Today, when the question of the soul relative to the self, when that comes up, I think we have to take all the resources that are available to us, including all the resources that science makes available and put it to the test. This is something that I think the Dalai Lama has been a real leader in saying okay, we have to use the best of this technology to try to get as much as we can of a measurement of what it is that’s going on inside of the brain because it’s clearly not material. It’s clearly not mass based. I know my thoughts and my feelings and my sensations come and go. They are not permanent. They are not eternal. Well, they only produce images anyhow. Could that be the soul? Well that would mean that the soul is an image that comes and goes. So, knowing what we know about neurophysiology we can begin to at least construct reasonable questions and we can say well on the basis of what we know it can’t be this, it can’t be an image. If it’s real, if it really reflects something of the real world then it has to be beyond image.
But certainly the soul has been an issue and in some instances throughout history a very, very big issue and in others not so much a big issue. But in any case you’re in religion and every philosophical system that has come into being on the planet Earth has in one way or another had to address this issue because there are natural questions. What happens? Am I more than just my physical body? What happens when I die? Etc, etc. All the elaborations of that have been approached by all these different disciplines in a panorama of approaches.
For me the most practical way, the most realistic way to begin in this direction is to say that in my own subjective experience I recognize that there are things that are not physical, mass, space. They are not part of my body, they are not my bones or my muscles. When I have thoughts and feelings, those are not in the physical world. In fact modern science is having great difficulty. They pontificate a lot but they still come down. When you really put them in the corner they still don’t know. The nature of image that I talk a lot about, but the nature of the image in the brain; not known, conjectural, maybe in a hundred years we’ll come across more evidence of a specific level that we can relate more directly to image.
So, we’re talking about the soul or the question of the soul in its context and certainly this has been approached from many, many different directions over long, long periods of time by every tradition and philosophy that has taken place on the planet. For me the most practical way to begin to look at it because I think it’s an enormously large question, the most thing that is most unsatisfactory is to take any of those answers that have been offered from the past that is simplistic that says this is the way it is, blah, blah, blah, and then you’ve got this box that you either buy or you don’t buy. That doesn’t help us I think because the problem is too important, it is too large, it is too subtle to be dismissed with pronouncements that come from a thousand or two thousand years ago. That’s not to say whether they are right or not. That’s not my point. My point is that today, when the question of the soul relative to the self, when that comes up, I think we have to take all the resources that are available to us, including all the resources that science makes available and put it to the test. This is something that I think the Dalai Lama has been a real leader in saying okay, we have to use the best of this technology to try to get as much as we can of a measurement of what it is that’s going on inside of the brain because it’s clearly not material. It’s clearly not mass based. And that puts it into another world where we have all manner of questions that we can ask and we can only try to accumulate evidence of something that would have to do with a soul.
My own persuasion which comes from very largely obviously from Gurdjieff, he would say flat out to begin with, no, we do not have a soul, we are not born with a soul, but there is the possibility that with sufficient and intense work one may make a soul, create a soul. That’s a very, very different point of view. And, in a sense seems more pragmatic to me, seems more real. Otherwise I have to accept that I was born with a soul, I don’t know what to do with that, not any longer. It’s like, okay, fine. Is this soul perfectible? Can it improve? Do I have to do something to make sure that it stays pure? Does it have all these kinds of questions come up? Whereas if I’m going to make a soul or create a soul then there are a totally different arena of questions that come up that say in effect from the very outset - I don’t understand this world. I don’t know anybody who does. So, we have to begin with what we can begin with. I can begin for instance by saying I know my thoughts and my feelings and my sensations come and go. They are not permanent. They are not eternal. Well, they only produce images anyhow. Could that be the soul? Well that would mean that the soul is an image that comes and goes. So, knowing what we know about neurophysiology we can begin to at least construct reasonable questions and we can say well on the basis of what we know it can’t be this, it can’t be an image. If it’s real, if it really reflects something of the real world then it has to be beyond image.