.Christ did say that not a single sparrow is “forgotten in God’s sight” and God is concerned about the death of each of them (Lk. 12:6; Matt. 10:29) but that human beings are of more value than the sparrows (Lk.12:7; Matt. 10:31) but though he did not say that birds have souls, neither did he exclude such a possibility. In any even, the Greek Christians believe in a hierarchical univierse in which humans, by virtue of their being created in the divine image, have dominion over the animals (Gen. 1:27-8). To Ware, dominion does not mean arbitrary dominion or cruel exploitation although this is the way it has been interpreted by many Christians through the ages. He thinks that dominion is "dominion according to the image and likeness of God" and such power as we have must be exercised solely in obedience to God. Therefore, we must show the same loving kindness and compassion God show us: note the respect shown to animals in the Jewish tradition (Robert Murray: The Cosmic Covenant 1992 pp 94-125)
The Greek Christians believe that at one time before the fall, Adam and Eve lived at peace with the animals in the garden of Eden but sin destroyed this harmony but in the eschatological kingdom at the end of time the primal harmony will be restored: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid…and a little child shall lead them” (Isa 11:6). In paradise humans and also the animals, ate only plants (Gen. 1:29-30) and presumably, this will be the case in the eschatolgocal kingdom and meat eating was allowed to humankind by God only after the fall (Gen.9::3) and thus not in itself sinful but it represents a decline from perfection: thus the Orthodox Church has never been vegetarian as a matter of principle and they usually abstain from meat and they just eat cold blooded fish, as Christ himself did (Lk 24: 42-43). Though animals do not have an immortal soul, that does not mean that they should not be treated with respect. On the contrary, the lives of many Christians abound in stories of close fellowship between men and beasts. They are not merely sentimental stories, but make a theological point according to Crabbe: it recalls the understanding and respect between human beings and animals before the Fall and points forward to the end time when such harmony may be restored. Isaac of Nineveh, honored in the Greek tradition as Isaac the Syrian (7thC) said, “the humble man approaches the wild animals, and the moment they catch sight of him, their ferocity is tamed. They come up and cling to him as to their master, wagging their tails and licking his hands and feet. For they smell on him the same smell that came from Adam before the transgression...What is a merciful heart?…It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for the demons, and for all that exists…As a result of his deep mercy, the heart of such a person shrinks and cannot bear the hear t to look on any injury or the slightest suffering of anything in creation. That is why he constantly offers up prayer full of tears even for the irrational animals…He even prays for the reptiles as a result of the great compassion that is poured out beyond measure in his heart, after the likeness of God” (Homily 74 ibid 341). Silouan the Athonite (1866-1938), a 20thC Orthodox saint, expresses the same intensity of compassion: “The Lord bestows such rich grace on his chosen that they embrace the whole earth, the whole world, with their love…One day…I saw a dead snake on my path which had been chopped in pieces and each piece writhed convulsively and I was filled with pity for every living creature, every suffering thing in creation and I wept bitterly before God” (Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakhrov) Saint Silouan the Athonite 1991 p367, 469)
(To be cont'd)
Ware next examines whether the notion of the "soul" is coterminous with reason or can extends "downwards" to include the Greek notion of "pathos" (emotions and the passions, there being no English word corresponding exactly with the Greek "pathos" ) and upwards to include the faculty of spiritual insight or vision higher than discursive reason. As far as "pathos" is concerned, some Greek Fathers follow the Stoics and see it negatively as a disease of the soul, something unnatural, excessive and disordered which needs to be eliminated through "apatheia" (dispassion or passionlessness or absence of passion) e.g. Clement of Alexandria states that the truly good person has no passions ( Stromateis 7:11 ed. Stahlin 47:1) and Evagrius of Pontus (d.399) highly influential amongst the Greek ascetic tradition, associates them with the "daimon" ("demon", not to be confused with "devil" but more in the sense of uncontrollable passions) and excludes them from the soul but other Greek Fathers, following Plato and Aristotle rather than the Stoics e.g. Theodore of Cyrus (c 393-460) and Abba Isaias (d.489) and Maximus the Confessor (c 580-662) (Triads 3.3. 15 ) view the passions as neutral such that whether they are good or bad depends to how we use them. Thus when they use the word "apatheia", they mean not the elimination of passion but their purification and per Palamas, our aim with regard to the passions is not "nekrosis" or their "mortification" but rather "metathesis" or their "transposition" or "redirection" and "epithymia" (desire) is to be turned into "eros" (an intense longing for God) and "thymos" (wrath or anger) is to become unselfish agape (an generalized love or unconditional love for even strangers) ( On Love 248)) and thus, on such views, the passions are not in themselves parasitic distortions but have a place in the true nature of the soul. Instead of eliminating, suppressing, and destroying our passion, we are to educate, re-orient, re-direct and transfigure them.
Can we re-orient our passions and our emotions and transfigure to achieve a spiritual understanding superior to the our reasoning. Some Greek Christians follow Plato in distinguishing between thinking (dianoia) in the sense of reasoning from premises to a conclusion and intellect or intellection (nous, noesis) but view that through the nous (serving as an eye of the soul), truth is simply “seen” to be true and whilst "dianoia" is marked by plurality, "noesis "is seen as unified so that at its higher level, the subject-object dichotomy vanishes: through dianoia we "know about" God but through "nous", we know God. Whilst "dianoia" forms general concepts by a process of abstractions from the data of sense-perception, by manipulating these concepts, dianoia then argues to a conclusion through the use of classification and analysis. In dianoia, the mind derives its information from outside of itself but on the level of nous, we participate directly in the reality we contemplate: “the direct experience (peira) of a thing suppresses the concept (logos) which represents that thing” per Maximus: we do not simply contemplate about the thing but we ourselves enter into it or it enters into us, so our knowledge ceases to be multiform and becomes simple and integrated. (To Thalassius, question 60 PG 90.624A; ed. Laga and Steel, 77).
It is often said that "language" is the "essence" of the human "mind". Maximus would readily agree that this is true of the "dianoia" but they would be more hesitant to say such a thing about the "nous" because at higher levels, intellection may reach out beyond language, visual images and mental concepts to include what we today would call “mystical experience” (which doesn't include such things as levitation, telepathy, trances or other paranormal phenomena) but includes the "direct awareness" of "supra-normal reality": we are never more authentically human when through this exercise of noesis, we "transcend" ourselves and enter into communion with the Eternal and in this sense, "nous" as our highest and our most God-like faculty, expresses our own "true self". If so then, the imagination (phantasia) understood by" the Greek Fathers as the image-forming faculty dependent on sense-perception, stands on a level below "noesis". Ware notes that all the references to "phantasia" in Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon carry a pejorative meaning. In fact, Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain (1748-1809) states that “the devil has a very close relationship and familiarity with the imagination” and goes so far as to style the "phantasia" as “a bridge of the devils”. This analysis shows that to the Greek Fathers, there are two kinds of thinking in the human "soul": a natural and rational thinking not involving any emotions and a more emotionally committed and more intuitive type of thinking which enables us to "know" and to "encounter" God.
