Hope for a generation: Abortion or not, life is
A deliberation on soul, life, hope and love. Everything you thought you knew about your surrounding reality may be completely wrong. What does this mean?
Without burying our heads in the sand, how do we stay positive in a world gone awry? That is a very good question. Many a life coach and self-help book author have tried to address this topic and indeed, many of them give some great pointers, but I am trying to come at this from a more cerebral, philosophical perspective. Not something you would normally read in an inspirational book.
So here goes nothing.
A thing with feathers
Aristotle said that hope is a waking dream and Vaclav Havel said that hope is not the conviction that something turns out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. Martin Luther King went a step further and said that we must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope. On the flip side, Benjamin Franklin said that he that lives upon hope will die fasting and Nietzsche famously pronounced that hope is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torment of humans. But we need to look at these statements in context. I mean Aristotle once claimed that women were monsters and had less teeth than men? King had several mistresses, Franklin owned slaves and actively promoted slavery and Nietzsche once proclaimed that altruism was bad as it gave the ‘weak’ a chance to confront the ‘strong’? Not judging here, but just saying these dudes were far from perfect, so why should we feel beckoned to adhere to their ideas?
Whilst I have a lot of respect for these politicians and philosophers in their own right, I don’t think any of them truly framed what hope really means.
For that we need to go to the poets. And when looking at what the poets say about hope, I think one poet in particular, the serenely rebellious Emily Dickinson - who, after years of criticising the clergy, the patriarchy and marriage, penned this beautiful line:
“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.”
If anything or anyone is going to save the world, it is the poets.
I truly believe that this sentence is one of the most reverently beautiful things ever said. Regardless if we know what a soul is or how it operates, Emily’s words will ring true to anyone who has ever faced uncertainty in their life and managed to hold on to something, anything, to keep going.
I asked myself, what is soul, and how is it related to hope.
DISCLAIMER:
I actually wanted to focus this article on the tangible and practical reasons of why we should have hope. I wanted to point to the fact that unionisation of employees is happening at a faster rate than ever before in our history, that we live in an age of unbridled knowledge at our fingertips, that we can synthesise organs from scratch, do open heart surgery, treat and defeat cancer, that we are safer and living longer than at any time in human history. That we have harnessed the immense power of solar energy. I was going to mention that the system was corrupt but that there are very real ways to combat this corruption, how easy it would be to tip the scales of wealth inequality - how this would be easily possible with a global universal basic income incentive. I then would have bored you for a thousand words about the effectiveness of this universal basic income and how it is a no brainer. How the creators of the game Monopoly added the {COLLECT $200} feature every time you pass go AFTER they had originally published the game as they realised how boring the game was if only a few people had all the money and how this relates to a UBI. But I didn’t go down this route, not today, today I felt like going deeper, so bare with, this whole treatise will make sense.
So I took out my phone and asked: “Hey Google what is a soul?” The answer I got back was “Who would like to send a message to?” and the phone opened up Whatsapp. I tried it another two times and the same outcome. Try it. I would be intrigued what your voice prompt gives back to you.
I then did the traditional search dance and typed the question. Here’s what I got back:
So, the dictionary definition hinges upon two central tenets, one that the soul is separate from the body and two, that it is immortal. What does that mean immortal? A soul never dies? If it is immortal then when was it born? Does immortal equal infinite?
Death and the mortal coil
When a human being dies, it is only the mortal corpus that goes, yet the soul lives on. From a young age, I have always had a particularly intuitive understanding of this. I once wrote a short story from the perspective of a soul waiting to be incarnated. It was quite a refreshing perspective to take on.
Try to imagine you are an immortal soul that has died and is waiting for rebirth. What is reality like? What do your surroundings feel like? I say ‘feel like’ because presumably once you die, you lose your faculty of sight as well as all the other senses which our bodies use to orientate and navigate our way around life. And if you don’t lose your faculty of sight, then presumably all that you see is up down, forward back and 360 degrees on all sides because one thing many forget when making these deliberations is that a normal human body’s eyes are restricted by the eye sockets and the shape of the skull, our eyes look forward in a way that is dictated by way our pupils point. Once we die this type of vision would also die and instead we would be able to perceive everything around us all at once. This would be pretty disorienting at first but after a while would probably be quite cool.
So yeah, what happens at the train station of souls? Are there snacks? Netflix? How do we pass the time? Or does time exist at all? We created the concept of time on Earth, but it doesn’t actually exist. It is just a measurement like centimetre or litres, which don’t really exist either.
Back to defining souls. I also asked other friends of mine to give me their definitions, the answers I got back varied:
“Soul is consciousness.”
But then what is consciousness? Just like with the dictionary definition using the term ‘spirit,’ this answer begets another question, what is spirit? Another answer I got back was:
“Soul is that which makes us laugh.”
