THE FOLLOWING IS COPYWRITTEN MATERIAL
NO PART OF IT MAY BE REPRODUCED
WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR
This is Part 11 of an 11-Part Series
Extracted from Chapter Two of my book The Seven Gates of Soul
Previous posts in this series include:
The Fear of Death in Early Cultures
The Fear of the Soul’s Journey After Death
Toward a Cyclical Conception of Death as a Part of Life
The Cyclical Worldview and the Release From Suffering
Extracting the Myth of Immortality From Its Cyclical Roots
The Embrace of Personal Immortality in the East
The Quest for Immortality in Early Chinese Shamanism
Plato's Influence on Western Concepts of Immortality
Augustine’s Influence on Christian Thought
Passing Through the Gate of Immortality
on the Way to the Underworld
By now, nearly 2 1/2 millennia after the death of Plato, and at least as long since the concept of reincarnation arose in Eastern religious tradition, beliefs about the immortality of the soul have become so thoroughly ingrained in modern thinking, that we no longer question them, nor assess the price we pay for holding them. Religion attempts to solve the problem of death by clinging to a belief in the soul’s immortality, or in its ultimate liberation from the necessity for life and death. When the soul’s fate is divorced from its cyclical roots in an attempt to mitigate the fear of life or death, however, these beliefs become a serious impediment to a meaningful understanding of the embodied soul’s experience. Ancient Vedic yogis and Taoist shamans sought identification with Spirit, not as a means for transcending death, but as a source of empowerment within life. When the quest for immortality instead becomes a quest for liberation from life or death, it short-circuits whatever claim to spiritual vitality the embodied soul can otherwise have.
Such a focus seriously impedes the soul’s embrace of the spiritual opportunity this life presents. Paradoxically, it is our cumulative earthly experiences that form the basis for any real experience of immortality or enlightenment that the embodied soul might have. To the extent that we cultivate our talents and make a contribution to the world of which we are part; to the extent that we learn to love and give of ourselves to others; to the extent that we pass on our values and our love of life to our children; to the extent that we participate fully in this life and leave our impact upon the hearts and minds of those that follow, then we will – in some truly meaningful sense – survive our own death, and live on as a source of illumination in the memory of those whose lives we have touched with our own.
Granted, many of those surviving us will remember us through the distorting filter of their own perceptual biases. These imperfect memories may or may not accurately preserve the essence of who we were as embodied souls. It is not the memories of others, however, that give substance to the soul’s immortality, but our own willingness to live a memorable life - made memorable through what we have given to it. Wherever the embodied soul is bold enough to assert itself, compassionate enough to share its love, wise and brave enough to risk making a difference, it will continue to reverberate in the embodied world as a vital force after death. Conversely, what happens then will be of little consequence, to the extent we have wasted our time here avoiding life, and pining for liberation from the curse of embodiment.
As we stand before the first gate of soul, I contend that it is impossible to discuss the experience of the embodied soul in a meaningful way, or realize its spiritual potential, while longing for either eternal life beyond the body, in the style of Western religion, or for liberation from the necessity for embodied life, sought in Eastern tradition. Before we can pass through this first gate, we must relinquish these beliefs. To face the embodied soul on its own terms, in all of the naked vulnerability that this encounter demands, we must embrace an awareness of death’s inevitability. We must speak about the soul’s journey in terms of the cyclical relationship between life and death in this incarnation. It is because the soul is privileged to participate in this eternal cycle – and not because the soul is immortal, or destined to one day be free from the cycle – that it enters a realm where an embodied life of meaning and purpose become possible.
The soul must also be distinguished from Spirit, and understood instead as the presence of Spirit within the physical body and the larger body of this earthly existence. Perhaps other adventures lie in store for the postmortem soul after death, but until then, the embodied soul must fully inhabit the body in order to reap whatever meaning is possible in this life. Despite the widespread appeal of the belief in the survival of the soul after death, any meaningful discussion of the embodied soul depends upon a willingness to focus, not on some possible existence beyond the body. but on this life in this body in the here and now. For outside of a belief system that speculates otherwise, this life is all the embodied soul is guaranteed. Once we have restored the soul to the body, we can begin to understand embodiment as the vehicle through which to discover and articulate the meaning and spiritual purpose inherent in this life.
If you have enjoyed this series, and wish to purchase your very own copy of the book from which it was taken - The Seven Gates of Soul: Reclaiming the Poetry of Everyday Life - you can order it here.
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