Can the concept of "soul" be extended to include animals? Do animals have souls? There is no lack of texts which suggest that animals do have some kind of soul too. In the Euchologion (or Book of Prayers) used officially in the contemporary Greek Orthodox Church, there are several prayers for animals “…if a righteous man shows pity to the souls of his animals (cf. Prov.12:10), how should you not take pity on them, for you created them and you provide for them? In your compassion, you did not forget the animals in the ark. ..Through the good health and the plentiful number of oxen and other four-footed creatures, the earth is cultivated and its fruits increase; and your servants, who call upon your name, enjoy in full abundance the products of their farming." (Prayer of St. Modestos which is attributed to Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain) Origen argues at some lengths that animals have souls: “No one, I suppose, will doubt that all living creatures whatever, even those that live in water, have souls” and quotes Scripture in support of his view (Gen. 1: 21, 24 (LXX); Lev. 17:14 (LXX) On First Principles 2.8.1). In addition, Origen thinks that the animal souls has certain similarities with the human soul: “The instinct (physis) in hunting dogs and in war horses comes near, if I may say so, to reason itself” (ibid 3.1.3) but Theophilus of Antioch (c180) goes further and say that the instinct in all animals, wild and domesticated, which leads them to mate and care for their offspring shows they possess understanding” (To Autolycus 1.6). Other Greek Fathers maintain that animals share with humans, not only a certain reason and understanding but also memory and a wide range of emotions and affections e. g. Basil of Caesarea. says that they display feelings of joy and grief and they recognize those whom they have met previously (Hexaemoron 8.2 PG 29.168A) and John Climacus says they express love for each other, for “they often bewail the loss of their companions” (Ladder of Divine Ascent 26 PG 88.102A) and we might add, recalling the story of Balaam’s ass in the Book of Numbers 22: 22-34 that animals also possess spiritual vision, sometimes perceiving things to which we humans are blind and the Italian G-P Monti (1713-83) even thinks that animals can have a genuine spiritual life though only at a rudimentary level (See E Amann Dictionnaire de theologie catholique 10:2 (1929) col 2394). If so, Nemesius of Emesa is right to affirm that all living things—plants, animals and human beings share together the same vital energy (zoe); creation as a whole constitutes a single unity. This seems to also to be the view of the Buddha. But to Origen, ,there is a crucial difference: the human soul is made in the image of God but not the animal soul (Against Celsus 4.83 ): they have no conscious relationship with God and are not endowed with immortality. According to Basil, the animal soul is made from the earth and after death is dissolved into earth again (Hexaemeron 8.2 PG 29.168A) but human being possessed “the breath of life” breathed into them directly by God (Gen 2:7) and it is this which enables them to attain the realm of eternity: they expect individual human beings in all their particular personal characteristics, will rise from the dead but not the animals.Christ did say that not a single sparrow is “forgotten in God’s sight” and God is concerned about the death of each of them (Lk. 12:6; Matt. 10:29) but that human beings are of more value than the sparrows (Lk.12:7; Matt. 10:31) but though he did not say that birds have souls, neither did he exclude such a possibility. In any even, the Greek Christians believe in a hierarchical univierse in which humans, by virtue of their being created in the divine image, have dominion over the animals (Gen. 1:27-8). To Ware, dominion does not mean arbitrary dominion or cruel exploitation although this is the way it has been interpreted by many Christians through the ages. He thinks that dominion is "dominion according to the image and likeness of God" and such power as we have must be exercised solely in obedience to God. Therefore, we must show the same loving kindness and compassion God show us: note the respect shown to animals in the Jewish tradition (Robert Murray: The Cosmic Covenant 1992 pp 94-125)
The Greek Christians believe that at one time before the fall, Adam and Eve lived at peace with the animals in the garden of Eden but sin destroyed this harmony but in the eschatological kingdom at the end of time the primal harmony will be restored: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid…and a little child shall lead them” (Isa 11:6). In paradise humans and also the animals, ate only plants (Gen. 1:29-30) and presumably, this will be the case in the eschatolgocal kingdom and meat eating was allowed to humankind by God only after the fall (Gen.9::3) and thus not in itself sinful but it represents a decline from perfection: thus the Orthodox Church has never been vegetarian as a matter of principle and they usually abstain from meat and they just eat cold blooded fish, as Christ himself did (Lk 24: 42-43). Though animals do not have an immortal soul, that does not mean that they should not be treated with respect. On the contrary, the lives of many Christians abound in stories of close fellowship between men and beasts. They are not merely sentimental stories, but make a theological point according to Crabbe: it recalls the understanding and respect between human beings and animals before the Fall and points forward to the end time when such harmony may be restored. Isaac of Nineveh, honored in the Greek tradition as Isaac the Syrian (7thC) said, “the humble man approaches the wild animals, and the moment they catch sight of him, their ferocity is tamed. They come up and cling to him as to their master, wagging their tails and licking his hands and feet. For they smell on him the same smell that came from Adam before the transgression...What is a merciful heart?…It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for the demons, and for all that exists…As a result of his deep mercy, the heart of such a person shrinks and cannot bear the hear t to look on any injury or the slightest suffering of anything in creation. That is why he constantly offers up prayer full of tears even for the irrational animals…He even prays for the reptiles as a result of the great compassion that is poured out beyond measure in his heart, after the likeness of God” (Homily 74 ibid 341). Silouan the Athonite (1866-1938), a 20thC Orthodox saint, expresses the same intensity of compassion: “The Lord bestows such rich grace on his chosen that they embrace the whole earth, the whole world, with their love…One day…I saw a dead snake on my path which had been chopped in pieces and each piece writhed convulsively and I was filled with pity for every living creature, every suffering thing in creation and I wept bitterly before God” (Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakhrov) Saint Silouan the Athonite 1991 p367, 469)
(To be cont'd)
2012年2月22日 星期三
From Soul to Self to Annihilation of Self.7
(Cont'd)
It is usual for people with religious beliefs to talk about "souls".Jesus once asked rhetorically: "What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?". It is obvious that our "soul" is regarded as the most valuable and most precious part of our "possession" , the protection and advancement of which is the duty or ideal of the the faithful to attain through various kinds of religious worship, rites, rituals and practices etc. Not only the Jews and later Christians and even later Muslims, many people in various primitive societies have got their own concept of some kind of "spirits" (e.g the spirit of their ancestors, the spirit of wild animals, the spirit of plants or even spirit of various natural forces or spectacular natural phenomena like mountains, seas, lakes, clouds, rains, stars etc ) which are supposed to somehow survive their death or destruction or exist "supernaturally" and have some kind of "perennial" or even "eternal" existence. What exactly is a "soul"? What kind of characteristics is it supposed to have? Do animals and plants have "souls"? If they have, are their "souls" the same as or different from human "souls" and if different, in what way are they different? How do we come to have such concepts?
