Beyond Dualism

We need a soul in the mind-body theory

Physicalism is the doctrine that everything is reducible to matter and the law of physics. Life and consciousness are ultimately a mere epiphenomenon of physical and biochemical processes. Your mind is the brain, your brain ‘produces’ your mind and conscious awareness. Once your body is dead, you are gone forever, and that’s it.

This is what the majority of scientists and philosophers believe. It is a materialistic scientific realism (or should we call it ‘scientism’?) that is essentially a mono-modal, 1-dimensional, or ‘one-level reality’ (there is only one substance, namely matter) and is not willing to leave any room for a metaphysical (or should we call it ‘post-material’?) worldview that captures also our spiritual dimension.

As well known, about four centuries ago, Descartes held a slightly different perspective and introduced the idea that nowadays is known as the ‘mind-body dualism.’ The material body (res extensa - the ‘extended substance’) is one thing made out of matter, and the mind (res cogitans - the ‘thinking substance’) is supposedly something immaterial that survives the dissolution of the body. Dualism, as the word already tells, is a bi-modal, 2-dimensional, or ‘two-level reality’ where the ladder of consciousness has two steps (the level of the material body and the level of the immaterial mind.)

In the modern Western philosophy of mind, or religious and theological thought, different variety of dualisms emerged but, during these last four centuries, most of those who challenged the all-pervading materialism, remained inside a coarse-grained two monolithic blocks metaphysical cosmology. You might have heard about the distinction between ‘substance dualism’ (the Cartesian one) and ‘property dualism’ (mind and emotions are properties of the brain not reducible to physical properties), and eventually, other theoretical speculations that, however, usually don’t allow themselves to embrace a pluralistic worldview. There is matter and mind, not much more.

Philosophical idealism and panpsychism that posit consciousness as fundamental and conceive of a mind in particles or a universal mind, respectively (and, by the way, conflate mind and consciousness,) also don’t go much further than a mind-matter dualism.

Perhaps, one of the few exceptions worth mentioning is Spinoza’s many ‘modes of substance.’ There is an ultimate Substance, call it God, that manifests in many different modes. The body (res extensa) and the mind (res cogitans) are only two of the many possible modes of the same substance. It is an elegant way to unite a one-dimensional monism (there is only one substance) and a multi-modal pluralism (there are many expressions of the same substance). But even this has been reduced in the modern philosophy of mind to the so-called ‘dual-aspect monism’ that conceives of matter and mind as the two aspects of the same substance but doesn’t dare to go beyond a two-level reality.

In the Eastern philosophies that was never the case. For example, in the Indian Vedic tradition, one finds a classification in five levels, or ‘koshas’, ‘sheats’, or layers that include the body and the mind, but go beyond them. Here also one finds the dualism that differentiates between a ‘material sheet,’ the body, and an immaterial ‘mental sheet’, the mind. But it adds also a ‘vital sheet,’ that is sometimes also called the ‘astral body’ or the ‘body of prana’, and which is the layer of life, the emotions, instincts, will, and desires. Beyond that one finds the ‘causal sheet’ or the layer of intuition or divine gnosis, which is a supraconscious level, the highest form of cognition. Finally, the Vedic mystics reached the ‘sheat of bliss’ into which one merges into the supreme consciousness and ultimate reality of Satchitananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss), and from which all the individuated consciousness, life, mind, and body emerge.

Now, one does not need to embrace fully, as it is, and uncritically these mystic categorizations from other cultures and traditions. Nevertheless, I believe that it is time that Western metaphysics asks itself whether its 2-level Cartesian dualism isn’t a bit too simplistic? Here I don’t address the reductionist materialist who clings to a worldview according to which we are soon going to reduce reality, together with all our psychological dimensions, to a dynamical interaction of tiny marbles. I’m thinking of all those who built their theoretical castles upon a dualist, or a modified form of dualism. Might a slightly more extended pluralistic spiritual worldview be possible? Can we go beyond a 2-dimensional cosmology?

I already hear many in the background coming up with the two typical objections.

The first one being … Occam’s razor! Why should we multiply entities by adding a ‘life sheet,’ or a ‘bliss-sheat’ or even distinguish mind from consciousness (aren’t these synonymous?) Let us cut this all out with good old Occam who told us that the simplest hypothesis is usually the best one.

