The truth about the "soul"
I'm not the first to discover this...
(The image below is of a type of statuary invented by the Chinese when they adopted the practice of “Buddhism” from India in the 2nd c. BCE: the Laughing Buddha)
Siddartha Gautama (5th c. BCE) became known as “the Buddha” when he began teaching his method for eliminating suffering from one’s life; for Buddha’s theory was that what humans suffer from is desire
He realized that we suffer primarily from our expectations: desiring some outcome or condition or wishing that things be different than they are
Believing is a form of desire; that is, what we choose to believe constitutes a projection of our needs onto the world or our lives
There is a quite ancient belief that there is some other condition or state behind what there is
This belief persists in many forms: a reality behind what we see; something permanent beneath the changing world; something lasting inside our bodies that die…
The Buddha was right: all these are forms of desire (and so are sources of suffering: fear, longing, hope, and so on
One of the primary features of Hindu belief in his era was that there is a “permanent self” within humans; the name of this feature was “Atman”
So one of the prominent elements of Buddha’s teaching was “There is no Atman!”
An identical belief in a “soul” (a disembodied essence of a deceased person) emerged in the development of early Christianity and persists into the present
[Note: Judaism does not contain the belief in a “soul:” human being is not divided: the “body” does not contain a “soul”…]
I’ve argued that this near-universal belief in something permanent inside me is anchored in the widespread human fear of death and the wish that something of “me” live beyond my death; I agree with the Buddha that this is just another desire from which we suffer…
It’s instructive that some form of the belief that I contain something permanent characterizes almost all human systems (Judaism excepted)
What this teaches us is that fear of death is practically universal; it’s pervasive, of course, because we are the only beings that know we are going to die
But, as the Buddha pointed out, trying to mask this fear by believing in a soul only adds to our suffering…