A very dear friend of mine asked me for my thoughts on the relationship between Soul and Spirit. I wrote her a longish reply, and I thought I'd reproduce it here...
Thanks for asking me for some thoughts on Soul and Spirit. Or is it Soul or Spirit? Soul versus Spirit? I didn’t want to reply until I had a chance to reread a book I value on Buddhist philosophy. I want to look at Soul and Spirit from three different views (actually four...)
1. An awful lot of Western mysticism borrows heavily from Plotinus. I want to take quick look at his view of how a composite of soul and spirit and matter winds up inside each of us.
2. The Tibetan Buddhists have an unparalleled philosophical view of spirit. There are two views that I want to touch: one that emphasizes that Mind is the only true reality, and another that poses that Mind creates the world, but the world it creates is not the ultimate reality.
3. At my core I’m a spiritual alchemist. So much talk about soul and spirit sounds too theoretical to me. The great contribution of alchemy is that it forces us to reconnect and to merge different worlds.
So here goes!
I. The Ultimate Good, evil in formless Matter, and a Sandwich
I’ve worked my way through parts of Plotinus’s Enneads before, but I’ve never made a careful study of them. What little I know I'll spill here. The first Ennead addresses being, soul, spirit, and good and evil. Here’s my summary of his points.
1. Humans are a composite of Soul/Spirit in Matter.
2. Matter is utterly formless. Because the Good is pure form, what lacks form utterly is utterly evil - and the combination of Soul in Matter represents a fall into a composite form where the Soul is subject to the vices that arise from Matter.
3. At the other end of the scale is the One, the totally transcendent, beyond all categories of being and non-being.
4. The One doesn’t create, because to do so implies that the One changes through time. Rather, the One emanates - first Thought (Nous), and the World Soul, and eventually the composite Soul that is encased in Matter within us.
5. The composite Soul within us has two portions - a personal Soul and part of the higher Soul that is allied with Nous.
6. Our real work happens in this composite state - in the combination of Soul and Matter. Matter may be evil, but it represents a stage for transformation to occur.
7. Liberation from Matter takes two sides: one aesthetic, and the other purifying. As we appreciate beauty more fully we become better able to relate to true Beauty, which links back to the Good and to the One. Purification helps liberate the composite soul from passions and attachments, making possible a fuller apprehension of the Good.
What are my problems with this? First, I have trouble aesthetically in equating formless Matter with evil and the nature of a Fall taking place when the composite of Soul and Matter forms. Second, and more importantly, there’s no sense of evolution that I get from Plotinus. For an evolutionary approach, I turn to the Buddhists.
II. Two ways to evolve
There are two different Tibetan Buddhist philosophical systems that look very differently at the Soul, Spirit, and Body.
A. Mind-Only
The Mind-Only (Cittamatra) school says that Mind cannot be separated from the Objects that it is concerned with. There are Western philosophers - the Idealists - who assert that Mind creates the world, but the Mind-Only school takes a subtly different approach. A single karmic latency or tendency creates simultaneously both Mind and Object. The two are utterly linked; the notion that one can study an object without understanding the perceiving mind is completely refuted in this view. The karma whose latencies manifest appear simultaneously in an object and in an observing mind. The Mind is never separate from the Object; the system encompassing both is key.
Western Idealist systems have problems with solipsism - everything’s actually inside my mind. The Mind-Only system asserts that there is mind activity, like dreaming, where the Mind is active but there is no effective karma generated. An action that generates karma, however, is always linked with the Mind/Object complex and with intent.
The mind acting affects the karmic flow of other entities - I might shoot something, altering its life flow - or I might support or love something. In these encounters my consciousness overlaps with that of another. We cooperatively choose each other to interact with to manifest and mature our own karmic tendencies. Hence we are not alone, solitary mind, but a cooperative of minds that overlap in our work at the physical level.
The Mind-Only school supports the idea of reincarnation, and it directly answers the question ‘what is it that reincarnates?’ The Mind-Only approach asserts that underneath all the superficial personality lies a core - the ‘Mind-basis-of-all’ - that is the true person. It is the spiritual entity that stores the karmic latencies and tendencies which then manifest in experiences and actions. The Mind-Only school does not state that the Mind-basis-of-all is a separate, independent entity, because only in combination with other factors - as a composite of spirit and the material - does karma actually manifest.
