The soul is what ultimately counts: soul as in soulmate,\u00a0 life and soul, a nation\u2019s soul, selling or mortgaging our soul \u2013 that indestructible, indivisible inner core or spirit of ours.<\/p>\n
Soul is the marrow of our existence as sentient, sensitive beings. It\u2019s soul that\u2019s revealed in great works of art, and soul that\u2019s lifted up in awe when we stand in silence under a night sky burning with billions of stars. Soul is present in <\/em>moments of intimacy, in flights of fancy, and in rituals that hallow the evanescent events of our lives with enduring significance. <\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThey do not sweat and whine about their condition,\u201d Walt Whitman wrote of the other animals, \u201cthey do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.\u201d Here was \u201cthe poet of the body and the poet of the soul\u201d holding up a mirror to us creatures inhabiting an animal body complicated by a soul \u2014 that organ of want and worry which we ourselves invented to explain why we make art, why we fall in love, why we yearn to converse with reality in prayers and postulates.<\/em><\/p>\n It is daring enough to ask what a soul actually is. It is doubly daring to question the age-old dogma that the soul is the province of the human animal alone. Even as we have incrementally and reluctantly admitted other creatures into the temple of consciousness, we have denied them souls \u2014 denied them because our tools of communication and computation have failed to probe it: the inner life capable of imagination and play, of love and grief, of dreams and wonder. And yet our very language defies our denial: the word\u00a0animal\u00a0comes from the Latin for\u00a0<\/em>soul.<\/em><\/p>\n This is an introduction by Maria Popova to, \u2018The soul of animals\u2019. We may be reluctant to exalt the life of \u2018lower beings\u2019 as possessing a soul. But her reference to it as the inner life is straightforward enough to be useful. And then we have her expansion of it as being capable \u2018of imagination and play, of love and grief, of dreams and wonder\u2019<\/em>. \u00a0It is indeed the very wonder at our inner life that makes us reify it, and then place it apart from the body. It\u2019s but a small step from there to attributing to soul the ability to survive the death of its current host brain.<\/p>\n The image of ourselves as \u2018creatures inhabiting an animal body complicated by a soul <\/em>\u2019 feels nice. It becomes easier to consider that other species too have corresponding inner experiences rather than a grand core able to infiltrate\u00a0 some heavenly domain. Rather few would deny that animals have inner experiences. A quality they likely don’t possess is the human foible of pretentiousness, which allows attribution to ourselves the status of the chosen species. Fortunate are those unassuming species not slated for ascension.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The soul is what ultimately counts: soul as in soulmate,\u00a0 life and soul, a nation\u2019s soul, selling or mortgaging our soul \u2013 that indestructible, indivisible inner core or spirit of ours. Soul is the marrow of our existence as sentient, sensitive beings. It\u2019s soul that\u2019s revealed in great works of art, and soul that\u2019s lifted up in awe when we stand in silence under a night sky burning with billions of stars. Soul is present in moments of intimacy, in flights of fancy, and in rituals that hallow the evanescent events of our lives with enduring significance. \u201cThey do not sweat and whine about their condition,\u201d Walt Whitman wrote of the other animals, \u201cthey do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.\u201d Here was \u201cthe poet of the body and the poet of the soul\u201d holding up a mirror to us creatures inhabiting an animal body complicated by a soul \u2014 that organ of want and worry which we ourselves invented to explain why we make art, why we fall in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":742,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.being.lk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.being.lk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.being.lk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.being.lk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.being.lk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=741"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.being.lk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":743,"href":"https:\/\/www.being.lk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions\/743"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.being.lk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.being.lk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.being.lk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.being.lk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}