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05/02/2008: "Looking for the Soul"

Where to Point the Finger

I was at a restaurant recently where two groups of cyclists were getting to know each other. The usual confusion about names ensued. One person called out, “Now who is Cliff?” and the fellow sitting across from her pointed to his own head.

The one who wanted to know Cliff looked up to the guy standing behind him. “You’re Cliff?” she asked.

Then the real Cliff once again pointed to himself, this time to his heart.

“Oh,” she said, “I thought you meant that guy behind you.”

As a student of culture I’d learned about this variation of body language. We in the West generally point to our chests to locate ourselves while other cultures—Chinese, so I’ve been told—point to their heads.

Cliff was a guy from Georgia now living in Yuma who first pointed to his head then made the adjustment to repair the communication. That in itself interested me. But it also got me thinking again about a recurring question that has confounded all thinking people, and that is the question about our identity. How do you locate personality? How do you locate the soul?

If you can point to your head or your chest to locate yourself, does that mean our personality, our soul, has parts to it?

You would think that the soul is just one thing–a single unit–for we want to believe that our soul is immortal. After we die our soul goes to heaven, hopefully–or the other place. And to be immortal, and therefore immaterial, it just can’t be the sort of thing that can be broken down into parts—part of it in our head, part of it in our chest.

But the idea that our soul has parts seems to be really the common cloth of our daily existence because our personalities can visit so many different moods. If we are happy and joyful, our soul carries that aspect. If we are depressed and low, such is the quality of our soul. Caught up in the passion of rage when we are slighted or wronged, our souls seethe with that special power that springs from anger.
And when we are sexually excited, we have surrendered ourselves to the erotic nature that comes with being a human animal.

So even if we accept that the soul somehow inheres in the mood of our attention—be we happy, sad, angry, or sexually excited—we’ve accepted that the soul has parts that can be active or quiet.

Oh, but maybe I’ve just identified emotions, and maybe I haven’t looked deep enough into the human spirit. Many thinkers simply dismiss all of that as something lower in human nature. They would say that the soul is beyond that. The soul is something finer and more elegant, and passions pull us away from our true nature. The Buddhists would agree with some of that, for their program of meditation and purification is to help a person realize that the passions of emotions and sexual attraction should be overcome in order for a person to understand his own soul and those of others.

The Hindus have taken a different approach. They developed a language for identifying the parts of the human personality. They call these parts chakras or energy centers which are associated with parts of the body. There are seven of them. Moving upward from the base of the spine, sexual organs, solar plexus, heart, throat, brow, and crown, the Hindus explain that our temperament has seven qualities, beginning with a drive to survive, then procreate, then seek power, then feel compassion, then communicate with others, then to see the connections with all things, and finally to be wise and calm in complete identity with all of creation.

In this way, Eastern thinking has a way of talking about personality that many in the West have adapted to show the soul as it inheres in a physical body.

With this kind of framework, the question about where should we point to when someone calls our name gets a little more complicated, for it could be interpreted as asking which sort of energy dominates in each person. A person who is always angry should point to his abdomen. A person who can’t get sex out of his mind should point to his genitals. A person who is caring and full of compassion should point to his heart.

A person who is analytical and thoughtful in communicating with others should point to his head. And I suppose that the person who the Eastern mystics would call “self-realized” would point to a place above his own head—to the sky, to the heavens, to the divine. As a check on our own orientation throughout our days, we should reflect, when someone calls our name, where to point our finger?