Lore, Legend, Myth: the Evil Yes-Man

Let us set aside hocus-pocus of every stripe, and talk about Soul and Spirit. Soul and Spirit are not the property of religious descriptions of reality: Soul and Spirit are perceived aspects of being that must be accounted for in even secular myth building. 

What is the existential nature of the Soul? What is it within us that we discover and then notice as our very own “Soul”? Taking the human animal as we find it, Soul is a haze of potential latent in the human mind. The capacity for love and loathing, for desire and disdain, the inclination to be and not to be, all yearnings to and fro rise from the latent potential which is the Soul. Like a trout rises to the fly or flees a shadow in response to perceived configurations in the field of reality so is the nature of the Soul. 

That the Soul does not choose to rise: that it is drawn, and that it does not choose what to find attractive, any awakened awareness will discover for itself. Spirit is the element of being which determines our response to the voice of the Soul. Everything the Soul is capable of is not attractive to a given Spirit: not every inclination will engage our will. And it is here, in the nature of our willing, that the Spirit displays itself. As an example let’s take sex. It is the soul that is the repository of the sexual inclination, and then it is the Spirit that determines how sex is configured in our lives. And any apparent maturation of the Soul is the result of the Soul consigning itself to the will of an awakening Spirit. This is the story told in the fable of “The Ten Bulls” that we find in Buddhist lore. 

So the Soul and the Spirit are arguably experienced as organs of mentation. And mentation here need not be confined to the kind of supposed intentional thinking we find in humans. Unless we are ready to dismiss lower animal behavior as a matrix of tropisms it is obvious that they too posses these organs of mentation. It is certainly obvious that they experience joy and suffering; and if this joy and suffering reduces to tropism, what does that say about human suffering and what does that imply about that in our selves to which we say yes or no? And what is it in the creature that possesses the yes-no imprimatur? Which brings us to the question of good and evil. The soul is an iridescent haze of potentiality. There is no evil that is not private good. It is all about that to which we say "YES".

The Invisible Man Delivers Pizza to a Mannequin

Reality is unitary and seamless. Throughout history those with some intuitive understanding of the fabric of reality have had to resort to metaphor and to parsing in order to transmit to others something of what to them is obvious. There exist myriad systems that claim to have the inside track on the real thing. Some systems are thousands of years old and some are proudly nouveau. But every one of them is simply a different way of slicing up the same Cosmic Pizza. 

One slices a pizza to make it manageable: possible to consume with some degree of order. All systems from Vajrayana to Eckankar to Catholicism make the same claim with regard to revelation of reality. There is only one Cosmic Pizza and though it can be sliced into a jigsaw puzzle, it cannot be made more or less than what it is; and while the best of these systems have genuine technical advantages over an unconsidered view, the worst of these systems could be described as “The Emperor’s New Pizza.” Not to make light of these things, but none of these systems are anything other than a useful technology for slicing the same Cosmic Pizza and for noticing how it is put together. Systems that are wholly invented are wholly useless at best, and wholly dangerous at worst.

Which brings us to the Invisible Man. We cannot see the Invisible Man because he is invisible. But if we dress him up: presto, there he is. So another way of considering the system thing is as the Invisible Man's tailor. Be the garments simple or garish, no matter how you dress him up the Invisible Man is just as he is. And heaven forbid that we should touch the naked form. I, being a ploddingly typical male, find myself preferring the Invisible Woman in Lycra.

Then again the system thing is like dressing a department store mannequin. Of course the clothes fit! In the best of cases whatever the style, the cloth is cut to favor the figure. In the worst of cases the figure is merely a format for a flight of couture fancy. But in the beginning and in the end there is only one Cosmic Pizza, and the Invisible Man is just as he is, and the department store mannequin is unchanged no matter how you dress her up.

Reality is unitary and seamless.