Throughout my now nearly 52 years of life, there has been a growing movement and manner in which we have begun to have ourselves explained to us. You encounter it everywhere now - in the headlines, in popular science, in the way we talk about our children. And about ourselves.
Infatuation is dopamine. Grief is a chemical imbalance. Depression is lacking serotonin - not a human being who has stopped because something in its life is calling to be seen. The life crisis has become symptoms to be managed, midway through life it's called hormones, and conscience is a signalling substance that made our ancestors better at cooperating on a savannah.
Everything that people once called their inner life is being translated, calmly and kindly, into something that takes place in a brain.
And usually it is said quite casually, almost as a matter of course - it is, after all, just chemistry.
But there is something about that little word just that is worth pausing at, because it is not a description.
It is a verdict.
Science has never said just. Science measures, and it measures well, and everything it finds in us is true - neurons, signalling substances, genetic material, electricity. But somewhere along the way there occurred a slippage, where the ability to describe the mechanics was confused with having explained the Human Being, as if the one who has taken the piano apart and laid all the pieces neatly on the floor has thereby understood the music.
And what is interesting is how alone we stand with that confusion. For try going back. Not ten years, not a hundred, but all the way.
The Egyptians, who built the oldest thing we know of coherent civilisation, distinguished between ka and ba, the life force and the part of the human being that could lift itself free of the body.
The Hebrews told that the human being came into being when God breathed his breath of life into it, neshamah, a breath that came from outside and made the dust alive.
The Greeks, whom we otherwise celebrate as the fathers of reason, called it psyche, and Plato insisted that it belonged to a different order than the body, while Aristotle, the most sober of them all, still maintained that there was a form in the Human Being that matter alone could not explain.
In India it is called atman, the self that lies beneath thoughts and is not them, deeper than the body and older than it.
The Chinese spoke of shen.
Islam speaks of ruh, the spirit that is of God's command and not of the world's substance.
And even Buddhism, which denies that the soul is a fixed thing one owns, never reduces consciousness to dust - there the mind comes first, not matter.
Civilisations that never met each other. Languages without common root. Millennia between them. And they all found the same thing - that the Human Being is inhabited. That behind the eyes there is something that is not the body, but uses it. They disagreed about almost everything - about the gods, about death, about morality - but not about this.
Materialism existed then too. Democritus believed everything was atoms. There were schools in India that rejected any spirit. But they remained what they were - schools. Marginal notes. No civilisation in history has built its view of humanity on them.
We are the first.
We are the first to have taken a measuring instrument and made its limit Reality's limit - as if what the scale cannot weigh thereby does not exist. That is not science. It is a belief that does not know it is a belief. And measured against humanity's collective experience, it is not us who stand on solid ground and the others who dreamed. It is us who are the tangent. And quite a small one at that.
Christianity gathered it all and gave it the sharpest formulation the world has seen - that the Human Being is created in God's image. That the spark is not just in us as a guest, but that we are shaped around it. John goes a step further and calls it the Light that enlightens every Human Being - every single one, regardless of station, strength and utility. It is that sentence which meant that the weak gained right over the strong. That the king came to stand under the law. That one conscience can defy an entire majority and be right.
And you need not take the traditions' word for it. You can simply look at what comes out of us.
A human being can stop before a sunset it has seen a thousand times before and become still. It can hear certain notes arranged in a particular order and feel something open that no survival advantage has ever required of it. It can love another Human Being far beyond the point where there is anything to gain from it - remain standing by a bed where there is nothing left to get, hold a hand that can no longer hold back. It can forgive what can never be made right again. It can die for a truth no one forced it to speak.
And yes, biology has its explanations, it can always point to function, to signalling value, to the herd. But notice that the explanation never hits what it explains. It can tell why we notice Beauty. It cannot tell why it means something. It can account for pair bonding. It cannot account for the love that remains when all utility is gone.
There is a remainder. There is always a remainder. And the remainder is not an error in the accounting - the remainder is Us.
And perhaps that is why so many walk around with a sense that something is wrong, without being able to point to what. We have never had more. Never known more about ourselves - pulse, sleep, steps, screen time, everything is registered, everything is measured. And yet there sits in more and more a quiet emptiness, a feeling of living in a language that is too small for what one is. That feeling is not an error. It is not a diagnosis waiting for its name.
It is the Soul registering that it has been written out of the story.
For you can deny the spark. But you cannot make it stop being missed.
Now notice what happens when the modern human being, who says just biology, is itself stepped on or treated unjustly. Then it suddenly speaks of dignity. Of violation. Of meaning that has been lost, of alienation, of being treated like a thing. And none of those words exist in biology.
Biology does not know dignity. It knows survival, reproduction, fitness. The one who himself protests against being reduced thus borrows his entire vocabulary from the world his own view of humanity has declared dead. He saws off the branch he sits on and does not notice that he is still sitting.
If we lose the language for the Soul, we do not lose a word - we lose access to everything the Word held open.
Beauty becomes stimulus. Love becomes bonding. Grief becomes an imbalance to be medicated away, instead of what it is - Love that has lost its place to be. Conscience becomes programming that can be reprogrammed. Forgiveness becomes irrational, sacrifice becomes stupid, fidelity becomes an agreement that can be renegotiated. And the Human Being itself - it becomes an organism.
And organisms... They do not have dignity. They have functions. They can be managed, sorted, improved, adapted. Everything we call inalienable rights rests on the Human Being being more than its substance, and the moment it is only substance, dignity becomes something we have adopted. And what has been adopted can be repealed by those who have the power to do so.
That is why the reduction is never neutral. Every time in history the Human Being has been treated as material, it began with someone describing it as material.
The language came first.
The treatment followed after.
And the treatment... some of you may perhaps remember last century's great experiments in the USSR and China, where they wanted to rewrite the Truth about the Human Being - and remove all talk of the Soul.
100 million dead later.
The spark cannot be measured. It never could, and that is not its weakness, it is its nature.
EVERYONE who came before us knew that. We are the first who have forgotten it. And a Human Being who has forgotten what it carries does not defend it.
I warn with everything I have against forgetting it. Because if we forget it, it will cost us everything.
A Human Being is in the end treated as what it believes it is.
❤️🔥🪽
Have a good week, friends - the weather forecast says sun and warmth as far as the eye can see, so I hope you have holiday like me ☀️🌊🥩🥤