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "A soul--in certain spiritual, philosophic and psychological traditions--is the incorporeal essence of a person, living thing or object...Soul can function as a synonym for spirit, mind or self, scientific works in particular often consider soul as a synonym for mind. I also looked up "From Soul to Self" (1999) ed. M James C Crabbe. which contains many articles on the subject. In addition, I consulted the Wikipedia, according to which, the word soul is derived from the Old English "sáwol/sáwel" first apearing in the 8th century poem Beowulf (v 2820) and in the Vespasian Psalter (77: 50) and is similar to other Germanic and Baltic words for the same idea including the Gothic "saiwala", old High German "sêula/sêla", old Low Franconian "sêla/sála" and the Lithuanian "siela". Another suggestion is that it is connected to the German root word for "binding" or "sailian" or Old English words "selian" or Old High German "seilen" meaning being "bound in death" and the ritual practice of binding or restraining the corpse of the deceased in the grave from returning as a "ghost". It is probably an adaptation by early missionaries and a translation of the original Greek word "psyche" or "life, spirit, consciousness". The Greek word "psyche" is itself derived from a verb meaning "to cool, to blow", referring to the vital breath or the animating principle in human and animals, as opposed to "soma" or "body" which could refer to either a ghost or spirit of the dead (as in Homer) and since Pindar, to the more philosophic notion of an "immortal and immaterial essence" left over at death and since Terence, the word "anima" has been used as translation of the original "psyche"in the English translation of the Greek and Latin "anima" in Matthew 10: 28 "And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.". In the Septuagint LXX the Greek word for "psyche" is translated from the Hebrew word "nephesh" which means "life, vital breath" and is later translated into English as "soul, self, life, creature, person, appeitite, mind, living being, desire, emotion, passion." e.g. in Genesis 1: 20 : "And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth." And St. Paul distinguished between the Jewish notion of 'nephesh" (vital breath) and "ruah" (spirit) in Septuagint LXX e.g. Genesis 1:2 "the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. "
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the term "soul" in the Sacred Scripture refers to human life or the entire human person. and it also means "the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God's image or ...the spiritual principle in man" and that our body becomes "human precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit" and that, "though made of body and soul, is a unity." and such unity "is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the "form" of the body i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature." and that "it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection." although "sometimes the soul is distinguished from the spirit" but that "this distinction does not introduce a duality into the soul" because "Spirit" signifies that from creation man is ordered to a supernatural end and that his soul can gratuitously be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God."
What were/are the Christian view on the human soul? According to Kallistos Ware in "The Soul in Greek Christianity", to Clement of Alexandria (c150-c215), the greatest of all lessons is to know yourself because " if someone knows himself, he will know God; and if he knows God, he will become like God" (Pedagogue3.1.1 )(cf. 1 John3:2). Cyril of Jerusalem (c.315-87) said" I have a soul and yet I cannot describe its characteristics." (Catechesis 6.6) whilst John Chrysostrom (c 347-407) said, " The essence of our own soul is not known to us fully or rather it is not known to us at all” ( in On the Incomprehensiblity of God ed. Malingrey 259-60). They they all echo C G. Jung's view that the psyche is a foreign, almost unexplored country (Modern Man in Search of a Soul 1984 p 86).Gregory of Nyssa's (c.330-395) view is the standard Christian view that man is made in the image and likeness of God, as affirmed by the Scripture (Gen.1:26-27) i.e. that each of us is a created icon of the uncreated God but “an image” is only truly such in so far as it expresses all the attributes of its archetype. If one of the attributes of the divine nature is to be beyond our understanding, does that mean that we must resemble the archetype in that respect? ( On the Creation of Man 11 in Petrologia Graeca 44 156AB) ("PG").
However much they differ in other respects, Greek Christian thinkers from New Testament times to the end of Byzantine era (i e. 1st to 14thC) are in agreement on one point viz. to understand ourselves, theory alone (i.e. philosophical speculations, abstract doctrinal definition etc.) is never itself sufficient and to have any self-knowledge, practice or ascesis (fasting, crouching, prostrating, making the sign of the cross,repeating invocation of the Holy Spirit, incantation of the Jesus Prayer "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us" and linking the words with the rhythm of breathing, gazing at the navel, simultaneously practicing an inner exploration, striving to make their intellect descend into their heart) is also required. Thus self knowledge can only be gained through silence, prayer and worship and through sharing in the sacraments.
Since to the early Greek Christians, human nature is beyond our comprehension, they have no agreed definition of the soul. Nemeisius of Emersa (late 4th Century) says of non-Christian philosophers: "the subject of the soul is differently handled by almost every ancient author." Some of the Greek Fathers offer a basically Platonic definition of the soul. e.g. Gregory of Nyssa : “a living and intellectual essence…non material and bodiless” ( On the Soul and Resurrection PG 46.29AB). To Athanasius of Alexandria (c.296-373), the soul is “an intellectual essence that is bodiless, passionless and immortal” (Questions to Antiochus 16 PG 28.608A ) although according to Crabbe, that may be a wrong attribution. Macarius the Egyptian however equate the soul with the inner man (ho eso anthropos) and in his Spiritual Homilies (late 4thC) Collection II ("SH ") 7.8, he expresses the view that there is a certain "diversity in unity" : “Just as the members of the body, though many, are said to be a single human being, so also the members of a soul are many—intellect (nous), conscience, will, thoughts--but the soul is one”. Thus it although it may comprise of a rational mind, freewill, conscience and just ordinary thoughts, they are all different aspects of the human soul and body and soul are seen as two complementary entities that constitute an undivided unity: neither can properly exist apart from the other and their separation at death is no more than temporary. Crabbe notes that while it is taken for granted that we are made in the divine image, there are no authoritative source [neither the Bible nor in the Nicene-Constantinople Creed (381) nor in the doctrinal decrees of the 7 Ecumenical Councils (325-787)] do we find any clear statement specifying the precise nature of this indwelling image. As said by Epiphanius of Salamis (c 315-403) “It cannot be denied that all humans are in the image of God but we do not inquire too curiously how they are in the image”
Can the soul exist without a body? Most Greek Christians link the divine image with the soul and exclude the body from participation in it and think that upon death, the soul will leave the human body but a small but a significant minority associate the divine image with the total human body, soul and spirit eg. Irenaeus of Lyons (c130-c200) ( Against the Heresies 5.6.1). However it is certain that the image of the divine in man is regularly associated with his possession "self-awareness" and of "reason", of "freedom in moral choice" and of "dominion over the animals" (Gen. 1:28).
But because the human soul is made in the image of God, to the Greek Christians, it cannot be understood on its own as a self-contained and autonomous reality but must always be be and can only be understood in its relationship to God. The divine is the determining element in our humanness. Crabbe thinks that God is at the innermost core of our being; apart from God, were are unintelligible. This relationship with God is what makes the human soul distinctive and unique and because of this special relationship with God, our freedom cannot be exercised arbitrarily but only in conformity with the will of God ie. only when our acts of free choice authentically reflects God's divine love and compassion. Our freedom can only be properly exercised in love and compassion. This starting point is thus very different from Eric Fromm's view, which does not presuppose any such relationship with the divine.
