Many people hate life, and the objective of existence on this earth has often become to scourge, to exercise a totalitarian rule within moments of interpersonal miscellany. Ironically, I’m going to argue that it’s because of “soul” that this is the case. That is, it’s because of the word “soul.”
Or rather, the antipathetic tactic toward vituperation and malice so many people see as fitting is related to the same spiritual dearth that harbored the invention of the word “soul” — it’s the attempt to will something into existence that simply isn’t there.
There is absolutely no way that any discussion of a person’s “soul” could be anything but a waste of time. First of all, being as it is a “spiritual entity,” per dictum, its delineation necessarily requires divine assessment — it takes God himself to evaluate a “soul,” even in theory, to say much less of the word’s clumsy injection into everyday situations. And being that the “soul” is ideally the ultimate individual benchmark, it would seem that its mention in commonplace scenarios would follow as the ultimate relinquishing of this purported value, rendering this “pure” entity more as a quantifiable commodity for the trading.
Unless, of course, we’re supposed to use our “brains,” brain being the trustworthy, doglike farmhand of the “soul,” and denote actual things on this earth that make us happy, entranced or glued in.
Alan Watts delivers an interesting and compelling passage on human uniquenesses in The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are: “Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree” (72).
It’s mostly just static noise in this life, and those who would take themselves seriously enough to propagate their “soul” serve to deny this very thing, and relinquish the opportunity to celebrate the fact that this life is mostly just static noise, relishing in the experience of immeasurable bounty in someone’s eyes, as waves crash on the Gulf of Mexico.