Soul, Spirit, Mind

Rev. Amy Russell - 2010-01-31

My husband, Bill, and I spent a wonderful Christmas with my family in Virginia, and then went to DC to spend another couple of nights with my parents. On our last night, we had the most wonderful dinner with them, talking and laughing about current events and remembering the highlights of our family Christmas. The next morning when Bill and I were packing up our car with all the gifts and stray items that seemed to have multiplied since we had arrived a few days before, my Mom came down to tell us that she couldn’t seem to wake my Dad. She didn’t seem to understand, she seemed confused about it, but not really alarmed. I went up with her, and went to shake my Dad’s shoulder, but as soon as I saw his face, I knew. His face was sagging in a strange way and as I touched his arm, I could see that his right arm and hand were curled up strangely. I told my Mom, “He’s had a stroke, go call 911”. She had obviously not allowed herself to identify this possibility. Her face looked shocked, but she went to the phone calmly.

As I sat and held my father’s hand, I told him that I loved him, and that if he needed to go he could, but that I really didn’t want him to go yet. He was not conscious; he seemed to be sleeping heavily. And in the few minutes that I had alone with him, I felt him slowly slip away. I knew he was quite alive, but the whole person that I knew as my Dad seemed to no longer occupy his body.

My four siblings, my mother, and I spent the next nine days in his hospital room, taking turns holding his hand, crying and laughing with stories we told about our lives together. It was an amazingly sacred time when the usual family dynamics of pressing our needy egos forward seemed to become unimportant as we dealt with the difficult task of saying good-bye.

Sitting in that room, I felt that my father was gone. I could no longer feel his presence with me, and I felt we were sitting vigil to his body, and that his soul was no longer there. And when he died after the ninth day, we all felt huge relief that he was no longer trapped in his body.

This experience has stirred up all kinds of questions in my spiritual struggle. I’ve struggled with what is our spirit, what is our soul, what is the functioning of the mind? What is a result of the way our brain works, what is our ego, and what could possibly be called the spiritual side of us as humans? Does anything last after death? And if something does, what is it?

And in the way of serendipity, a book dealing with how the brain works just happened to fall into my lap. I mean, it literally fell in my lap when I opened the car door of my sister’s car when we were together. She just happened to be reading a book called My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor when my father had his stroke. After hearing about how this book was by a doctor who had a stroke affecting her left brain, who remained conscious and recounts her experience of how her brain functioned after the stroke, I was intrigued. So, when I returned here, I went to the library and got the book.

Taylor describes how with the left side of her brain incapacitated, much of the hard linear distinctions that our left brains make disappeared and left a view of the world as a fuzzy, but blissful state of seeing the world as a wholeness. She said she began to lose the distinction between where her body ended and where another person began. She lost a lot of the judgments about who she was as a person and began to see herself as a part of the whole universe. She lost many of the past hurts and anger that she had carried around with her. She says that she felt she was in a world of peace. In the beginning of her stroke, she felt she had an option to return to life or to leave. And the choice to come back was not an easy one. The blissful state she existed in was much preferable to the world of separate individuals all with separate agendas and issues. But she made a decision to regain her health and thereby regain the functioning of the left brain. She completely recovered from her stroke. But as a result of her stroke, she gained a full appreciation of living from the right side of the brain. Taylor describes living from the right side as a way of fully seeing the world as a Oneness.

Hearing this description of how our right brain functions without our left brain floored me. It sounds like our right brain is our spiritual center, the part of us that is intuitive and open and loving. It sounds like our right brain operates much like what some of us would describe as our soul would function.

This is, pardon the pun, “mind-boggling”. To me it calls into question many ideas that I have had about soul or spirit.

So, first of all, let’s explore what people use the words “soul, spirit, and mind” to mean.

The origin of the words spirit and soul come of course, from the Old and New Testament. The Hebrew word “nephesh” is used in the Hebrew Testament to denote life, breath, vitality, or soul. And the Hebrew word “ruah” is often used to denote breathe or spirit. They are often used interchangeably, often to refer either to a living creature and their body and spirit. And sometimes they are used to refer to the non-physical part of a person. "And the LORD God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." (Genesis 2:7). The idea that humans are made up of body and inanimate spirit comes from this kind of passage. But the word “soul” is often used in the Bible to refer to body and soul, as in living creature.

Then in the Hebrew Testament we find the idea that there is some part of a creature that survives death. Such as in Ecclesiastes 12:7: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was and the spirit shall return to God who gave it.”

The New Testament written in Greek also refers to some part of a creature that is considered separate from the body and related to one’s spiritual nature: It uses the word psyche to refer to spirit or to life. "He that findeth his life (psuche) shall lose it: and he that loseth his life (psuche) for my sake shall find it" (Mat. 10:39).

So the Bible is not clear whether there is a difference between soul, spirit, or even mind/body. There is some idea that something lasts after death, but it’s not clear what that is.

Modern spiritual writers also use the words soul and spirit loosely to refer to the deepest, most primal part of a person, that part that is beyond language, beyond the animal instincts, the thing that grounds a person for the deeper meanings for who they are in life.