Whatever the true nature or limitation of what is understood by the term "soul" and the exercise of "free will" may be, there are two clear authoritative statements on the unity and inseparability of of the soul with the human body:
1. the 5th Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 553, condemning Origen’s idea of the pre-existence of the soul because the soul and body come into existence at the same time
2. The Nicene-Constantinople Creed (381) concludes: “I believe in the resurrection of the body” because the severance of the soul from the body at death is not final and irrevocable for upon Christ’s Second Coming on the last day, the two will be united again because Christ was resurrected from the dead on the third day and thereafter, they will coexist eternally in the age to come. Thus Christianity not only believes in the immortality of the soul, it also believes in the ultimate re-integration of the body with the soul on the day of Last Judgement.. This is not based on any philosophic argument but merely based on an article of their faith. As Paul argues, our conviction that eventually, we shall be raised from the dead depends in the final analysis upon our belief that Jesus Christ truly rose from the dead. As Paul argues in 1 Cor 15: 20-24, Christ had marked out the path that we shall follow: he is the first fruits and we are the harvest
Is the body in which Christ was raised from the dead the same or a different body? As far as his disciples are concerned, it is the same body, wounds he sustained on the cross included. According to the Bible, his disciples recognized Jesus by seeing the wounds of the Cross on his hands and feet and in his side (.John 20: 20-28). What about the body of us mortals upon the day of Last Judgment? Will it be the same body? If so, our body at what age? Will it be composed of the same atoms and molecules and arranged in exactly the same way as we may be just at our hour of death or will it be composed of all our atoms and molecules but at the height of our youth and beauty or will it be an improved version of our body but without any plastic surgery? The Bible appears to be silent. All we have according to St. Paul is that we shall rise in a body "glorified" and perhaps transfigured: a “spiritual” body as Paul puts it in 1 Cor. 15:44 . But what do we mean by "spiritual"? Is that just a metaphor? It it is material, then in what way will it remain material? Or will it be "non-material"? We simply do not have any answers! According to Macarius, in his Spiritual Homilies: “all the members of the body are raised, not a hair perishes” (SH 15:10 cf. Lk. 21:18 ). Gregory of Nyssa thinks that the constituent elements making up our physical body are constantly changing but the soul imposes upon such elements a "particular form" (eidos) and by virtue of the uninterrupted preservation of this "form", it may legitimately be asserted that we continue throughout our life to have the same body and at resurrection, the soul will reassemble the particles of matters from which the body was formed during the present life and impress upon them the same “form” as before (On the Creation of Man 27 (PG 44.225C-228) ( cf. On Soul and the Resurrection PG46.73A-80A; On the Dead PG 46.532B-536B ed. Jaeger/Heil 62-66). It seems that what is important is not the individual particles of our "spiritual" body or "glorified" body but the continuity of the "form" supplied by the soul, whatever "form" there means. Is that "form" the kind of form talked about by Plato or does it mean something else? Thomas Aquinas, a great Catholic theologian, thinks that we are not merely our Platonic form or our soul. He says, "The soul is not the whole man, and my soul is not me" (in I Cor. c 15 lect. 2 ed. Cai #924) If the body and soul come into existence simultaneously and will be reunited at the resurrection, then it follows they together constitute an integral whole, an undivided unity but the soul is not the whole man and “my soul is not me” and “me” is the combination and coincidence of the two together.In this respect see the work attributed to Justin Martyr (c 100-c 165) (On the Resurrection 8 PG 6. 158B ) who is supposed to have said that what he called "me" is not his soul without his body nor his body without his soul but the combination and coinherence of the two together. We may legitimately ask: "Is there any "sense" in talking about it like that i.e. is it "nonsense"" ? But In this regard, another Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis appeals to the example of a waterfall: the drops in the waterfall are continually changing but the curve assumed by the waterfall remains constant; since the water preserves the same form, it is indeed the same waterfall (Miracles: A Preliminary Study 1947 180 ) Gregory of Nyssa uses the analogies of a stream and the flame of a candle ( PG 46.141AB). If so, what is the basis of their respective claims?
Ware thinks that the Greek Patristic texts probably derived their ideas of what the human "soul" consists of or in from the classical Greek philosophy. They thus distinguish various subdivision within this all embracing unity of the human "soul". Some of them presuppose a simple bipartite division of body and soul eg Council of Chalcedon (451) states that the Incarnate Christ is “complete in Godhead and complete in humanity, truly God and truly man formed from a rational soul and body”, whatever that means except in a metaphorical sense. Others prefer a tripartite division, distinguishing the soul , the intellect (nous) or spirit (pneuma) eg. Origen insists that the human being is comprised of “the soul, body and spirit” but his the "human spirit" is distinct from the Holy Spirit of God (in Irenaeus the distinction is less clear and Gregory of Nyssa is also a trichotomist in his On the Creation of Man( 8 PG 44.145D) and claims that throughout the Scripture, there is a distinction between soul and spirit (see Commentary on John 32 18 ed. Preuschen 455.17-18). Some alternate between the one scheme and the other, considering that there is no basic discrepancy between the two e. g. Apollinaris of Laodicea (c310-c390) (See R. A. Norris Manhood and Christ. A Study in the Christology of Theodore of Mopsuestia 1963 81-122). If we may rely on Origen, it may be doubted whether the trichotomist or the dichotomist scheme has a clear basis in Scripture: The Hebraic concept of personhood, as found in the Old Testament, is "embodied" and "physical": scarcely is there a soul-body contrast of the Platonic type and the person is seen as a single unity of “flesh-animated-by soul”. In the New Testament, nowhere does Paul make a direct contrast between body and soul although he often distinguishes between flesh (sarx) and spirit (pneuma). Only on one occasion did he use the triad “spirit, soul and body” (1 Thess 5:23) but it may be doubted if he intended to provide there a systematic enumeration of the parts of the human person
As regards the soul, Greek Christian authors employ a variety of classifications, sometimes twofold and sometimes threefold e.g.Clement of Alexandria: distinguishes between knowledge (gnosis) and impulse (horme), between the cognitive and the affective/volitional parts of the soul (Stromateis 6.8 ed.Stahlin 466.13-14). Basil of Caesarea (c300-c379) employs the Aristotelian distinction between the “active” and “passive” “receptive aspects of the soul (Homily 3.7 PG 31.213C ed. Rudberg 35.6-7). More frequently, the Greek Fathers adopt the tripartite subdivision of the soul, developed by Plato: logistikon (the rational or intellectual aspect); thymikon (the spirited or incensive aspect) and epithymetikon (the appetitive or desiring aspect) (see Clement of Alexandria, The Pedagogue 3.1.2 Gregory of Nazianzus Poems PG 371381A-1384A; Evagrius Practicus 89 ed. Guillaumont 680-2 ) But Origen expresses reservation about this classification, noting its lack of support from the Scripture (On First Principles 3.4.1)
Per Ware, a second tripartite scheme popular among the Greek Fathers, again with little explicit support from Scripture, is the subdivision found in Aristotle
the vegetative soul (nutritive); the animal soul (sensitive)and the human soul (rational/intellectual). In this threefold scheme used by e. g. Gregory of Nyssa, it is evident that the term "psyche" is being used with a connotation far wider than that normally ascribed today to the word “soul”: it signifies not just "self consciousness" also in a broader sense, "vital energy" or "life-force" but Gregory of Nyssa adds that in the strict sense, psyche can only be applied to the rational human soul and that the animal soul and still less the vegetative soul is not a soul in the strict sense (On the Creation of Man 15 PG 44.176B-177A). Thus in his view, animals and plants do not have souls.
