Where better to start than with the soul?

I caught a recitation on the radio in the middle of the night about a week ago called "The Soul Bone" by Susan Wood (http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15057) which is an incredibly beautiful poem written as a reflection of where one would find one's soul if it could be localized to a specific part of the body - the soul bone. On a side note, she happens to be a professor at Rice University where I do a lot of thinking as I jog around the campus. In this poem, she refers to ancient thinkers believing that the soul could be found in the body: "...the Midrash believed in the bone and called it the luz, just like the Spanish word for light." She goes on to imagine the bone just so, casting its light throughout the darkness of the inside of her body.

It is often easy to treat the body as something wholly distinct from the soul, in so doing playing the Hamlet and seeing the body as just a "mortal coil" to be "shuffled off" (Hamlet III.1:10). This comes from the famous "To be or not to be" monologue (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27761/27761-h/27761-h.htm#sceneIII_1) that is universally panned but contains within it the exact conflict that philosophers, religions, and individuals have struggled with since the beginning. Whether it is better to suffer the troubles that come with a physical existence or to "sleep perchance to dream," dreaming being a metaphor for the soul continuing to exist without the body. If the body is a "cage" (thanks, Arcade Fire) then what more of it is there than to release the soul at some point in time? This is problematic for someone like me whose livelihood depends on treating those diseases that afflict a small portion of this body. 

The notion of the caged soul is not sufficient, though, because I know people and have experienced myself either loss or pain so grievous that it feels as if "my soul hurts" - a feeling that can't be completely embodied by a physical reaction but indeed penetrates into a place that one can't even characterize but nonetheless knows it is there somehow. Conversely, we have mapped the human body with such detail that I know that there is no bone, ligament, muscle, vessel, nerve, or organ whose function is to contain a spirit. Just about every bump on every bone has a name assigned to it (ex. external occipital protuberance)  that relates to its location or function or disposition, yet I cannot conceive of removing any of these alone which will remove the soul at the same time and contain the soul within it. Perhaps the Latin for soul (anima) or the Hebrew ruah ("breath") can lend some understanding. The body is "animated" through the presence of the soul, and it dies when the "breath" has run out of it. In both cases, it appears the soul is an active entity.

Susan Wood's stumbled on something profound with regard to the spirit as a "light" because this too is an active characterization of the soul. The great paradox of physics is that light has particle-like qualities as well as wave-like qualities. Everyone knows that if you put a barrier in front of a beam of light, the light stops and a shadow appears behind the barrier. This is because like a particle, light will travel in a straight line. However, if you place a diffraction grating in front of a beam of light, multiple light bands will appear at regular intervals - a wave-like quality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_grating). If the soul bone is characterized as a "luz" it would have particle and wave characteristics. As a particle, it will continue to travel until it reaches a barrier, and then beyond the barrier there is shadow. So the soul can reach the boundaries of the body and then stops. But as a wave the manifestation of the soul is seen throughout the body and possibly even beyond. Look at the ripples produced by a rock dropped into a pond - there is obviously energy radiating out from the center but there aren't tiny pieces of the rock radiating out uniformly at a constant rate. The evidence of the wave is seen in the change it makes in the material around it. In the same way, soul light traveling as a wave is evidenced by the animation it produces in the body. At the same time, would seem possible to me that the effects of the soul doesn't necessarily have to stop at the boundaries of the body, just as if a gel was in a pool, the waves would transfer through the gel as well as the water. But this is the topic of another entry...

What is most appealing is that every characterization of soul is active, with the light being especially so. This body then as it gets better becomes a better conduit of the soul meaning it is valuable for the body to be maintained to its best possible extent. This is in every sense a work in progress and I hope you can appreciate the value of the journey as well as the destination in every endeavor as I attempt to fumble my way through the subsequent entries, and enjoy the ride!