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04/23/00 Soul Food For Thought By Eddie Nambulous Welcome, dear readers, to Crazy Eddie's Soul Asylum --- a forum where I invite you to consider your personal beliefs about the nature of the human soul. I know --- I sound like a combination of a television hawker and an evangelist, but you'll have to indulge me, friends. I'm on a spiritual roll. Recently, I've been spending a lot of hours reading up on the good old human "soul." That's right --- I've been doing some spiritual surfing well into the wee hours, eye drops and an endless cup of always at hand. Looking through religious teachings from a wide variety of cultures and time periods, I found that the word "soul" is used in a lot of different ways. To some, the soul has been defined as "the combination of the spirit with the physical being." In the Bible, the very creation of the human race is seen as that initial union of spirit and body. In a generic sense, "soul" can mean "a person" --- as in "lost soul" or "poor soul." This usage, for the linguists among you, was as common in the nineteenth century as it is today. "Soul" is sometimes synonymous with "the whole self," sometimes with "the being," sometimes with "the essence." The word also appears (with an interesting frequency) as a metaphor for "strength" or "heart." In the huge majority of cases, the "soul" is understood to exist well before mortal life. In some cultures, the predominant belief is that all living things have a "soul" --- plants and animals as well as human beings. So, I ask you to ponder: just what is the connection between body and soul? In some ancient cultures, it was believed that containing the human body (albeit under very specific circumstances) can actually entrap the human soul. (Couldn't be too much worse than a job on Wall Street --- or in the White House.) Sorry to sound so negative but, as far as I'm concerned, we're already trapped --- in bodies that break down, in communities full of distrust and ignorance, in countries that use us as worker bees and couldn't care less about a greater good. As for reincarnation, that hopeful notion that the soul returns over and over again, well --- frankly, I don't know if I'm so keen on the idea of coming back. The notion of returning again and again, dealing with the same frustrations, the same fears, the same bull over and over and over --- who could bear the thought of it? Worse yet, what about the possibility of coming back as a potted palm? Or a mosquito? Or a politician? I guess there's always the possibility that one could luck out and come back in a role at the very top of the human food chain. Maybe a business mogul, or a pro baseball player, or a movie star. (I admit it --- another go-round might not be so bad if I came back as Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt or Harrison Ford.) Across the planet and across time, we humans have always gotten a lot of comfort from this concept of "the soul." It seems that we've always needed to believe there's another level of existence, some immeasurable element that gives us strength, some spiritual core that goes well beyond the physical realm. Look at the way people have been turning, in increasing numbers, to "New Age" ideas about healing and spirituality and mental health. It turns my stomach to see spirituality turned into big business, but at least there are a lot of people moving in the right direction, away from thinking only of the more superficial aspects of life that we've been force-fed since birth. The way I see it, a little more belief in the soul --- whether that belief is based on religion, science, or the occult --- could only be a good thing. In the end, all of this "soul food-for-thought" has got me convinced that the spirit is and will always remain sublimely indefinable. But rest assured, loyal followers --- the Ed-Man is also a Soul Man. Call it "soul," call it "spirit," call it "inner strength" --- it's the human element that the Gua fear most. Trying to analyze it has occupied them for decades. (Little did they know that we've been trying to analyze it for centuries.) Maybe our beliefs become our reality. Maybe they dictate what happens to the soul once our bodies have become so much fertilizer in the garden of the cosmos. I mean, paranoid as I am, I do hold out a modicum of hope that the human species might actually progress, might actually move on to some higher state of being. In the meantime, our job must be to ensure we survive long enough to get there.
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