My answer is that, if reality were that simple, I would agree. But reality isn’t black or white, the Earth is more than a dead rock with thin air, an atom is more than a bunch of protons with electrons racing around it, a cell is more than cytoplasm enclosed within a membrane, and, maybe, you are more than just a body and a mind. Reality is complex. Cutting out aspects of reality with Occam’s razor because this makes our intellectual life easier, will only leave us ignorant of its variety and complexity. It is supposed to make us immune to a disease but, ultimately, ends up in a form of intellectual sterilization.

The second, and much more interesting objection I can hear is: What is the evidence!? Why should one believe that there is anything beyond my body and my mind? Isn’t this wild speculation? Metaphysical phantasies? Show me the data!

Here I would like you to show that this is not only a speculation, but you can perceive it as a lived experience, if you are willing to take a first-person perspective, instead of asking others to prove you something that you can only prove to yourself. First-person perspective means to ‘look’ inward and try to realize how you perceive, conceive, feel yourself, and think of yourself.

First of all, let us question the distinction between mind and consciousness. I already described this in another post but it is always useful to recall this to…. well, our mind.

Close your eyes and relax. Look at the thoughts in your mind. Observe your thoughts, without judging and without being involved in them. Simply step back and witness your thoughts, how they emerge, present themselves, change, come and go. Thoughts are something mutable, that changes in time, you know that all too well.

But who or what is witnessing all these thoughts? There is a witness, who is the spectator of all these thoughts that come and go, but it remains always present. This presence is something that does not change, it is an immutable witness that watches the twirl of thoughts but is not those thoughts. It simply is. And this presence is what we call ‘consciousness.’ We might also just call it the ‘soul’ or our ‘inmost being,’ the ground of all our sentience, awareness, and experience.¹

Thus, it is not abstract philosophical speculation. A simple first-person investigation into our inner life, reveals us how we can’t simplistically conflate mind and consciousness. There is a qualitative difference that we can’t ignore, no more and no less than with the body and the mind.

So, we have gone a little bit beyond the Cartesian dualism. There are not two but at least three elements that one should not conflate: body, mind, and consciousness.

But, with this first-person approach, we can go further.

Go inward again and take the same psychologically detached witness position. However, this time observe your emotions, feelings, desires, and all those sensations that are neither physical nor mental. Are emotions thoughts? When we have a thought or think about something, say we are trying to solve a mathematical equation, we are focusing on the analytic mind, the intellect, and resort to the power of reason. But when we experience an emotion, such as joy or fear, calm or anger, happiness or sadness, etc. we don’t use the analytic mind. Non-human animals are mostly subjected to this emotional, and instinctive part of life without having developed a mind, or at least a fully developed analytical reason as in humans. Yet they are conscious, have a body, and clearly display emotions, desires, will, and agency. We don’t need to speculate about deeper philosophical concepts to know, by a direct lived experience, that there is a qualitative difference between an abstract thought and an emotion. This means that we should discriminate, discern, and take some precaution before simplistically equating emotions and feelings to a ‘state of mind.’ It would be much more reasonable to follow our inner perception and first-person experience, and add to the distinction between consciousness, mind, and the body also that of an ‘emotional body,’ or, since emotions, desires, will and agency are psychological aspects of life, we could call it also the ‘life sheet’ or just the ‘vital.’

We can still go further with this exercise.

