The Perception of the Self

A worldview is an intricate thing. No one definition can ever prove sufficient for this crucial aspect of a human being, because what it means to be a human being differs between every such being. What this term encompasses is nothing less than what comprises the very soul of a man: their experiences, their beliefs, convictions, and dreams. One cannot arbitrarily define and file away a concept so intertwined with a man's essence, no more than one can say what substance makes us a soul. This deep, embedded concept, however, is not only the lens through which a person sees the world, but the mirror that the world reflects off of into the eyes of others. One's perception of the vast, encompassing presence of Creation defines the person in both the most public and most intimate senses, for perception is the arbiter of thought and dreams.

The first thing that an infant receives into its senses when it enters the world is sensation, pure and uncolored. It feels the shock of cold hands upon flesh, the sharp pain of a blow upon the rear to bring forth the final, and the most essential sensation of all; it brings into its lungs the air of the Creation it is now a part of, tying itself to all else that lives. From this simple, elemental firing of nerves in the skin and throat, blossoms the essence of humanity; the soul. A man without a soul is not, as we picture him, a man who holds only himself precious; the soulless man is the one who sees but does not perceive. The soul and its power to perceive is the most personal and intimate possession that a man can ever claim; it is more innate than love, or lust, or dreams. The man without a soul is he who has felt the cold hands upon his newly born skin, absorbed the air which is both nourishment and oath, and yet has not taken the sensation into his spirit. The man incapable of painting his thought across what he sees must then rely upon the soul of his neighbor; he has forfeited his eyes and thought to that of another. There can be no greater abomination than this, for when a man ceases to see the world in terms of his own ego, he becomes a slave to it and anyone who might wish to claim him in his blindness by virtue of their sight.

Touch and sight are sensations of the physical, threads holding man to the tapestry of the world, but it is the weave of the soul that carries the truth of one's being. Even the most profound of the enlightened, when chanced upon the secret truths of the universe, cannot share it with his fellow being, for the expression of the sublime is constrained by the limitation of the physical: the albatross of language, meaning, and tongue hang around the man who wishes to express the personal truths that every soul experiences. Each person must discover their own truth, through introspection and consideration of their spirit's fabric. Therefore, it is this essential, personal essence that the soulless man lacks, for he who is capable of no introspection is unable to borrow the stuff of the spirit from others.

What one must keep in mind when he considers the state and nature of his own spirit, something that every human being must do at some point, is his preconceptions of the soul given to him by his culture. When one says "soul," most instantly conjure some religious representation of the soul. For some religions, the soul is taught to be a person's thinking, feeling essence, separate from the body. For others, it is an innate spirit which measures the individual's strength of will and presence. All these definitions, however, make a grievous error; they assign the soul to be a fully formed entity in itself, part of a person, but separate from all the others. This is erroneous because the soul cannot be measured by its interactions and movements; the soul has a part in every motion of a person's thought and spirit. The body and mind are suffused with the influence of the soul, for its power of perception influences the thought and emotion, from which all deeds come. To separate it from the rest of the body, tied to some certain parts of a man's brain or limbs is to deny the power that his nature and his past have upon his present and future.

One's soul is nothing less than the essence of what he is and feels, and the lens through which the world is perceived by our sensory organs. It is what moves our emotions to the call of music, the leap of the heart at the sight of a love long absent, and the joyful fluttering of the spirit at the taste of sweetness upon the tongue. When a man seeks the truth, he must seek it both within and through his own soul, which the soulless man is content to never discover. The soul and life are synonymous, for a life without the joy and movements of the soul cannot be but a life without light. Those who lack it are the most pitiful of creatures, for they lack the power to embrace Creation with the whole of their being.

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Sorry for going essay mode on you, my dear readers. It started out as a post pointing out the contradictions in the bible, and then a long line of synapses firing led to my scrapping of the entire thing and writing this. Hope it made you.... think.... well, something.