The Greek Fathers affirm with varying degrees of emphasis that the soul is not only one with itself but also with the body and to indicate this all embracing wholeness of the human person, many of them employ the integrating symbol the notion of the heart (kardia) (the best discussion is still that of Antoine Guillaumont “Les sens des noms du Coeur dans l’antiquite Le Coeur” Etudes Carmelitaines 29: Paris, 1950 pp 41-81). Today, the heart is contrasted with the head and the head is regarded as the seat of reason whilst the heart is considered to be the seat of the affections and emotions but in the Bible, the heart designates not simply the affections and emotions, which are located primarily in the guts or belly but rather the spiritual center of the human person but there is no head-heart contrast in the Old Testaments: the heart is the seat of memory, conscience, thought, wisdom and intelligence, the place where we make moral decisions and where we experience divine grace: God dwells in the heart and so also does Satan (see e.g. Matt.6:21; 15:19 ; Lk 2:19; Rom. 1:24; 8:27; Gal. 4:6 and Eph. 3:16-17). In some Greek Patristic texts eg. those ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite (c 500), there are very few references to the heart but no special significance is attached to the term but other sources, such as the Macarius, ascribe to the heart the centrality and the richness of meaning it possesses in the Bible: “the heart directs and governs the whole bodily organism; and when grace possesses the pasturages of the heart, it rules over all the members and the thoughts. For there, in the heart, is the intellect (nous) and all the thoughts of the soul and its expectation and in this way grace penetrates throughout all parts of the body” (Macarius SH 15:20 cf. 22-23; 43.7). The heart is not only the physical organ in our chest, it is also symbolically the point of convergence between the body and the soul and the meeting place between the human being and God and corresponds in some measure to the modern concept of the unconscious “within the heart is the unfathomable depth” (SH 15.32 cf. Ps 63 [64]: 7 LXX: “the heart is deep”) . The heart is thus the unifying
center of our personhood, open on one side to the abyss of our
unconscious, open on the other to the abyss of divine grace and the nous
or intellect is a faculty far higher than the reasoning brain—a
visionary power, creative and self-transcending, that reaches out beyond
time into eternity, beyond words into silence.
The Greek Patristic tradition concerning the heart is lucidly summed up towards the end of the Byzantine era by Gregory Palamas (1296-1359): some Fathers locate the mind(dianoia) or the intellect (nous) in the head and others in the heart but this does not greatly disturb him for he considers that there are no dogmas in the realm of physiology but in any case, since the mind is non-material, it cannot be precisely located in space: citing John Climacus (c 570-c649), he says the mind is “both in us and not in us” “our intelligence (logistikon) is neither within us as in a container—for it is incorporeal—nor yet outside us, for it is united to us” and expresses a definite preference for the approach found in the Macarian SH whereby the mind or intellect is associated with the heart rather than the head, describing the heart as “the shrine of the intelligence and the chief intellectual organ of the body…the ruling organ…the throne of grace, where the intellect and all the thoughts of the soul reside” and our aim in prayer is to “collect our intellect, outwardly dispersed through the senses and bring it back within ourselves—back to the heart itself, the shrine of our thoughts”. To Palamas, the Hesychasts strive to "bring their intellect back and to enclose it within their body and particularly within that innermost body within the body that we call the heart" (see Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts 1.2.3-4 quoting John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent 26 PG 88.1020A and Macarius SH15.20) .Palamas thinks that “after the Fall, our inner being naturally adapts itself to outward forms" ( Triads 1.2.8 and The Encounter of the Religions: a Dialogue between the West and the Orient, with an Essay on the Prayer of Jesus Tournai 1960 92-93). He thus defends the psychosomatic techniques used by the Hesychasts (those who pursue inner stillness (hesychia) through the practice of contemplative prayer, usually in the form "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us", a bit like the Tibetan Buddhists' recitation of various Buddhist mantras. They would adopt a crouching postures in their prayers, with their gaze fixed on the heart or navel, and would link the words of the Jesus Prayer with the rhythm of their breathing and at the same time they would practice an inner exploration, striving to bring their intellect descend into their heart and for which practice they were often ridiculed as omphlopyshoi or "navel-psychics" or people who locate the soul in the navel, a name against which they vigorously protested) Palamas thus thinks that there is a certain correlation between the organs of our physical body and the different centres of spiritual energy within ourselves operating through in a kind of "analogy-participation" but not literally.
Palamas' interpretation of the heart has much in common with the understanding of "memoria" in Book 10 of the Confessions of Augustine (354-430) but by "memoria", Augustine meant not primarily the recollection of past events but the “deepest abyss of the ego” to use Henry Chadwick’s phrase (Augustine 1986 p 67) or in the words of John Burnaby “that deep of the soul in which is treasured not only the consciousness of the self but a consciousness of God” (Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine 1938 p155). It is "aula ingens" “a vast courtyard” “a profound and infinite multiplicity” “a large and boundless interiority” (penetrale): Within the "memoria", each of us finds contained “the heaven, the earth and the sea”: there we encounter not only our own true self but God" (Augustine Confessions 10:8.14-15; 10.17.26). The "memoria" is thus closely associated with the intellect (mens) and the spirit (spiritus): our sense of continuity and identity is rooted in the memory and it is through memory that we experience ourselves as created in the image of God and so become responsive to divine grace. Here there are very close parallels between the Biblical, the Greek Patristic notions of the functions of the heart and indeed, save for the existence of a monotheistic God, very close to the traditional Chinese conception of what the heart does as in the "heart philosophy" of Sung and Ming Dynasties. And if the Greek Christian understanding of the heart resembles Augustine’s memoria, it also anticipates the concept of the self as found in C. G. Jung, which includes not only the "ego-consciousness" but the innermost depths of our "personhood": “The self is not only the center of but the whole circumference which resembles both consciousness and the unconscious; it is the center of this totality, just as the ego is the center of the conscious mind…The self is our life’s goal, for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination we call individuality” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections ed. Aniela Jaffe 1967 417) In short. in the Greek Patristic usage, the heart and the soul overlap. The soul is seen as non-material and is contrasted with the body; the heart is both a physical organ and a center of spiritual energy and thus symbolizes the fundamental unity of the human person and while the word soul has predominantly philosophical associations, the heart is more explicitly religious in its overtones, oriented towards the spirit and towards God and designates the human being as a creature made in the image of God and a finite expression of God’s infinite self-expression.
(To be con'td)
It is usual for people with religious beliefs to talk about "souls".Jesus once asked rhetorically: "What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?". It is obvious that our "soul" is regarded as the most valuable and most precious part of our "possession" , the protection and advancement of which is the duty or ideal of the the faithful to attain through various kinds of religious worship, rites, rituals and practices etc. Not only the Jews and later Christians and even later Muslims, many people in various primitive societies have got their own concept of some kind of "spirits" (e.g the spirit of their ancestors, the spirit of wild animals, the spirit of plants or even spirit of various natural forces or spectacular natural phenomena like mountains, seas, lakes, clouds, rains, stars etc ) which are supposed to somehow survive their death or destruction or exist "supernaturally" and have some kind of "perennial" or even "eternal" existence. What exactly is a "soul"? What kind of characteristics is it supposed to have? Do animals and plants have "souls"? If they have, are their "souls" the same as or different from human "souls" and if different, in what way are they different? How do we come to have such concepts?