This school really reminds me of many of the metaphysical schools I’ve explored in the West. But there are other philosophical approaches in Tibetan Buddhism, and one of them challenges this view very strongly.
B. Truth and Consequences
The Middle Way/Consequence school (Madhyamaka/Prasangika) school turns conventional thinking on its head. Consequentialists feel that the Mind-Only approach excessively focuses on the mind and creates an abiding nature of mind. Buddhist philosophy in general focuses on our tendency to reify things: to make things real that actually are not real. We do this with our expectations of how things behave. We treat other people as objects, and we assume that we know all about the objects - animate and inanimate - that we manipulate. We suffer when our expectations go awry.
The various Buddhist philosophical schools attack our incessant drive to reify by cutting into our conventional ways of looking at the world. The Mind-Only school says that Objects don’t exist independently; Objects and Subjects exist together. The Consequentialist view is that the Mind-Only school reifies the mind, and hence does not present the most profound view of reality.
The Consequence school focuses on dependent origination as the nature of conventional reality.
- Causes and effects depend on each other; it’s not just that effects depend on a cause to create them, but that the linkage works in both directions.
- Wholes and parts mutually depend on each other. You can’t create a whole without its parts, but the parts have unique meaning in the whole that causes a mutual dependence.
- And, most importantly, subjects and objects depend on each other. In the West we constantly separate ourselves - the subject - from what we observe and what we manipulate - the objects. There is no such separation in the Consequence view: both subjects and objects are completely interdependent.
What’s mind-bending about the Consequence school is that it states that Objects are completely dependent on Mind - but that Mind isn’t independently existent either. Everything arises dependently on other things - even the nonphysical part of me that I label ‘Soul’. Nonphysical - spiritual - entities evolve and manifest in cooperation with the whole just like evolution occurs at the material level.
So what of Soul versus Spirit in this view? ‘Soul’ as such isn’t talked about much in Buddhist philosophy, primarily because Buddhist philosophy - particularly the Consequence school - is focused on breaking down the reality of a separate, inherently existent self - call it Soul. Ultimate reality isn’t ‘spiritual’ in the way most Westerners think of it. Ultimate reality is a non-dual realization of emptiness. We can think and talk about emptiness, and that rational approach is genuinely helpful. Realizing emptiness in a profound way, is like pouring water into water: borders and rationally imposed limitations disappear.
III. From the alchemist (meaning me...)
My aesthetic side tends toward the Middle Way/Consequence school approach: I like the notion of an emergent spiritual nature. But I don’t think there’s much way to decide the real truth value of any of these statements. Instead I’m much more interested in spiritual alchemy.
Underneath alchemical symbolism is the notion that we’re a composite of matter and spirit. The language of metals that alchemy spins is directly analogous to our own state: there is a physical and a spiritual reality, and the two interact. The alchemical process works with this relation between matter and spirit, and it does so in a unique way. The process begins with a number of purification steps:
- dying
- dissolving
- drying out
- sublimating
In the sublime state the spirit and matter are fundamentally isolated: matter has already died, and we’ve pulled out the living spiritual energy. But the separation doesn’t stop here. The next step is the Albedo, the White Work, where the spirit takes on a stable form, clear and radiant like the Full Moon. One might mistake the Albedo for the final process because it looks like the spiritual entity has ascended – left the material world. But we’re not done yet.
Most important is the final step. Alchemy isn’t about ascendence - of separating from matter and ascending in some spiritualized, non-physical essence. It’s about revivifying matter - it’s about transcendence. The final step is the Rubedo, the Red Work. Here the fully formed white essence recombines with matter to transform it. It is utterly transforming base matter - formless stuff - lead / Saturn - into pure living gold.
The alchemical maxim that I always remember has the mnemonic VITRIOL: Visita interiora terrae. Rectificando invenies occultem lapidem -- Penetrate into the center of the earth. In purifying you will find the hidden stone. The real nature of things isn’t out there; it’s right here. Our work is not to get out of the physical but to become more completely transformed and transforming in our interaction with the physical.
