The Man without a Soul

What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? (Matthew, 16, 26.)

(The following reflection is from Soul Growing: Spiritual Exercises for Transmodern Times, a book by Rollie Smith)

The other day, I met a man who has no soul.

His hair was coiffed by a professional stylist. He wore a smile that seemed molded by Da Vinci. On his arm and in his entourage, were beautiful women from the cover of Vogue or the center page of Playboy. He looked like a god in his silk suit, with his manicured hands, red tie, and bronzed skin. If the gods exist because lesser men believe in them, he is indeed a god.

He has vast property and a large amount of money. The man without soul is concerned with himself above all. He judges success by how many things he owns and how much land he conquers. He is hooked on grandeur and greatness for himself without others. He alone knows what needs to happen.

This man expands his ego by diminishing others; he is careful about himself and careless with the world. He makes something of himself over others by achieving wealth, property, and glory or desperately trying to. And the meaning of power to him is the ability to cause fear. He fans the flames of fear in others to aggrandize himself.

He can be ruthless in pursuit of profit and is always looking for a better deal. He lies strategically with a complete lack of conscience. He is impulsive and self-centered, obsessed with publicity, and has a compulsive need for attention. It is difficult to keep him focused on any topic except himself.

He puts himself and his name everywhere gaining as much publicity as he can even to selling his name to investors. He sells ghostwritten vanity books that claim to have answers to all persons’ ills.

He has no sense of humor and is too simple to have a sense of irony. He cannot take a joke or laugh at himself and hates it when others laugh at him. Without soul, he is lost in things. He is impervious to the soul in others as he is in himself

When you sit with him, he is not present. He retreats to the past or claims the future. His present is stuck in an identity given by circumstances. He cannot be totally present in himself or with others. He has no way to enter another person’s consciousness. He is not with or for others.

He likes people when they are useful to him and when they are claiming to like him. He turns on them when they no longer are. He is a transactional man. It is all about what someone can do for him. People are dispensable and disposable. Interaction with others is always making a deal in which he wins.

He is pure reflection — which is why he can have a following, even a large one. His words and actions mirror what others desire and fear. He has no position because he is not positioned. He is a brand, a slogan, a commercial. He sells himself with vigor. He is an actor without his own persona.

The man with no soul is fixed in the illusion of an autonomous self. He believes he has access to the truth while being a creature of others’ opinions of himself.

Without consciousness, he has no conscience. He behaves only for rewards from outside. He does not question himself or his principles because he does not have any. He does not think critically. He dismisses complexity in favor of simple formulas. He will say or use anything to seal the deal.

One can call the man without a soul neither good nor evil though much evil results from his behavior. He is not responsible because he takes no responsibility; and I do not know if his refusal to take responsibility is culpable or pathological. He blames others whom he labels as evil to defend and glorify himself whom he claims is great.

Neither good nor bad, he is no-one; he fits in anywhere, and takes on the guises of his situations. There is no transparency and no identity to such a man. He has no position because he is not positioned.

But I recognize in him an insecurity, a silent fear of failure, a secret distaste for who he is?

__________________

A Zen teacher once told me to reduce my ego until it is nothing — or to expand my self until it embraces everything and everyone that is, the universe. “It is the same,” he said. The ego is a construct and the self an illusion for great souled ones.

Great-souled persons, like Mahatma Ghandi, are centered and transcending. They grasp both poles of each of the dimensions of being present. They are fully conscious with a robust interior life while acting passionately outwards in the world. They are unique, creative individuals while being persons for others. They are mindful of the lessons of the past while intending a better future. They acknowledge the world as it is while acting for the world as it should be.

This is the project of humanity: To diminish the ego and expand the soul completely, thus removing the illusion of self and things in the world. Centering to the point of nothingness between self and others, past and future, interior and exterior, real and ideal while in the same moment expanding beyond the boundaries of being.

The Singularity where the soul thrives without ego is the point beyond history and prophecy, at the end of history, the end of science, the end of the world, where the one is the many. It is beyond culture, beyond religious belief and ritual. It is found apart from and yet within Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, and most other religious traditions. It is neither orthodox nor heterodox, neither theistic nor atheistic. It is the before-all and the not-yet because it is presence, the here, the now, the with, the towards. Beyond comprehension of the man with no soul.

________________

What happens if a man without a soul becomes a leader?

I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words: “If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can’t simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.” And “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

In darker times as we experience today, I listen to Bonhoeffer and especially his Letters from Prison. He returned to Nazi Germany from the safety of teaching in New York so that he could accompany his fellow citizens and resisters in their suffering. He spoke against and defied Nazism even though he was forbidden to teach. He was arrested and sent to prison for being connected to the officers’ group that tried to eliminate Hitler. Just a few weeks before the Allies took Berlin, Bonhoeffer was marched out naked to the courtyard of the concentration camp and hanged. Thus, he reminds us of another martyr who resisted empire 2000 years before.

Both are models for us of the great souled leader confronting the man without a soul and challenging those of us with weaker souls.R