When I read Jill Bolte Taylor’s book about her stroke, her description of her mind after losing the left side of her brain sounded so much like what I would have called a soul experience. She says, “I loved knowing my spirit was at one with the universe and in the flow with everything around me. I found it fascinating to be so tuned in to energy dynamics and body language. But most of all, I love the feeling of deep inner peace that flooded the core of my very being.”

Hearing this description made me question what was going on here. Was this state of bliss engineered by the brain chemistry in her right brain? Is this the “God” part of the brain that some people talk about? And if it’s in the brain, what does that say to those of us who believe this part of us, our soul part, lives on after death? How could that be if it’s in the brain?

My belief system has always contained a belief in life after death. Not a traditional belief in a heaven or a hell, but a belief in something about the energy that we contain living on in death. I’ve believed that since childhood having grown up in a Christian church, but have continued that belief after I became a Buddhist. And my belief was strengthened through my experience with losing my husband. I’ve often felt his presence in my life.

But the experience of losing my father has been different. As in any great life change, your beliefs are all on the table, being thrown up in the face of your life upheaval. I’ve been struggling with feeling unsure of everything, unsure of where my father exists in my life’s picture. So, I’ve been struggling with what is soul and how does it manifest itself in our own selves.

Author Bill Plotkin, in his book, Nature and the Human Soul, says that “The human soul is a person’s ultimate place in the more than human world…Soul is the place that most centrally and comprehensively identified a thing- a thing’s truest place.” He talks about the soul being the place where we have relationships to everything else in our life, all persons, all creatures, and all things. He uses the word “soul” to signify something similar to an ecological niche in nature- one very specific to one animal. He says that we are not just creatures in the world, we are a unique part of the world in our relation to the world. In other words, we are totally interdependent to the other creatures and things around us. Just as our UU principle says, “the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.”

Plotkin describes our human development in terms of our soul’s searching for our ultimate place in the world- the real world. He says that it is our ego that is unaware of our soul’s ultimate place in the world. Our self-consciousness gets in the way of our just relaxing into the knowledge that we are ultimately a soul, utterly at home in the world.

Plotkin is not speaking about the soul as being the “inner” non-physical part that lives in the material, physical body. He believes that we need to move away from the dualistic Cartesian way of thinking that has led us to believe that there is a physical world and an ethereal world. He says, much as a Buddhist might, that the soul is all of us- our bodies, our minds, our relationships, and our meaning in life.

Thomas Moore speaks about our souls as being the deep grounded part of us that is attached to what we consider our home, our relationships, our natural comfortableness with life’s pleasures. Our souls, Moore says, is that homey part that enjoys a good glass of wine and sitting and talking with someone we love. Our souls are comfortable with their attachments, even their wounds and sorrows, because that is what has made us what we are. Moore says, “Like a cow chewing its cud, grapes slowly fermenting into wine- past gives the soul its fodder, its stuff, the source of its particular kind of understanding and progress.” Our souls may stay stuck in past relationships and roles because it is still ruminating on our slow human progress. And any time we try to move forward in life, our soul pulls up back into deeper reflection, more processing about who we are and what we really need. The soul keeps us grounded in the things we that nourish us- the relationships, the need for home and belonging, the need to feel safe. Moore also says that our souls are not separate from the soul of the world. Again, that we are connected to the most primal way to all that came before and all that comes after.

Moore sees spirit as different than soul- as being the power and strength that pulls us up into new challenges, that moves us ahead. The soul is the deep inner connection we have with ourselves and with the world we live in; the spirit is the connection we make with the wider universe, or the thing that might be considered “larger than ourselves”, the All. This soul- reaching in, and spirit- reaching out- describes the two types of spirituality that I feel I received from Buddhism – teaching me about finding that deep quiet place within, and Christianity teaching me about the loving universe around me. I love to think about that phrase from our UU song, Spirit of Life, “roots hold me close, and wings set me free” as describing these two spiritual elements.

So, when I think of my father’s soul and where it is, there is one thing that is clear to me. That my father’s soul lives on. It lives within me and my family, and within each person who loved and knew him as we did, and it lives in the universe in the relationship he had with the universe. If our souls are not just who we are, but our relationships in the world, the people we love, the people who read something we wrote, the people who worked with us, the animals who lived with us, the plants we cared for. If our souls are not just something physical or something immaterial but something relational. As David Whyte poem says, There is one world only, the one to which we gave ourselves utterly, and to which one day we are blessed to return.”

David Whyte also describes the soul as “the largest conversation a person is capable of having with the world.” And for some of us, we believe that conversation continues after death.

After being encouraged by many of you, I went to see the movie Avatar. Wow! I have to say it’s an amazing experience. It’s in 3D- you have to wear these silly glasses- but it really makes it seem as though you are visiting an alien planet with all its beautiful plants that light up when they are touched, and animals you shrink from because they are right in your face. In this fictional planet, Pandora, we are introduced to a humanoid race of blue creatures who have organs that allow them to attach nerve endings to plants and animals and read their minds. And when they attach themselves to a special Tree of Souls, they hear amazing voices and music that are a symphony of all their ancestors’ souls. They learn to understand that they are truly connected to all the souls on their planet in this way, and to all the souls that went before them. It brings new meaning to the phrase “tree-huggers”. The native people from this planet don’t just have an intellectual appreciation for their planet, they actually have a soul-relationship with their planet. I feel our souls are truly connected in this way. When we care to listen.