The Soul Is a Whirlpool
Ancient peoples had a lot of ideas about the sun. They saw it as a dazzling god, a celestial lamp, a chariot of fire, a woman carrying a torch, many other fantastic forms.
Of course, we now know all those ideas about the sun were wrong. But do we say, therefore, that the sun doesn’t exist?
Of course not. The sun’s just as real now as it’s ever been. It’s just that ancient peoples had wrong ideas about it. If you could ask an ancient person and a modern person to each point at the sun, they’d both point at the same thing.
In the Buddhist traditions, one of the three fundamental truths of human existence is anatta, or no-soul. Modern science also, to borrow a phrase attributed to Laplace, has found no need for the hypothesis of a soul.
In each case, though, what is not-found is something distinct and apart from the body, some unique personal essence which, in some traditions, supposedly survives death or pre-exists birth or is placed by a god into the receptacle of the body, and so forth. But what if we step back from these wrong ideas about the soul and simply ask ourselves, what were aincient people pointing at, so to speak, when they talked of a soul? What was it they believed would be reborn in another body or rise to heaven or sink down to the underworld or haunt the earth?
It’s the conscious mind. It’s our conscious experience of being a self living in a world. It’s all the qualia, to borrow a philosophical term, or percepts, to borrow a neurocognitive term, produced by our brains — colors, brightness, smells, sounds, flavors, textures, pain, pleasure, the sense of physicality, all the components of our waking, dreaming, or hallucinating minds and the way these are integrated into a unified experience, a point of view. The ancients may have been mistaken about its longevity and mobility, but they weren’t mistaken about its existence, any more than they were mistaken about the existence of the sun.
In Zen Buddhism, when we say there is no soul, we mean there is no unchanging essence, no quintessential “me”, no perceiver different from the ever-changing perception. But that ever-changing perception must be in some way real, because there it is, or to rephrase, here we are.
Did you ever chase whirlpools as a kid? If you lived around creeks, you probably did. Walking or running along the bank, you can sometimes catch these eddies flowing with the water. At times, when the creek becomes rough or shallow, they will wink out of existence, then pop back up again downstream from the obstruction.
The soul (aka conscious awareness) behaves in much the same way. It arises and swirls and shifts, and then the body flows over the stone of sleep and the soul goes away for a while, regathering as the body wakes, until one day that doesn’t happen anymore.
Is the whirlpool above the rock the same as the whirlpool below it? You can look at it either way. It’s a moot point, really.
As is the question of what the whirlpool is. From one moment to the next, is it the same thing or is it something different? Does “the whirlpool” exist at all, or is it just an empty place in the water we give a name to so we can talk about it?
The soul — our conscious self, our “me” — is like the whirlpool in this respect as well. Are you the same “you” as the kid in the photograph? Can a “you” even be found, or is every “you” a moving shape, an action taken for a while by the world, a gesture of the universe? These are questions of how we choose to look at what’s real, not questions about what is real.
Soul is a very useful word. Perhaps we should keep it around.
Image: Creative Commons license via Pixabay