Thursday, May 5, 2011

Selves and Souls

It's taken me a couple of weeks to recover from Holy Week. I don't know if there's such a thing as too much preaching, but if there is, Holy Week is it. At the same time, I talked a lot about souls in my sermons, which got me thinking.... (That's always dangerous, I know.)

One ideal to which the classic practice of mindfulness drives us is the realization of no-self. No-self can be a difficult concept. For many it can seem self-abnegating. Thich Nhat Hanh, however, handles the idea with a grace and richness--that I frankly have come to expect from him. He explains that the "self" that mindfulness confronts is the self that's possessed with itself--that is both in love with itself (this is the concept of manas that I've talked about elsewhere) and that sees itself as an independent, self-sufficient being. The self as an island, if you will, and an island that must be better than all of the other islands around it.

The goal of mindfulness practice, in this context, is to get us to see the deep interrelation of our selves with the world that surrounds us. That we have no self apart from the intricate web of relationships in which we live and move and have our being. Our selves are born of many non-self elements--of the many people in our lives, or our experiences, of the quality of our environment. (It really does shape you differently to grow up in the moist warmth of New Orleans as opposed to the dry heat of Arizona.) For Thich Nhat Hanh, we realize no-self when we recognize that we inter-are--that our lives are bound up with the world in which we live.

So does no-self imply no-soul? Not at least the way I understand the idea of soul--an idea that I've learned from Christian mystics, especially Julian of Norwich. Our soul is precisely our capacity for relationship---or not just the capacity but the reality of the relationships which our lives are grounded. To be more precise, from a Christian perspective our soul is that place where we stand in an intimate and original (or originating) relationship with God. It's not just that our souls are married to God, but that the marriage is the content of our soul. (Notice, this isn't to say that our souls are God---but that they are bound up with the life of God.)

For me, the God dimension of this doesn't negate the Thich Nhat Hanh's deep sense of our interbeing with the world that surrounds us. If the truth at the heart of each of us is this original relationship with God, then in and through this relationship, our lives/souls must be bound up with one another--with the whole of the creation as well. For me, the God dimension of this adds depth and mystery to Thich Nhat Hanh's sense of interbeing---and our truth is precisely in this depth and mystery.

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