The Body and the Soul

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 The Body and the Soul

Some time ago, during one of our more philosophical conversations, my daughter, our own Deanna, reminded me of a statement I have seen online: “You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”

This idea fits well with Path doctrine regarding bodily autonomy. Core Tenet #3 tells us that our bodies belong to us, as vessels for our true Selves, and what we choose to do with them is our own business.

This quote has often been misattributed to C.S. Lewis, but the idea that your Self resides in your spirit rather than your physical incarnation has been around for hundreds of years. One of the first and possibly clearest iterations of this idea came from a paper written by Rev. Dr. R. Thornton in October of 1881. He wrote: “We should have taught more carefully than we have done, not that men are bodies and have souls, but that they are souls and have bodies.” It was denounced as a Spiritualistic idea, not a Christian one, but the Path is a Spiritualistic pursuit, and Path doctrine teaches that the body really is just a complicated kind of clothing for the essence that is You, called a Soul in a spiritual context or a Mind if you, like me, prefer a more seciular term. It is comprised of your consciousness plus all of your memories and your essential personality. Basically, you are a ghost, piloting a squishy meat-draped skeleton made of stardust that will inevitably fail you. We are encouraged to remember that, and to make the most of the time we spend in this mortal realm. Treat your body as a complex life-support system for your Mind, because we have learned through clear and unmistakable evidence that the Mind continues to exist after the mortal shell has been left behind: both of my parents have found a way to communicate with me through the Veil.

Monotheistic belief systems seem obsessed with what you can and cannot do with your body. They want to tell you what you can eat and drink, what you can wear, and who you can have sex with. They dictate what goes in, on, and over it. They demand that you put your body in one special place to worship, and even have rules about what you are allowed to drape yourself in while doing so. They also often enforce strict gender roles, based on the sex assigned at birth; certain Protestant offshoots of Catholicism are patriarchal by design. This focus on the exterior contaminates all other doctrine, neglecting nourishment and development of the true Self for its biomechanical vessel. The King James version of the Christian bible was even used to justify slavery, by encouraging the idea that some people are better than other people based on how they look. In contrast, the Path teaches you to focus on the development and eventual Enlightenment of your Mind and encourages you to see people of all shapes and colors as your brothers and sisters, fellow Minds or Souls.

The Eighth Core Tenet of the Path teaches us that the only real sin is treating people as things, but we do not mean the mortal shell. Treating people as things means denying their essential core divinity as Minds and using them for what you can get from them. Treating yourself as a thing means ignoring your own divinity and Integrity and either allowing yourself to be used or using other people.

Of course, we are not saying that you should not take care of your body. By all means, do your best to look after it, to feed and preserve it so that it may continue to look after you. But when we shift our focus from the body to the Mind, we may begin that most noble of pursuits, the journey toward Enlightenment. And that journey does not have to end.

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