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Into the Embodied Life - Part Eleven

 

 

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

The Myth of Immortality

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.

Into the Embodied Life - Part Ten

 

 

THE FOLLOWING IS COPYWRITTEN MATERIAL

NO PART OF IT MAY BE REPRODUCED

WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR

 

This is Part 10 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

The Myth of Immortality

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

 

While today we take for granted the fusion of Christian and Platonic thought, this was actually a transition that spanned four or five centuries after the birth of Christ. Philo Judeaus of Alexandria (c 15 BCE - 45 CE), a contemporary of Saint Paul, was one of the first to reorient Jewish and early Christian thought in a more Platonic direction (James L. Christian, The Wisdom Seekers: Great Philosophers of the Western World, Vol. 1, p. 216), which eventually established the concept of immortality as the gospel truth in both cultures.  Many other early Christian thinkers after Philo Judeaus were also instrumental in effecting this transition, but none was more important than Saint Augustine (354-430 CE), bishop of Hippo in Roman Africa.  Augustine was a central figure in philosophical history, and is often considered the greatest shaping influence upon early Christian theology.  More than any other thinker, he provided an essential bridge between the religion of the New Testament and the Platonic tradition, and through his work, Western Christianity absorbed many of Plato’s ideas (Norman Melchert, The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy, p. 230).

In his youth, Augustine was attracted to Manichaeism, a radical form of Christianity originating in pre-Islamic Iran (then at the heart of the Persian empire), founded by the Gnostic prophet, Mani.  Mani taught identification with Christ as the vehicle through which imprisoned souls could escape their entrapment in the body and return to God.  The Manichean religion believed the body to be a haven of darkness, and required the elect of their faith to adhere to a strict regimen of asceticism and celibacy.  Augustine eventually abandoned Manichaeism, which failed to answer his deeper philosophical questions about the being of God and the nature and origin of evil, but he maintained Manichean beliefs about the body’s relationship to the soul, and the desire for transcendence of the body’s mortal limitations ("Augustine," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 14, p. 397).  The more mature Augustine recognized these same beliefs in the teachings of Plato.

Augustine was introduced to the thoughts of Plato through the writings of Plotinus and Porphyry, who were responsible for facilitating a revival of interest in Plato in the 3^rd and 4^th centuries CE.  While Saint Paul admonished the early Christians, including Augustine, to "let your armor be the Lord Jesus Christ; forget about satisfying your bodies with all their cravings." (Romans 13:14), Neoplatonism reinforced the Manichaean belief that the soul must escape the body before it could return to God.  Plotinus asserted that the intellect was an intermediary between soul and God, while Augustine naturally preferred Christ, but neither doubted that the soul’s true destiny was immortality and eternal reunion with the One.  Both also agreed that the temporal, mortal body was a primary hindrance to fulfilling this purpose.   Augustine's philosophy was an amalgam of Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, and Biblical scripture, with a major leavening by Plato’s ideas.  Through Augustine’s influence, the immortality of the soul, and a deliberate disidentification with the body became cornerstones of the Christian faith ("Augustine," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 14, p. 398).

Into the Embodied Life - Part Nine

 

 

THE FOLLOWING IS COPYWRITTEN MATERIAL

NO PART OF IT MAY BE REPRODUCED

WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR

 

This is Part 9 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

The Myth of Immortality

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

 

The belief in a more personal form of immortality was given tremendous philosophical momentum in the West four centuries before the birth of Christ in the teachings of the Greek philosopher, Plato.  Plato taught within a couple centuries of the time frame that the Upanishads and the Tao Te Ching were being written, thus signaling a synchronistic global shift toward an embrace of personal immortality that took different forms in different cultures over the course of two to three centuries.  In Egyptian tradition, the concept of immortality was rooted in a mythological association of the ruling pharaoh with the immortality of Horus – an association that hardly applied to the common Egyptian.  Even after the ritual procedures for guaranteeing immortality became more widely available, immortality was still construed as the privilege of the few who could afford it.  It was through Plato’s indirect adaptation of Egyptian ideas that immortality became understood in the West as inherent in the very nature of the soul itself, and no longer something that needed to be attained.  This development marked a huge paradigm shift from which, in my opinion, we have yet to recover.

Building on arguments put forth by Pythagoras and Socrates, and influenced heavily by the Orphic tradition, Plato considered the soul to be of divine origin, preexistent (existing before it entered the body), and immortal (Norman Melchert, The Great Conversation: An Historical Introduction to Philosophy, pp. 143-144).  Plato did not deny that the soul was bound to the body for the duration of this life, but he felt this association to be a burden that would thankfully dissolve at death. Like the Orphics, he considered the body "an impediment which... prevents the soul from attaining to truth...” (p. 110).  In advising his students about how best to handle the soul’s experience of embodiment, Plato suggested that the soul should indulge its bodily appetites to the minimum extent necessary for the continuance of life, while constantly monitoring the body’s pull upon the soul through the use of reason.  The true philosopher, as Plato put it in the Phaedo, made his life a practice for death because he knew that after death, the soul would be free of its imprisonment in the body and would return to the realm of Spirit from whence it had come (pp. 103-116).

