R U Body, Soul or Spirit?

Many spiritual traditions distinguish between body and soul and between soul and spirit. ‘Soul’ is generally considered to be individual, albeit holistic. ‘Spirit’, on the other hand, is universal and shared identically by all. 

You began life as a unicellular organism, a zygote formed from the merger of two parental sex cells. As a unicellular animal, you interacted with your environment and accomplished tasks, such as reproduction, as directed by a resident ‘software program’ (DNA), consisting of over 20,000 unique instructions (genes). 

Do you remember being your zygote-self? Probably not. But why not? Because your zygote-self was not conscious? Maybe. Or because you are not your zygote-self? 

Every cell in your body today is fundamentally identical to, and theoretically interchangeable with, with your zygote-self. Approximately 30 trillion of these proto selves are alive today. Which one are you? All of them? None of them? Watch carefully. It’s a classic game of 3 Card Monte. What we call ‘you’ is not consciousness at the cellular level. 

The extent to which unicellular organisms may be ‘conscious’ is a matter of intense debate. On the other hand, most of us can agree that at some point between the moment of your conception and the time the last guest left your surprise 30th birthday party, you were at least temporarily conscious, i.e. aware, self-aware, and aware of being aware and self-aware. In other words, you’re a hall of mirrors!

You may have asked yourself, “Why is it that I am who I am? Why am I ‘me’ and not someone else? How unique am I, how ‘fine-tuned’? I’m not you; we are not even related as far as I know. But I’ m also not my brother, even though we do share the same parents, and had I been an ‘identical twin’, I would not have been my twin either. 

If I am cloned someday, will I be that clone and/or will my clone be me? Or will my clone and I each experience ourselves as a different, unique version of ‘me’? Well, news flash: you have already been cloned…trillions of times. It’s called cell division.

Remember? You began life as a unicellular animal. Well, that single cell has reproduced and continues to reproduce. In the course of an average human lifetime, the zygote will be copied 100 trillion times with 30 trillion of those copies alive and functioning at any given moment. 

No one of them is you, but we refer to them jointly as your ‘body’ (or, equivalently,  your ‘mind’). Every one of the 30 trillion cells that make up your body houses the same basic genetic code.  But different cells express that code differently. Bone cells and skin cells are governed by the same DNA, but they function differently in your body.

Theoretically at least, every cell has the ‘potential’ to perform any function within the scope of its code. But not every cell does that. The evolution of the organism known as You requires division of labor. Each of us harbors a miniature version of Bill Belichick in our brains: “Do your job!”

Different cells express their common DNA differently. Cells differentiate to form tissues; those tissues develop into organs and those organs work together as a ‘body’, a unified  organism, you. What you perceive as ‘you’ are patterns of interaction among the cells that form your body. 

The question, “What makes me ‘me’?” is non-sensical. The question assumes that there is some sort of distance separating who you are from what you are. What makes ‘you’ you is that you are! 

‘Who you are’ transforms ‘what you are’ into you. ‘Who you are’ and ‘what you are’ are your personae; each is just you but under different modes of description. 

You cannot compartmentalize here. We talk of cells and the networks they form, the tissues that support those networks, the interactions among networked cells, and patterns formed by those interactions. These distinctions are academically useful, but experientially, they are a distraction. The phenomenon of ‘you’ is holistic. ‘You’ has no parts, aspects maybe, but no parts.  

After some time, the society of cells that constitutes ‘you’ will cease to function as an integrated organism. You will die! The impact on the cellular members of your body will be catastrophic. Over the following minutes, hours, and days all cells associated with ‘you’ will die…well, almost all. A few cells may be able to survive for a time outside the mother ship.

Then there’s the matter of your DNA, the Team You playbook. If you’ve been fortunate enough to reproduce, some ‘you-specific code’ will be inherited by the DNA of others. Traces of your ‘software program’ may show up in the code (DNA) of some species a million years from now…or not.  But in any case, those immediate and/or remote descendants are not you.

When you speak of ‘you’ in a clinical sense, you’re referring to a collection of cells and the inorganic infrastructure that enables those cells to function in a coordinated fashion. 

So, back to the original question(s): if the details of my conception had been different, however infinitesimally, would I still be ‘me’ or would I be someone else? The answer of course is ‘yes’…and ‘yes’. 

That ‘person’ would not be the same as the person she would have been if the details of her conception had been different. But on the other hand, she would not be someone else either. She would be who she is, period.

Every ‘person’ is unique. No one person can be truthfully compared with any other person. Of course, you can construct artificial scales of comparison: height, weight, age, IQ, et al. But these variables have nothing to do with who a person is, with who you are.