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "A soul--in certain spiritual, philosophic and psychological traditions--is the incorporeal essence of a person, living thing or object...Soul can function as a synonym for spirit, mind or self, scientific works in particular often consider soul as a synonym for mind. I also looked up "From Soul to Self" (1999) ed. M James C Crabbe. which contains many articles on the subject. In addition, I consulted the Wikipedia, according to which, the word soul is derived from the Old English "sáwol/sáwel" first apearing in the 8th century poem Beowulf (v 2820) and in the Vespasian Psalter (77: 50) and is similar to other Germanic and Baltic words for the same idea including the Gothic "saiwala", old High German "sêula/sêla", old Low Franconian "sêla/sála" and the Lithuanian "siela". Another suggestion is that it is connected to the German root word for "binding" or "sailian" or Old English words "selian" or Old High German "seilen" meaning being "bound in death" and the ritual practice of binding or restraining the corpse of the deceased in the grave from returning as a "ghost". It is probably an adaptation by early missionaries and a translation of the original Greek word "psyche" or "life, spirit, consciousness". The Greek word "psyche" is itself derived from a verb meaning "to cool, to blow", referring to the vital breath or the animating principle in human and animals, as opposed to "soma" or "body" which could refer to either a ghost or spirit of the dead (as in Homer) and since Pindar, to the more philosophic notion of an "immortal and immaterial essence" left over at death and since Terence, the word "anima" has been used as translation of the original "psyche"in the English translation of the Greek and Latin "anima" in Matthew 10: 28 "And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.". In the Septuagint LXX the Greek word for "psyche" is translated from the Hebrew word "nephesh" which means "life, vital breath" and is later translated into English as "soul, self, life, creature, person, appeitite, mind, living being, desire, emotion, passion." e.g. in Genesis 1: 20 : "And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth." And St. Paul distinguished between the Jewish notion of 'nephesh" (vital breath) and "ruah" (spirit) in Septuagint LXX e.g. Genesis 1:2 "the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. "
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the term "soul" in the Sacred Scripture refers to human life or the entire human person. and it also means "the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God's image or ...the spiritual principle in man" and that our body becomes "human precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit" and that, "though made of body and soul, is a unity." and such unity "is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the "form" of the body i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature." and that "it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection." although "sometimes the soul is distinguished from the spirit" but that "this distinction does not introduce a duality into the soul" because "Spirit" signifies that from creation man is ordered to a supernatural end and that his soul can gratuitously be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God."
What were/are the Christian view on the human soul? According to Kallistos Ware in "The Soul in Greek Christianity", to Clement of Alexandria (c150-c215), the greatest of all lessons is to know yourself because " if someone knows himself, he will know God; and if he knows God, he will become like God" (Pedagogue3.1.1 )(cf. 1 John3:2). Cyril of Jerusalem (c.315-87) said" I have a soul and yet I cannot describe its characteristics." (Catechesis 6.6) whilst John Chrysostrom (c 347-407) said, " The essence of our own soul is not known to us fully or rather it is not known to us at all” ( in On the Incomprehensiblity of God ed. Malingrey 259-60). They they all echo C G. Jung's view that the psyche is a foreign, almost unexplored country (Modern Man in Search of a Soul 1984 p 86).Gregory of Nyssa's (c.330-395) view is the standard Christian view that man is made in the image and likeness of God, as affirmed by the Scripture (Gen.1:26-27) i.e. that each of us is a created icon of the uncreated God but “an image” is only truly such in so far as it expresses all the attributes of its archetype. If one of the attributes of the divine nature is to be beyond our understanding, does that mean that we must resemble the archetype in that respect? ( On the Creation of Man 11 in Petrologia Graeca 44 156AB) ("PG").
However much they differ in other respects, Greek Christian thinkers from New Testament times to the end of Byzantine era (i e. 1st to 14thC) are in agreement on one point viz. to understand ourselves, theory alone (i.e. philosophical speculations, abstract doctrinal definition etc.) is never itself sufficient and to have any self-knowledge, practice or ascesis (fasting, crouching, prostrating, making the sign of the cross,repeating invocation of the Holy Spirit, incantation of the Jesus Prayer "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us" and linking the words with the rhythm of breathing, gazing at the navel, simultaneously practicing an inner exploration, striving to make their intellect descend into their heart) is also required. Thus self knowledge can only be gained through silence, prayer and worship and through sharing in the sacraments.
Since to the early Greek Christians, human nature is beyond our comprehension, they have no agreed definition of the soul. Nemeisius of Emersa (late 4th Century) says of non-Christian philosophers: "the subject of the soul is differently handled by almost every ancient author." Some of the Greek Fathers offer a basically Platonic definition of the soul. e.g. Gregory of Nyssa : “a living and intellectual essence…non material and bodiless” ( On the Soul and Resurrection PG 46.29AB). To Athanasius of Alexandria (c.296-373), the soul is “an intellectual essence that is bodiless, passionless and immortal” (Questions to Antiochus 16 PG 28.608A ) although according to Crabbe, that may be a wrong attribution. Macarius the Egyptian however equate the soul with the inner man (ho eso anthropos) and in his Spiritual Homilies (late 4thC) Collection II ("SH ") 7.8, he expresses the view that there is a certain "diversity in unity" : “Just as the members of the body, though many, are said to be a single human being, so also the members of a soul are many—intellect (nous), conscience, will, thoughts--but the soul is one”. Thus it although it may comprise of a rational mind, freewill, conscience and just ordinary thoughts, they are all different aspects of the human soul and body and soul are seen as two complementary entities that constitute an undivided unity: neither can properly exist apart from the other and their separation at death is no more than temporary. Crabbe notes that while it is taken for granted that we are made in the divine image, there are no authoritative source [neither the Bible nor in the Nicene-Constantinople Creed (381) nor in the doctrinal decrees of the 7 Ecumenical Councils (325-787)] do we find any clear statement specifying the precise nature of this indwelling image. As said by Epiphanius of Salamis (c 315-403) “It cannot be denied that all humans are in the image of God but we do not inquire too curiously how they are in the image”
Can the soul exist without a body? Most Greek Christians link the divine image with the soul and exclude the body from participation in it and think that upon death, the soul will leave the human body but a small but a significant minority associate the divine image with the total human body, soul and spirit eg. Irenaeus of Lyons (c130-c200) ( Against the Heresies 5.6.1). However it is certain that the image of the divine in man is regularly associated with his possession "self-awareness" and of "reason", of "freedom in moral choice" and of "dominion over the animals" (Gen. 1:28).
But because the human soul is made in the image of God, to the Greek Christians, it cannot be understood on its own as a self-contained and autonomous reality but must always be be and can only be understood in its relationship to God. The divine is the determining element in our humanness. Crabbe thinks that God is at the innermost core of our being; apart from God, were are unintelligible. This relationship with God is what makes the human soul distinctive and unique and because of this special relationship with God, our freedom cannot be exercised arbitrarily but only in conformity with the will of God ie. only when our acts of free choice authentically reflects God's divine love and compassion. Our freedom can only be properly exercised in love and compassion. This starting point is thus very different from Eric Fromm's view, which does not presuppose any such relationship with the divine.
