19._ Soul

We must then reject those ambitions that we have described already as foolish and disturbed? We must surpass them stoically to accept with serenity our least and ephemeral place in the Universe? We must contemplate with resignation, and until with joy, the future and inevitable dissolution of ours "ego" in the undifferentiated deposit of the Nature?

We must consider fulfilled our "mission" and to be satisfied whatever it has been our luck in the life? We must be contented with surviving in our descendants, in the works that we leave, in the memory of which they remember to us? Or we must separate any thought about the death, to live with intensity and unconcern every present moment? We must leave the "melancholic" attitudes to submerge in the action, the sensation, the dionysiac joy?

We must consider to the death like a friend who definitively releases of the sufferings and the preoccupations to us? Or we must look for the impassibility, the destruction of our individual will, to accept to dissolve to us in the group, in the impersonal thing, even finally in the nothing?

This is very difficult. The human being rather tends to convince himself of his individual immortality. He considers his personal conscience so valuable that he attributes the capacity to him of an existence independent of the matter, the body and the world: the immortal soul. An individual soul that would animate a body provisionally, but could subsist when this one dies, or be reincarnated successively in other bodies, or persist by the eternity next to the other souls and be fused with them in a unique soul, in an immaterial supra-universe.

But we see it of another way, since we think that our individual conscience could not subsist by itself independently of our body, as being an emergence of this one.
Beyond the rationalist-materialist-mechanist approach that affirms that the human mind is only a epiphenomenon of the body, and more here of the vitalism that postulates a "vital breath" added to the matter mysteriously, with the emergentism we thought that it is the organization, of great complexity, of the human body, which causes that a radically new and superior reality emerges: the mind, the reason, the personality.

In the body a genetic program that determines its identity and functions is discovered, in the brain are discovered the capacities that serve as base to the thought and the memory. Lack to discover much --almost everything-- but we are being convinced more and more that there is something that defines to us that is more essential than our body --which varies continuously, since their cells are renewed during the life--, and that it can be described at our time with this resemblance: it is our "software".

When we die, when our "hardware" is destroyed, our "software" --our soul-- cannot continue subsisting "by itself" in the space nor in the time, but we think that, like information that is, it does not disappear, but that is conserved somehow until arriving at the knowledge of God.

____________________________________________________________________________________

From the book of Job

Do not human beings have a militia on earth,
and are not their days like the days of a mercenary?

Like a slave who longs for the shadow,
and like laborers who look for their wages,
so I am allotted months of emptiness,
and nights of misery are apportioned to me.

When I lie down I say, 'When shall I rise?'
But the night is long,
and I am full of tossing until dawn.
My flesh is clothed with worms and dirt;
my skin hardens, then breaks out again.

My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle,
and come to their end without hope.
Remember that my life is a breath;
my eye will never again see good.
The eye that beholds me will see me no more;
while your eyes are upon me, I shall be gone.

------------------------------------------------------------------

I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint;
I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.
I will say to God, Do not condemn me;
let me know why you contend against me.
Does it seem good to you to oppress,
to despise the work of your hands
and favor the schemes of the wicked?

------------------------------------------------------------------

Your hands fashioned and made me;
and now you turn and destroy me.
Remember that you fashioned me like clay;
and will you turn me to dust again?
Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese?
You clothed me with skin and flesh,
and knit me together with bones and sinews.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Why did you bring me forth from the womb?
Would that I had died before any eye had seen me,
and were as though I had not been,
carried from the womb to the grave.
Are not the days of my life few?
Let me alone, that I may find a little comfort
before I go, never to return,
to the land of gloom and deep darkness.

------------------------------------------------------------------

A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble,
comes up like a flower and withers,
flees like a shadow and does not last.
Do you fix your eyes on such a one?
Do you bring me into judgment with you?
Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?

------------------------------------------------------------------

For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down,
that it will sprout again,
and that its shoots will not cease.
Though its root grows old in the earth,
and its stump dies in the ground,
yet at the scent of water it will bud
and put forth branches like a young plant.
But mortals die, and are laid low;
humans expire, and where are they?
As waters fail from a lake,
and a river wastes away and dries up,
so mortals lie down and do not rise again

------------------------------------------------------------------

So you destroy the hope of mortals.
You prevail forever against them, and they pass away;
you change their countenance, and send them away.
Their children come to honor, and they do not know it;
they are brought low, and it goes unnoticed.

----------------------------------------------------------------

I was at ease, and he broke me in two;
he seized me by the neck and dashed me to pieces;
he set me up as his target; his archers surround me.
He slashes open my kidneys, and shows no mercy;
he pours out my gall on the ground.
He bursts upon me again and again;
he rushes at me like a warrior.

I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin,
and have laid my strength in the dust.
My face is red with weeping,
and deep darkness is on my eyelids,
though there is no violence in my hands,
and my prayer is pure.

O earth, do not cover my blood;
let my outcry find no resting place.
Even now, in fact, my witness is in heaven,
and he that vouches for me is on high.
My friends scorn me; my eye pours out tears to God.

------------------------------------------------------------------

My days are past,
my plans are broken off, the desires of my heart.
They make night into day;
'The light,' they say, 'is near to the darkness.'
If I look for Sheol as my house,
if I spread my couch in darkness,
if I say to the Pit, 'You are my father,'
and to the worm, 'My mother,' or 'My sister,'
where then is my hope? Who will see my hope?
Will it go down to the bars of Sheol?
Shall we descend together into the dust?

----------------------------------------------------------------

Know then that God has put me in the wrong,
and closed his net around me.
Even when I cry out, 'Violence!' I am not answered;
I call aloud, but there is no justice.

He has walled up my way so that I cannot pass,
and he has set darkness upon my paths.
He has stripped my glory from me,
and taken the crown from my head.
He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone,
he has uprooted my hope like a tree.

---------------------------------------------------------

(But)

As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives.
The Last, he will stand upon the earth.
After, with my skin he will cover me again,
Then in my flesh shall I see God,
Whom I, even I, shall see on my side.
My eyes shall see, and not as a stranger.

________________________________________

From the book of Isaiah

Look down from heaven and see,
from thy holy and glorious habitation.
Where are thy zeal and thy might?
The yearning of thy heart
and thy compassion are withheld from me.
For thou art our Father,
though Abraham does not know us
and Israel does not acknowledge us;
thou, O Lord, art our Father,
our Redeemer from of old is thy name.
____________________________________________________________________________________

previous-blog----------------------------------------------index----------------------------------------------------------next-blog