The person that is ‘you’ is the same regardless of your size, age, or intelligence. As you grow and age and learn, your personhood remains unchanged.  And yet there is no feature in your constitution, that if changed, would make you a different person. But watch carefully. Which cell are you? Now which? It’s a classic game of 3 Card Monte. 

So what do we call that aspect of ‘you’ that is irreparably identical throughout your lifetime; we call it your ‘soul’. Soul is what remains unchanged regardless of what else changes. You are a single organism. What is subject to change we call your body; what is forever changeless we call your soul. 

Nothing ever changes but nothing is ever the same; everything changes but nothing is any different. This is the riddle of being a person.

Now take a step back. Every soul is unique, but what is it that all souls enjoy in common? Participation in Spirit. 

You are the holistic sense of self that transcends, but is inseparable from, its elements. You are that by which the whole of you exceeds the sum of you (2 > 1 + 1) and (2 = 1 + 1+ x), where x is a ‘hyperreal infinitesimal’, i.e. a number smaller than any positive real number but greater than 0. You are quite literally unreal…in the mathematical sense of the word. 

Whatever ‘is’, and enjoys a requisite but unspecified degree of complexity, may be self-aware and exhibit the characteristics we associate with ‘soul’. Your soul is not added to your body, as many of us were taught in Sunday School; rather your soul is your body reimagined.

You exhibit characteristics of ‘soul’ because of the ontological fabric in which your cells are embedded. This something in the fabric of being is what we call Spirit.

Christians are familiar with Spirit as the Holy Spirit, a member of the Trinity, God and one of God’s 3 personae (persons). For Christians, the Holy Trinity is the source and paradigm of all process. The Holy Spirit is ’Lord, the giver of life’.

But the concept of a single Spirit in which diverse entities ‘participate’ is in no way limited to Christianity. It plays a part in many of the world’s spiritual traditions.

Let’s unpack this idea! Your soul is the awareness that transcends mere awareness. Call it ‘awareness of self as self’ or ‘awareness of being aware’? As such, it never changes, regardless of the object of your awareness at any one time. Your perceptions are constantly changing but your act of perceiving and your identity as a preceptor never change.

Soul is the ‘part’ of you that makes you, you. It is the aspect of ‘you’ that does not change based on its location in spacetime. ‘Soul’ changes nothing; it adds nothing to experience. Yet without it experience is meaningless.

‘You’ are the constant that allows you to experience real solidarity with a far better, 8 year old version of yourself. (Your parents thought they were ‘civilizing’ you; if only they knew!) That’s soul. It’s intensely personal. It is the one person behind every persona, every mask. 

So you are you, regardless of where or when, location or age. It is reasonable to suppose that you would be you, regardless of the circumstances and details of your conception.  In any event there’s only ever one you, so who else are you going to be?

Being ‘you’ is being self-aware. Ýou is what is constant across every act of self-awareness. So you are you regardless of your current circumstances, regardless of your life history, and regardless of the circumstances of your conception.

But what if the circumstances of your conception include your ‘choice of parents’. We have established that you would be you regardless of which paternal sperm cell impregnated your mother’s ovum. Now suppose you are the product of a different paternal donor; would you not still be you?

And if you were also the product of a different ovum? Or a different woman’s ovum. Who would you be then? Who else but you? “I am he as you are he as you are me as we are all together.” (Beatles, I am the Walrus)

So is Soul different from Spirit? Absolutely. Can we reduce one to the other? No way! As many, you are body; as one, you are soul; unnumbered, you are spirit.

So how is it that you are you? Well, again, who or what else could you possibly be? You could, I suppose, be a different you but then you would be that you just as intensely as you are this you and so we’d be having this very same conversation. You are always ‘you’ no matter who you are. You are you no matter what you are. That’s soul. You are you regardless of who you are. That’s spirit. 

So ‘soul’ is not something added on to something else (e.g. ‘body’). It is simply a way to describe what everyone agrees already is. Materialist models start with the most primitive constituent building blocks (cells, molecules, etc.) and use them to explain more complex, more integrated behavior. 

The concept of ‘soul’, on the other hand, crops up in connection with models that begin with the organism’s most complex behavior and deduce its constituent elements. ‘Spirit’ is a word used to describe that which all souls share in common. 

Spirit is a characteristic of Being itself. Participating in Spirit is what it means to be, period, not just what it means to be you. Spirit is more fundamental than body or soul; it is more like a topological feature of reality. It is what makes consciousness possible…and perhaps universal. It furnishes the objective aspect of all ethics: Karma, Golden Rule, Great Commandment. Spirit is the recursive, reflexive aspect of Being per se. It is what makes all else possible…and real. 

David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com.

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