Whatever the true nature or limitation of what is understood by the term "soul" and the exercise of "free will" may be, there are two clear authoritative statements on the unity and inseparability of of the soul with the human body:
1. the 5th Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 553, condemning Origen’s idea of the pre-existence of the soul because the soul and body come into existence at the same time
2. The Nicene-Constantinople Creed (381) concludes: “I believe in the resurrection of the body” because the severance of the soul from the body at death is not final and irrevocable for upon Christ’s Second Coming on the last day, the two will be united again because Christ was resurrected from the dead on the third day and thereafter, they will coexist eternally in the age to come. Thus Christianity not only believes in the immortality of the soul, it also believes in the ultimate re-integration of the body with the soul on the day of Last Judgement.. This is not based on any philosophic argument but merely based on an article of their faith. As Paul argues, our conviction that eventually, we shall be raised from the dead depends in the final analysis upon our belief that Jesus Christ truly rose from the dead. As Paul argues in 1 Cor 15: 20-24, Christ had marked out the path that we shall follow: he is the first fruits and we are the harvest
Is the body in which Christ was raised from the dead the same or a different body? As far as his disciples are concerned, it is the same body, wounds he sustained on the cross included. According to the Bible, his disciples recognized Jesus by seeing the wounds of the Cross on his hands and feet and in his side (.John 20: 20-28). What about the body of us mortals upon the day of Last Judgment? Will it be the same body? If so, our body at what age? Will it be composed of the same atoms and molecules and arranged in exactly the same way as we may be just at our hour of death or will it be composed of all our atoms and molecules but at the height of our youth and beauty or will it be an improved version of our body but without any plastic surgery? The Bible appears to be silent. All we have according to St. Paul is that we shall rise in a body "glorified" and perhaps transfigured: a “spiritual” body as Paul puts it in 1 Cor. 15:44 . But what do we mean by "spiritual"? Is that just a metaphor? It it is material, then in what way will it remain material? Or will it be "non-material"? We simply do not have any answers! According to Macarius, in his Spiritual Homilies: “all the members of the body are raised, not a hair perishes” (SH 15:10 cf. Lk. 21:18 ). Gregory of Nyssa thinks that the constituent elements making up our physical body are constantly changing but the soul imposes upon such elements a "particular form" (eidos) and by virtue of the uninterrupted preservation of this "form", it may legitimately be asserted that we continue throughout our life to have the same body and at resurrection, the soul will reassemble the particles of matters from which the body was formed during the present life and impress upon them the same “form” as before (On the Creation of Man 27 (PG 44.225C-228) ( cf. On Soul and the Resurrection PG46.73A-80A; On the Dead PG 46.532B-536B ed. Jaeger/Heil 62-66). It seems that what is important is not the individual particles of our "spiritual" body or "glorified" body but the continuity of the "form" supplied by the soul, whatever "form" there means. Is that "form" the kind of form talked about by Plato or does it mean something else? Thomas Aquinas, a great Catholic theologian, thinks that we are not merely our Platonic form or our soul. He says, "The soul is not the whole man, and my soul is not me" (in I Cor. c 15 lect. 2 ed. Cai #924) If the body and soul come into existence simultaneously and will be reunited at the resurrection, then it follows they together constitute an integral whole, an undivided unity but the soul is not the whole man and “my soul is not me” and “me” is the combination and coincidence of the two together.In this respect see the work attributed to Justin Martyr (c 100-c 165) (On the Resurrection 8 PG 6. 158B ) who is supposed to have said that what he called "me" is not his soul without his body nor his body without his soul but the combination and coinherence of the two together. We may legitimately ask: "Is there any "sense" in talking about it like that i.e. is it "nonsense"" ? But In this regard, another Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis appeals to the example of a waterfall: the drops in the waterfall are continually changing but the curve assumed by the waterfall remains constant; since the water preserves the same form, it is indeed the same waterfall (Miracles: A Preliminary Study 1947 180 ) Gregory of Nyssa uses the analogies of a stream and the flame of a candle ( PG 46.141AB). If so, what is the basis of their respective claims?
Ware thinks that the Greek Patristic texts probably derived their ideas of what the human "soul" consists of or in from the classical Greek philosophy. They thus distinguish various subdivision within this all embracing unity of the human "soul". Some of them presuppose a simple bipartite division of body and soul eg Council of Chalcedon (451) states that the Incarnate Christ is “complete in Godhead and complete in humanity, truly God and truly man formed from a rational soul and body”, whatever that means except in a metaphorical sense. Others prefer a tripartite division, distinguishing the soul , the intellect (nous) or spirit (pneuma) eg. Origen insists that the human being is comprised of “the soul, body and spirit” but his the "human spirit" is distinct from the Holy Spirit of God (in Irenaeus the distinction is less clear and Gregory of Nyssa is also a trichotomist in his On the Creation of Man( 8 PG 44.145D) and claims that throughout the Scripture, there is a distinction between soul and spirit (see Commentary on John 32 18 ed. Preuschen 455.17-18). Some alternate between the one scheme and the other, considering that there is no basic discrepancy between the two e. g. Apollinaris of Laodicea (c310-c390) (See R. A. Norris Manhood and Christ. A Study in the Christology of Theodore of Mopsuestia 1963 81-122). If we may rely on Origen, it may be doubted whether the trichotomist or the dichotomist scheme has a clear basis in Scripture: The Hebraic concept of personhood, as found in the Old Testament, is "embodied" and "physical": scarcely is there a soul-body contrast of the Platonic type and the person is seen as a single unity of “flesh-animated-by soul”. In the New Testament, nowhere does Paul make a direct contrast between body and soul although he often distinguishes between flesh (sarx) and spirit (pneuma). Only on one occasion did he use the triad “spirit, soul and body” (1 Thess 5:23) but it may be doubted if he intended to provide there a systematic enumeration of the parts of the human person
As regards the soul, Greek Christian authors employ a variety of classifications, sometimes twofold and sometimes threefold e.g.Clement of Alexandria: distinguishes between knowledge (gnosis) and impulse (horme), between the cognitive and the affective/volitional parts of the soul (Stromateis 6.8 ed.Stahlin 466.13-14). Basil of Caesarea (c300-c379) employs the Aristotelian distinction between the “active” and “passive” “receptive aspects of the soul (Homily 3.7 PG 31.213C ed. Rudberg 35.6-7). More frequently, the Greek Fathers adopt the tripartite subdivision of the soul, developed by Plato: logistikon (the rational or intellectual aspect); thymikon (the spirited or incensive aspect) and epithymetikon (the appetitive or desiring aspect) (see Clement of Alexandria, The Pedagogue 3.1.2 Gregory of Nazianzus Poems PG 371381A-1384A; Evagrius Practicus 89 ed. Guillaumont 680-2 ) But Origen expresses reservation about this classification, noting its lack of support from the Scripture (On First Principles 3.4.1)
Per Ware, a second tripartite scheme popular among the Greek Fathers, again with little explicit support from Scripture, is the subdivision found in Aristotle
the vegetative soul (nutritive); the animal soul (sensitive)and the human soul (rational/intellectual). In this threefold scheme used by e. g. Gregory of Nyssa, it is evident that the term "psyche" is being used with a connotation far wider than that normally ascribed today to the word “soul”: it signifies not just "self consciousness" also in a broader sense, "vital energy" or "life-force" but Gregory of Nyssa adds that in the strict sense, psyche can only be applied to the rational human soul and that the animal soul and still less the vegetative soul is not a soul in the strict sense (On the Creation of Man 15 PG 44.176B-177A). Thus in his view, animals and plants do not have souls.