According to Plato, there were four arguments (attributed to Socrates and set forth in the Phaedo) for thinking that the soul survives death (116-152).  First, like the plant-based cultures of prehistory, he observed that the processes of nature are cyclical, and reasoned that this also applied to human life and death. Second, Plato believed that what we call "learning" was really a process of remembering, and through circular reasoning argued that if so, we had to have been here before and would probably be here again.  Third, since the soul could perceive the Ideas, or Forms – Truth, Beauty, the Good, that in his theory underlay all of manifest creation, and were unchanging and eternal – then the soul had to exist on the same level of reality that they did.  Fourth, since Plato considered the opposites to be antithetical and utterly distinct from one another, he concluded that the soul, which brings life to the body, could not participate in death. 

Of course, it is Spirit that brings life to the body, not soul, but this is exactly the confusion that Plato passed on to the emerging western religious traditions of his day.  Soul, as we are discussing it here, is the life of Spirit within the body, not the source of its own existence.  While Spirit is every bit as eternal and immortal as Plato argued, the life of Spirit within the body – the embodied soul – is a temporary, mortal condition.

The eager intermingling of cultures around the Mediterranean sea, during the centuries preceding and following the birth of Christ, allowed Greek philosophy in general and Plato’s ideas about the immortal soul in particular to assert a profound influence upon the development of Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought.  From the mid 2nd century CE, Jewish and Christian thinkers began articulating their ideas in the broader, more contemporary intellectual context provided by Greek philosophy (James L. Christian, The Wisdom Seekers: Great Philosophers of the Western World, Vol. 1, pp. 213-216).  Stoic philosophers emphasizing duty and ascetic practices appealed to some early Christians, but there were also problems with the Stoic belief in corporeality (i.e. the idea that both God and the soul were bodies of refined substance) and its embrace of pagan pantheism.  Plato’s ideas were much more in keeping with early Christian thought, and provided the philosophical foundation for Christianity that would lend credence to its influence within academic and other spheres of power throughout the Greco-Roman empire. Plato’s influence also spread to the Muslim world from 800-1000 CE, when Islamic scholars translated a number of dialogues and Neoplatonic treatises into the Arabic languages ("Philosophical Schools and Doctrines," Encyclopedia Brittanica, Vol. 25, pp. 903-904).

Into the Embodied Life - Part Eight

 

 

THE FOLLOWING IS COPYWRITTEN MATERIAL

NO PART OF IT MAY BE REPRODUCED

WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR

 

This is Part 8 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

The Myth of Immortality

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

 

In ancient China, there appears to have been some discussion of immortality in the original shamanic teachings of Lao Tzu, who says of the superior man in the Tao Te Ching (translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, p. 50):

He who knows how to live can walk abroad

Without fear of rhinoceros or tiger.

He will not be wounded in battle.

For in him rhinoceroses can find no place to thrust their horn,

Tigers no place to use their claws,

And weapons no place to pierce.

Why is this so?

Because he has no place for death to enter.

As Eliade suggests, however, the immortality discussed by Lao Tzu evolves from immersion in a state of shamanic ecstasy in which the superior man seeks “to frolic at the Origin of all things,” and does not include the notion of survival of the physical body or the human personality after death (A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 2, pp. 30-31).  The Taoist sage instead  aspired to living identification with the Tao, “something mysteriously formed, born before heaven and earth, in the silence and the void, standing alone and unchanging, ever present and in motion” (Lao Tzu, translation by Gia-Fur Feng and Jane English, p. 25).  As with the Vedic seers of India, it was this identification with the Tao that gave the Taoist shamans their earthly power, and their capacity to heal.  Original Taoist teachings about immortality had little to do with surviving physical death, but everything to do with maximizing one’s spiritual vitality in life.

As with the aspiration of Western mystics to unity with Spirit, attaining immortality paradoxically meant checking one’s identity as an individual soul at the door.  The individual soul could not merge with Tao without becoming annihilated in emptiness, and it was this ecstatic annihilation in death while still alive in a body that produced the immortality sought by Taoist shamans.  Just as individual mystics walked a thin line between unity with Spirit and megalomania, and individual yogis were tempted by the siddhis, or personal powers that arose as a consequence of their practice, so too were individual shamans likely seduced by the lure of a more personalized form of immortality.  But it was only later, after the original shamanic teachings were written down and perverted by a more secular class of shaman-kings who used them for political advantage that a preoccupation with the transcendence of physical death became a more widespread goal.