I Wrote a Song

I wrote a song. Not too surprising, I’ve written many. But was one of the better ones. I know that because I was inspired by a combination of something I’d read and something I heard. What I read was a poem Voices by Diana DeLuca, about women’s struggles with abuse and our misogynistic, patriarchal, culture. I don’t remember what the song was, but immediately afterward I heard the first verse of a song, based on Diana’s poem, in my head. Over the next few weeks, I wrote the two verses, set them to music, then got the full text of the poem and wrote more verses, added a bridge and finished the whole thing up. That’s the way it seems to work for me, music I have to work hard on turns out forgettable, while the stuff that just “comes to me” is by far the best.

Ah, but that’s not the whole story. You see, something about those words really got under my skin. While I was writing it, I started feeling off, but I really know something was wrong when it seemed that I couldn’t feel any emotions at all! It was like my brain was covered with a thick, white, blanket, and everything was numbed out. It was pretty weird. I knew that my emotions were there, I just couldn’t feel them, and that had me worried. I spent some time in meditation, trying to understand what was going on, but it wasn’t until a couple of days later that it hit me: Working and performing that song had triggered unconscious memories of my own abuse and my automatic defense mechanisms had kicked in. I had detached completely and numbed out all emotions.

Friends tried to help me “cheer up,” but it didn’t make any difference. I wanted to care, I did! But feelings just wouldn’t come. I was torn between wanting them to just give up and go away, and a tiny fear that they actually would. The logical part of my mind knew that this was really messed up, but I didn’t know what was going on. Nothing undermines your sense of self like having your feelings betray you! I’m on the upside now, but I have a ways to go. The key seemed to be the realization, once that happened, the blanket began to lift.

This whole episode was a real surprise, and, maybe, a gift. The process was uncomfortable and a bit frightening, but it had given me an enormous respect for how far I’ve come over the past 50+ years! My friends are fond of telling me how much I’ve changed in just the past couple of years, but that’s nothing compared to what it was like to be nearly emotionless, as I was in my twenties! At the time, of course, I had no idea what I was doing. I had shut things down so early that I had no memory of any other way to be.

Looking back on it now, it looks like a kind of hell: A place where you can’t allow yourself to feel anything but fear, fear of being caught caring about something that could be turned against you. You can’t be passionate about anything, or anyone, and you have to watch people who might want to care for you, get frustrated and walk away, because you won’t ever respond with honest love or affection.

This is a situation, writ large, that happens to all of us, all the time, in the small. It happens to all of us every day, and we are so used to it that we don’t even notice. We hear a snatch of song that makes us happy, or sentimental, or we see a face that makes us nervous or afraid, and we accept those feelings without a second thought. Those feelings are real, they are never questioned! But what if we did? What if we stopped assuming that feelings have any kind of reality to them? What if a feeling was just a feeling, and not a fact? How many times have you had a feeling about something that turned out to be wrong? What would our world be like, if we didn’t allow every person with a scary story, tell us who to love, who to hate, who to trust, who to betray, what to do, what to think? I imagine it would be a very different world, wouldn’t you?

As always, I welcome your questions and comments.

Take care.

The Soul of the Matter

What is a Soul? The Psyche, Spirit, Awareness, Consciousness? I think all of these are the same, different words for the same experience, with each word having it’s own connotation and context. Soul and Spirit are most at home in the religious and spiritual, while Psyche, Awareness, and Consciousness are mostly used in the secular sciences. Surly it doesn’t surprise you that scientists the deal with the mind would want to have words that have as little religious and metaphysical baggage as possible? And philosophers sit somewhere in the middle, not wanting to be too objectively scientific, nor too dogmatically religious, use words from both sides.

But, what is this thing we are talking about? I was re-reading Carlos Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, and there was a passage near the end that talked about Diableros who could steal your soul and keep it imprisoned. For some reason, that gave me pause. Not because I hadn’t heard stuff like that before, but because I’ve learned and experienced a lot in the past few years and that whole idea just didn’t seem right to me.

There are a lot of Christian, and Christian-derived, traditions that share the idea that the “soul” is something indefinable that everyone gets, but can be given away, lost, sold or stolen without the person even noticing. How can a soul be so important, if you can’t even tell when you’ve lost it? (Some traditions get around that by saying that when “sell you soul” bill doesn’t come due until you die.) For this, and other reasons, I’m convinced that the soul, spirit, psyche, whatever you call it, is such a fundamental and necessary part of who you are, that it cannot be lost, stolen or given away. And that separation of the soul from the body results in sleep, coma or death, depending on how deep and long the separation is.

The concept that there is something of us that continues after death has been around, probably, as long as there have been humans who could think about it. But what that “something” is have varied a lot throughout history. You can browse through Wikipedia, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and EgyptianMyths.net to see some of these ideas, but the takeaway here is that the Western concept of the soul, the one through which we view all others around the world and throughout history, is a relatively new invention, and it differs so dramatically from what came before that we have no words to understand them. Hence the confusion of words.

Our modern version of the soul, heaven, hell, and the devil, are pretty much an inventions of medieval Christians, and survives today most strongly in Evangelicals: Your soul is the eternal part of you that is subject to eternal torment in Hell, by the Devil and his minions, unless you are 'saved' by by absolute faith in Jesus Christ. If you followed that link, you won't find that wording there, for they tend to downplay obedience/punishment aspects of their faith when dealing with "outsiders." But it's so fundamental to them that the idea of doing away with hell is sparing a religious war.

The reason for this is fairly obvious, without a single, fixed, eternal “soul” that can be “sent to Hell,” there is no need for a “savior,” and Christianity itself serves no purpose. This will probably offend some people, and it’s true that other sects are much less strident about this, but the fact is that judgment and punishment is the underlying message of every Western religion, regardless of whatever other messages are put in top of it. The only way out of this “obedience or punishment” mindset is to drop the very idea of a judgmental god altogether. 

That was a long digression. I put that in to demonstrate how deeply religious and historical contexts shape our ideas, and how often those ideas can be heavily influenced by politics, and cultural, and religious, necessity and biases. Given all that, is it possible to step away from what we’ve always taken for granted and view our inner lives with fresh eyes? I think so.

What is a soul? In terms of experience, the soul is that thing that makes you, you. It’s that fundamental thing that you refer to when you say “I.” The thing that has the personality, the memories, and the feelings that are uniquely yours. It’s that awareness that is aware that it is aware. In terms of structure, the soul part of a multilayered thing that we currently have no name for, but encompasses consciousness and self-awareness, on one end, and our Higher Selves, or our connection to All That Is, on the other.

The soul is not consciousness or personalty, consciousness and personality are a result of the soul interacting with the physical world. Consciousness is like the surf upon a beach, it is the result of Awareness, (the ocean), coming into contact with physical reality, (the shore), creating the personality, (as anything from small ripples to crashing surf). Once created, this personality can exist without a physical body, though it tends to lose a lot of it’s ability to function in this reality, making it difficult to communicate with. Like trying to participate in a video game without having your own character, you can kibitz, whisper in people’s ears, and send messages, but the players will usually be too busy to pay you much mind, if they notice you at all.

Though I’ve just scratched the surface, I think that’s enough for now! These are just my ideas, and, in my mind, ideas are only as good as how useful they are in everyday life. I fully intend to explore these ideas and how they can make your life happier, more peaceful, and productive.

Take care.