The Greek Fathers affirm with varying degrees of emphasis that the soul is not only one with itself but also with the body and to indicate this all embracing wholeness of the human person, many of them employ the integrating symbol the notion of the heart (kardia) (the best discussion is still that of Antoine Guillaumont “Les sens des noms du Coeur dans l’antiquite Le Coeur” Etudes Carmelitaines 29: Paris, 1950 pp 41-81). Today, the heart is contrasted with the head and the head is regarded as the seat of reason whilst the heart is considered to be the seat of the affections and emotions but in the Bible, the heart designates not simply the affections and emotions, which are located primarily in the guts or belly but rather the spiritual center of the human person but there is no head-heart contrast in the Old Testaments: the heart is the seat of memory, conscience, thought, wisdom and intelligence, the place where we make moral decisions and where we experience divine grace: God dwells in the heart and so also does Satan (see e.g. Matt.6:21; 15:19 ; Lk 2:19; Rom. 1:24; 8:27; Gal. 4:6 and Eph. 3:16-17). In some Greek Patristic texts eg. those ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite (c 500), there are very few references to the heart but no special significance is attached to the term but other sources, such as the Macarius, ascribe to the heart the centrality and the richness of meaning it possesses in the Bible: “the heart directs and governs the whole bodily organism; and when grace possesses the pasturages of the heart, it rules over all the members and the thoughts. For there, in the heart, is the intellect (nous) and all the thoughts of the soul and its expectation and in this way grace penetrates throughout all parts of the body” (Macarius SH 15:20 cf. 22-23; 43.7). The heart is not only the physical organ in our chest, it is also symbolically the point of convergence between the body and the soul and the meeting place between the human being and God and corresponds in some measure to the modern concept of the unconscious “within the heart is the unfathomable depth” (SH 15.32 cf. Ps 63 [64]: 7 LXX: “the heart is deep”) . The heart is thus the unifying
center of our personhood, open on one side to the abyss of our
unconscious, open on the other to the abyss of divine grace and the nous
or intellect is a faculty far higher than the reasoning brain—a
visionary power, creative and self-transcending, that reaches out beyond
time into eternity, beyond words into silence.
The Greek Patristic tradition concerning the heart is lucidly summed up towards the end of the Byzantine era by Gregory Palamas (1296-1359): some Fathers locate the mind(dianoia) or the intellect (nous) in the head and others in the heart but this does not greatly disturb him for he considers that there are no dogmas in the realm of physiology but in any case, since the mind is non-material, it cannot be precisely located in space: citing John Climacus (c 570-c649), he says the mind is “both in us and not in us” “our intelligence (logistikon) is neither within us as in a container—for it is incorporeal—nor yet outside us, for it is united to us” and expresses a definite preference for the approach found in the Macarian SH whereby the mind or intellect is associated with the heart rather than the head, describing the heart as “the shrine of the intelligence and the chief intellectual organ of the body…the ruling organ…the throne of grace, where the intellect and all the thoughts of the soul reside” and our aim in prayer is to “collect our intellect, outwardly dispersed through the senses and bring it back within ourselves—back to the heart itself, the shrine of our thoughts”. To Palamas, the Hesychasts strive to "bring their intellect back and to enclose it within their body and particularly within that innermost body within the body that we call the heart" (see Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts 1.2.3-4 quoting John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent 26 PG 88.1020A and Macarius SH15.20) .Palamas thinks that “after the Fall, our inner being naturally adapts itself to outward forms" ( Triads 1.2.8 and The Encounter of the Religions: a Dialogue between the West and the Orient, with an Essay on the Prayer of Jesus Tournai 1960 92-93). He thus defends the psychosomatic techniques used by the Hesychasts (those who pursue inner stillness (hesychia) through the practice of contemplative prayer, usually in the form "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us", a bit like the Tibetan Buddhists' recitation of various Buddhist mantras. They would adopt a crouching postures in their prayers, with their gaze fixed on the heart or navel, and would link the words of the Jesus Prayer with the rhythm of their breathing and at the same time they would practice an inner exploration, striving to bring their intellect descend into their heart and for which practice they were often ridiculed as omphlopyshoi or "navel-psychics" or people who locate the soul in the navel, a name against which they vigorously protested) Palamas thus thinks that there is a certain correlation between the organs of our physical body and the different centres of spiritual energy within ourselves operating through in a kind of "analogy-participation" but not literally.
Palamas' interpretation of the heart has much in common with the understanding of "memoria" in Book 10 of the Confessions of Augustine (354-430) but by "memoria", Augustine meant not primarily the recollection of past events but the “deepest abyss of the ego” to use Henry Chadwick’s phrase (Augustine 1986 p 67) or in the words of John Burnaby “that deep of the soul in which is treasured not only the consciousness of the self but a consciousness of God” (Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine 1938 p155). It is "aula ingens" “a vast courtyard” “a profound and infinite multiplicity” “a large and boundless interiority” (penetrale): Within the "memoria", each of us finds contained “the heaven, the earth and the sea”: there we encounter not only our own true self but God" (Augustine Confessions 10:8.14-15; 10.17.26). The "memoria" is thus closely associated with the intellect (mens) and the spirit (spiritus): our sense of continuity and identity is rooted in the memory and it is through memory that we experience ourselves as created in the image of God and so become responsive to divine grace. Here there are very close parallels between the Biblical, the Greek Patristic notions of the functions of the heart and indeed, save for the existence of a monotheistic God, very close to the traditional Chinese conception of what the heart does as in the "heart philosophy" of Sung and Ming Dynasties. And if the Greek Christian understanding of the heart resembles Augustine’s memoria, it also anticipates the concept of the self as found in C. G. Jung, which includes not only the "ego-consciousness" but the innermost depths of our "personhood": “The self is not only the center of but the whole circumference which resembles both consciousness and the unconscious; it is the center of this totality, just as the ego is the center of the conscious mind…The self is our life’s goal, for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination we call individuality” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections ed. Aniela Jaffe 1967 417) In short. in the Greek Patristic usage, the heart and the soul overlap. The soul is seen as non-material and is contrasted with the body; the heart is both a physical organ and a center of spiritual energy and thus symbolizes the fundamental unity of the human person and while the word soul has predominantly philosophical associations, the heart is more explicitly religious in its overtones, oriented towards the spirit and towards God and designates the human being as a creature made in the image of God and a finite expression of God’s infinite self-expression.
(To be con'td)
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