#1: The body is water; the soul is the wave
Thanks to dualistic thought, there is a widespread misconception that the soul is something added to a body, in the words of Wendell Berry, “like a letter into an envelope.” Western religion has done as much to complicate this concept as to clarify it, suggesting in most cases that the soul is mortal and can be extinguished like a flame, while at other times (namely, when it is convenient to their carrot-and-stick theology) insinuating that the soul is a unit of identity that can experience an eternal state of being, either via life in heaven or conscious torment elsewhere. Believers accept this invisible soul as an article of faith, while non-believers, finding no evidence for it, dismiss the soul as an anachronism from less enlightened times.
They’re both wrong.
If your physical body can be likened to water — the actual bonded molecules consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen — then your soul is a consistent pattern of activity of that water in a specific place and time: a wave. The water that constitutes this wave is a constant state of flux, with molecules entering into and exiting out of the energetic pattern as it moves horizontally across the water’s surface. The behavioral pattern of the wave itself, however, is what gives the wave a sense of constancy while it exists.
When C.S. Lewis, representing one of those dualistic Western theologies, wrote, “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul, you have a body,” he was about as correct as one can be describing the non-dual relationship between them in a dualistic context. There is no good reason to deny that you are both while experiencing physicality. The important truth that Lewis’ statement imparts is that your whole sense of being an “I” is derived from the subject constancy of the soul, not from the constant change exhibited by the body. This means the experiential vector of your life, what you actually see and think about and feel, is the interaction of souls. You are a soul moving through a world of fellow souls.
Physical reality manifests this experience of the soul, and the experience could not happen without it — imagine what a wave would be without water — but the energetic pattern moves in a different way than the energy itself (see the diagram of the transverse wave phenomenon below) and we experience the pattern. This is evident in the experience of non-physical phenomena like thoughts and feelings. Even if these experiences are directly caused by physical activity in the nervous and limbic systems, the experience of feeling love for a spouse or contemplating God is not reducible to these physical interactions, no more than a rainbow is reducible to water and sunlight. The presence of soul accounts for the witness and completes the experience in the way that a viewer at the proper perspective completes the rainbow. To bring it back to the water-wave analogy, subjective experience could be likened to internal swirling patterns within the wave, the seafoam churned up by its motion, or the spray exuded as it crests and crashes. Water alone does not produce these patterns; the greater energetic pattern, moving both through and as the medium of water, creates and experiences them. To miss this and deny the agency of a soul generating experience as it moves both through and as the physical world is to dismiss a vital aspect of what it means to exist, let alone be alive as a creative force in a dynamic realm of forces.
Note that both “body” and “soul” are being used here in their full holistic context. There is no firm separation between an individual body and the greater body that constitutes its physical environment (as would be better understood if we could actually see the constant interchange of material between them); likewise there is no separation between an individual soul and the greater Anima Mundi/Over-soul/Paramatman/ soul of the world. But there is physical matter moving in and out of THIS pattern at THIS particular place and time, and thus a soul witnessing itself as THIS particular pattern within the greater pattern etc. These are absolute and relative truths respectively and they are complementary in a way that one loses all meaning without the other — which is what Nonduality means, not a division into truth and illusion/falsehood.
As an individual energetic pattern, the soul is not immortal, though the energy that animates it is, and that could be a source of the confusion. But also, as we will see, further principles of “I and I” flip the idea of mortality on its head, and so, while death of that particular pattern is still a reality, it is truly “a door that opens” to another set of experiences, just as the downward momentum that follows the crash of a wave is the same as the upwelling that commences a new one. Which gives us a fine segue into the next principle…
The Principles of “I and I”
a series of essays highlighting the foundational tenets of Noestan existential philosophy as described in I and I: a Perennialist Theory of Reincarnation and Cyclical Time
#1: The body is water; the soul is the wave
Noesta Aqui 