An answer which I particularly like as it gives a more concrete definition, one that could even be measured empirically. A scientist’s dream.
“Soul is the part of us that is a part of us and yet is us.”
Again this is a tricky definition as it is a paradox and paradoxes are puzzles within themselves and as such add more confusion than elucidation. But I still like the attempt.
I would wager for you guys to come up with your own definitions and send them to me. Especially after you have finished my own delving into the subject.
For myself, I define soul as that which makes us feel connected to everything and produces the sensation of love. Ram Dass once said that when we meditate or deliberate on the world, that we should expand ourselves outwards because it is through this mental practice that we come to realise that we are everything around us, that this whole world in essence is one giant cosmic awakening with everything in existence sharing its origin with everything else and as such. EVERYTHING is SOUL. I also like the interpretation that the reality of consciousness is merely the universe trying to perceive itself and that we all play a part in making the entire universe conscious. But then again, what is consciousness? What drives it? Is consciousness the bridge between the body and the soul? Or better, our brain and our soul?
Consciousness, like reality, is one of the final frontiers of science. From Newton to Einstein through to quantum physics the history of science is marked with an abject decrease in our understanding and trust in reality and the way we have traditionally tried to map out reality. But more to that later.
Hope is blind
Hope is power. It is the unbridled realisation that not everything is as it seems and that for as much as we understand the laws of causality, we never really can predict what the outcome of any situation is ever going to be. All crystal ball gazing aside, life is so mysterious and the future just a concept, that it really pays nothing to try and attempt to rationalise it. Hope is so powerful that it has the ability to take on an entire life of its own. Hope is the neverending belief that life is transitory, nothing is static, everything is in flux. Quantum physicists have even managed to define this mathematically, the world around is an emanation of our own thinking.
Try this experiment with me quickly. Close your eyes and while they are closed try to reimagine what you had just been looking at. The room in front of you, try to remember where everything sits, the colours, the contours. It’s impossible right? That is because once you close your eyes, the world around you ceases to exist entirely.
Blind people will for the most part agree that they live in a different dimension, where the world as it appears to those who can see, is completely different to the one they occupy. Their world is dominated by sounds, smells and touch whilst ours is one made of entirely visual stimuli.
Our entire concept of reality is an illusion. Say it with me: “Reality is an illusion.” What most physicists and evolutionary biologists can agree on is that the world that we appear to occupy is nothing like the world that we actually perceive. In fact the entire theory of natural selection is predicated on the fact that our senses would evolve to give our brain enough information and in a specific way so as to maximise our chances of survival.
Beyond space and time
Quantum physicists are now exploring scenarios where there is no space or time and the bizarre thing is, most concepts about multidimensional string theory and other calculations actually work better when they are not restricted by our traditional view of time and space. I know it is hard to fathom this and I don’t even think most of the physicists who are working in this field even fully grasp it themselves. I mean, how do you understand anything if the reality that is presented to you is beamed through a filter created by millions of years of evolution in our brain circuitry and doesn’t even depict what reality really is. What we see is an illusion and I guess the only way to rationalise existence without the need for three dimensions of space and one of time like Einstein said, is in death. With death there is no necessity for any space and any time, for surely if the soul is immortal, it does not operate in any space time continuum. It just is.
I hope this little essay on hope and the meaning of soul has managed to inspire you to start seeing your life, existence and reality in a new light, to “never stop questioning” and also to not sit too idle in your own beliefs about the world. If time doesn’t exist and reality is nothing but an illusion, then why do we need to worry about anything? We should sit and deliberate on this funny little thing called life, that all of our memories, our perceptions and ideas are all wrong because the very reality that they have been drawn upon is not actually the reality that exists. The smartphone or laptop upon which you are reading this are not real. That the person sitting opposite you is actually an extension of you, that you ARE that other person, as well as the mosquito trying to annoy you, the dog that is barking, the leaf on the ground, the very ground itself, is YOU. And that this change in our perceptions should give us hope and guide us to somewhere meaningful, where all of our ambitions and visions for society’s healing are already taking place, because it is happening inside you.
Okay before I get too distracted here, I will give it a rest and let another remarkable woman take us out, the enthralling Michelle Obama, who had this to say about hope:
“You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once but don't ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.”
Till next time.
PS sorry for tricking you into thinking this was going to be a discussion about abortion rights.. yeah, nah it’s being done ad nauseam at the moment - don’t think the world needs another someone voicing their opinion of when “life” starts. But if you really think about it, this essay does discuss something far more significant and in a roundabout way does touch upon the subject, albeit differently.
I just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone for the feedback on my last article, you guys are amazing. Was also completely humbled by the amount of sunscriptions and donations that came in the last weeks. Incredible. Blown away.
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