YOUR SOUL AND YOUR BELIEFS - LOGOTHERAPY FOR FULFILLMENT

For as long as humankind has left a written record, men and women have thought of themselves as having a soul -- or even as being a living soul who came out of the Cosmos in some mysterious manner. This crucial aspect of personhood is still perceived as the key element of our inner life by theologians, philosophers and most existential scholars -- often with the assumption that only creatures with self-introspective abilities can exist in an altered state even after death. Roberta can remember the grief she felt as a youngster when her parents explained that her badly wounded dog wasn’t going to be in heaven -- poor Tippy had no soul to carry on after his demise!

She was desolate as a child but obviously has matured to understand more clearly what theologians and philosophers mean when they speak of the soul as the central factor of human personality. Of course, most persons spend little or no time pondering how and why the soul originated in the complex creature-self or unified body/spirit personality humans have evolved to become. Unfortunately, a great many women and men fail to understand there are often choices we should make and service we must offer to others for nothing more rewarding than the health of our intangible but always active souls. The very perceptive Ernest Becker wrote;

It really doesn’t matter if we discover that our inner assumptions about human nature and the world, our self-awareness in language, art, laughter and tears, is built into ourselves genetically or socially. We still haven’t discovered the inner forces of evolution that have led to our character development in ways that no other mammal shares. But it is this development in a human mammal capable of introspection, that we still mean by the word ‘soul.’ The soul remains the mysterious life force for each person, with the inner dynamisms and pulsations of existence.

In other words, the soul is at the heart of our self-awareness, is the crucial element of the creature-self aspect of each personality. The soul is the seat of spiritual virtues, positive attitudes, high expectations, mature beliefs and responsible choices and through it humans yearn to make sense of life and love, of significance, rage, guilt and violence. This causes thoughtful men and women to ponder the purpose of their lives according to their values and expectations. Our ancestors always created superstitions, traditions and philosophies in order to understand life in a pre-scientific era and to rely on theologies and ideologies to justify what they planned to accomplish. Of course from our human beginnings on the Savannah of Africa, some women and men were open minded and generous while others were closed minded and grasping. Some people loved others and other persons seemed incapable of offering love or support to anyone beyond their own supporters. Obviously, this crucial aspect of life is what we are concerned with.

Earlier scientists, physicians and psychologists, who were themselves maturing beyond myths and superstitions to understand life and matter through scientific methods, assumed that while humans were often confused and conflicted, they would live more successful lives guided by scholarship than by worn down religious traditions and ideologies. Superstitious beliefs, they assumed, would soon be banished. Men and women would surely learn how to live without the myth of a supernatural God insulating them from reality. Fearful and illogical humans would choose to live in a rational manner because the scholars were pointing out their many idiosyncrasies and irrational decisions. Boy -- did the early scientists ever underestimate the staying power of subjective human expectations and beliefs! Jard sat beside Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square one day and debated the nature of his flight around the world from Singapore with a twenty year old member of the Flat Earth Society. The young woman insisted that he had actually flown around the rim of a plate shaped world! Since he had seen the curvature of the earth from thirty-five thousand feet, he was not persuaded by the charming if somewhat ideological girl. When teaching psychology at Olivet College, he once had several Creation Science true believing students walk out of a class session when he pointed out that the resistance microbes develop to anti-biotic medications is a form of evolution occurring before our eyes. The ideological youngsters had no intention of learning anything about science -- their minds were already closed to anything new unless it fit into their constricted world-view.

One major problem in psychology arose because that Freud and many of his contemporaries had imbibed deeply of the secular philosophy of Nihilism. This mind-set is the disastrous belief in disbelief, the assumption that all values are relative, that real politik comes out the barrel of a gun and the ordinary people should be used or even abused by the aristocratic elite that controls every nation. Nihilism is the wretched philosophy of meaninglessness that focused Germany’s aggressive attitude through five bloody wars, destroyed its peasant farmers through the Industrial Revolution and orchestrated six million additional victims during the Holocaust in less than a century. The mind set that Germany was superior to all other nations, that it had a divine right to dominate Europe, was embedded in its national anthem -- Deutsland Uber Alles -- ‘Germany above everything else.’

Humans have always been prone to violence in our relationships, as a brief reading of history, scripture or the Greek tragedies reveal very well, but our ancestors always understood that war and the sacrifice of their sons and the destruction of their homes and crops was evil and spiritually bankrupt. Warfare and heroism is far more glamorous and heroic at a distance than up close and bloody. It was very hard to convince a farmer that watching a band of pillaging horsemen abscond with his family’s winter food supply was some great boon to society in the long run. Only powerful aggressors who planned to personally benefit from slaughter have justified war. They still do, as they sacrifice ordinary men and women and their wealth in order to serve their nefarious purposes!

Only in the last few centuries have philosophers and theologians, usually in the service of narcissistic rulers, rationalized aggression as somehow beneficial to a society and blessed by God. Only recently have the spin doctors of America created a bloddy,war,relationships to justify rapine and raiding, of maiming and murder. The spin doctors of society understand that fear and greed always sell better than faith, hope and love, that mind-bending propaganda in an era of televised images can step by step seduce naïve people into virtually any kind of self-defeating behavior.