“I drink to separate my body from my soul.”
― Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde liked to drink, but I like to go backpacking… for as long as my body is able. But we’re both trying to do the same thing.
Every “body” started as a single cell… an egg. To that perfect, self-contained structure was added another cell, bearing catalytic instructions. From those two cells and their blueprints, every cell in the organism was created, specialized, and primed for its mission. This systematized replication continued until there was either a breach in cellular protocol, or the organism burned itself out and decomposed. My own body, as nearly every other collection of cells on the planet, is somewhere between the two.
Where did all that stuff come from, and where does it go when it’s no longer needed? For example, I have watched potted tomato plants grow from a seed the size of a flea to be taller than I am; producing pounds of delicious fruit in the process, and potentially hundreds more tomato plants. All this takes place in a volume of soil less than 2 gallons, with limited food or fertilizer. Think about that. How do sufficient molecules assemble to make a tomato plant? Are they implicit in the matrix of potential that is broadcasted from a single tiny seed? If not, how do they get there? We can see that nearly all the dirt remains behind when the plant is fully grown. So, what’s the matter? The atoms, electrons and other sub-atomic particles had to appear from somewhere to become solid matter… in this case a tomato plant. Is life capable of creating matter, or – more probably – distilling it from the atmosphere and the energy of the sun?
Lewis Thomas, in his humbly wise book The Medusa and the Snail, tells us that the first simple cell appeared on earth approximately 3.7 billion years ago. Every first cell carries within it the fullness of its program (DNA), and the software to execute its commands (RNA). Did this first, primal cell carry within it the operating system for all life on earth? Whence comes a single cell’s impetus to achieve totality as a multi-celled, systemic organism? At the subatomic level, the strands of DNA act as though they are antennae; receiving instructions from an invisible field of consciousness that is remotely directing all things. Else we have to consider that each single cell knows exactly what it’s doing already… from the very first molecule. Or that consciousness is derived from matter. Consider that physical reality is itself almost entirely empty space, and ask yourself, where does all this stuff come from?
The life force projects the body as photons arranged on a movie screen. It feels solid, but is just a flickering image of a greater reality. My own body’s movie has been like a mechanical disaster flick, with things breaking down left and right. And if my body is a projection of my consciousness, what does its crippled condition say about my psyche? Who is projecting the movie? The aging celluloid is brittle, and spliced together poorly in places. It often gets caught in the gears, and tangled in its own loopiness. But science informs us there is no biological process of “aging,” except that which we expect in our minds. All the cells in the human organism are replaced every few years, and the new ones hang on the scaffolding of the way we see our bodies. If we believe we are old and getting older, that’s the reality we make for our organism. We basically think ourselves to death.
Every culture on earth believes there is a separate, eternal thing distinct from our bodies, which we refer to in the Western world as a “soul.” It is said that the soul leaves the body at the moment of death, which is medically defined as the cessation of life activities in the cells. Some have even weighed the body immediately before and after death, and calculated the mass of the soul that departs. Where was that singularity, before the first cell became two? And where does it go? Does the soul come after enough specialized brain cells have developed consciousness, or is the soul directing the entire movie?
What is the body, anyway? As Sting wrote in a song, “These are the soul cages.” The physical body appears to be a vehicle for life to experience itself. Else why would eyes have evolved? Trillions on trillions of organisms exist successfully without the power of sight, but all have an awareness of light – even if they can’t “see” it. The body exists as a vehicle made of synthesized light, which the spirit uses to experience itself in the physical plane. My own body may be breaking down, but I can turn my gaze inward and experience the essence of existence beyond the bars made of flesh and bones. This act of communion is facilitated by being in the wilderness: away from all that is temporary, and closer to the eternal nature of all that is. My soul is in the mountains.
“Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never;
Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!
Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit forever;
Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems!”
— The Bhagavad Gita (ch. II, 65-69)