There are still aspects of our ordinary waking conscious state that escape our direct awareness. Modern psychology knows all too well that there is a subconscious or unconscious aspect in us. One might say that we can’t know the unconscious because it is, per definition, non-conscious, and, thereby, we cannot experience what it is and how it works. But this is only partially true. Because, while most of our physical, emotional, and mental processes escape our ordinary waking state awareness—what is called the ‘access consciousness’— we can, nevertheless, still indirectly experience its effects. Think only about your dream state while you are sleeping. Recall one of those confused and incoherent dreams, that we all have from time to time, or even nightmares. It is a state of consciousness where everything appears fearful, irrational, disordered, non-sensical, and seemingly bubbles up from an obscure realm of automatisms, and uncontrolled instincts, and that the mind translates in a (true or apparent) meaningless symbolism. Also in the waking state, we can see how our subconscious parts influence our life. Sometimes we are dominated by irrational fears, desires and habits, or strange behavioral automatisms that we can’t explain and hardly control. Especially if these are related to past traumatic experiences, we know how these can condition our mental and emotional existence. We don’t need to go into the technical details of what this subconscious domain really is, how it works, and what psychology might tell us about it. It is sufficient to think about our past first-person life experiences to realize that there is a submerged aspect of our individuality that makes part of our personality. Therefore, it makes sense to add to our ladder of consciousness another step: Besides the body, mind, vital, and consciousness itself, there must be something that we label the ‘subconscient’ or a ‘subconscient sheet.’²

This is not to say that mind, body, life, and all our parts of being are separate entities that have no relation with each other. Of course, the mind is deeply intertwined with the body, our emotions determine our thoughts, our thoughts cause our body to act, and our past experiences are rooted in our subconscious and even in the cells of our body determining the quality of our mental and emotional life. But this does not imply that there is no distinction. The ladder of consciousness is a deeply interrelated network of interactions between planes and parts, but we can’t throw them all into the same pot, mix them, and then say that there are only one or two levels, while the rest of the universe, suddenly, ceases to exist.

And what about those great insights, those moments of inspiration, the flash of intuition (the Eureka and proverbial ‘Aha! moment’), that kind of sudden realization and epiphany where we know something, without knowing how we could know it? Western philosophy of mind amalgamates these cognitive phenomena with the subconscious activity of our brain or mind. It is, again, another conflation that does not hold scrutiny if we investigate it from a first-person experience. There is a huge qualitative difference between obscure, disorganized, disconnected, and meaningless dreams that reflect our fears and anxieties, and, on the other hand, a luminous insight of knowledge and a sudden creative moment that might translate into a beautiful poem, music, piece of art or scientific discovery. The latter we might call the ‘supra-conscious, ’ something that should not be confused with the subconscious, as, unfortunately still too many do.

We found six steps in the ladder of consciousness: the subconscious, the body, the vital, the mind, the supraconscious, and, at the center of them all, the soul.

We might ask whether the soul is a separate and independent entity. Well, here the first-person experience on the ordinary level of our waking consciousness may no longer be sufficient to furnish clear answers unless one ascends the heights of the mystic experience. Mystics tell us that our soul is an ‘individuation,’ or a ‘divine spark’ of a universal Consciousness. You will find this, especially in Eastern spirituality (the already mentioned Satcitananda of the Indian spirituality), but it isn’t absent in the Western tradition as well (e.g., in Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, or the concept of the ‘Absolute’ in the Kabbalah, the ‘World Soul’ in philosophical idealism, etc.) But let us be ‘scientific’ and apply Occam’s razor, mystics may hallucinate and we prefer to be parsimonious, and speak ‘only’ about the soul. Well, not really since we have multiplied a lot of the initial entities, namely the brain and mind. The mind is no longer a mere epiphenomenon of the brain, life’s emotions are not a mere state of the mind, intuitions are something beyond the machinery of a bunch of neuronal cells, and the subconscious isn’t the same as the supraconscious. We ended in Occam’s hell.

We can summarize our ‘findings’ with the following diagram.

This is only a diagram, a mind map, a mental structure of something that goes beyond (over and under) the mind. Others built very different (and usually much more contrived) structures of consciousness.³ So, it is only a pointer, a mental crux, that, however, helps us to go beyond a limited dualism.

The only message I would like to give out isn’t so much yet another complicated and mystical metaphysical framework, but to invite you to consider that, maybe, reality goes beyond a black-and-white body-mind dualism. Psychology, philosophy, or theology can’t forever restrict themselves to a two-dimensional bubble. The universe is a bit more diversified than we would like it to be according to our anthropomorphic belief systems. And we are a bit more complex and richer creatures that deserve better than being caged into a superficial one-dimensional physicalism or to the simplistic flatland world of dualism.

Now, you might ask why should we bother? You might feel that asking whether we are just biological robots or, have a soul and mind that survives the last day of our bodily existence, or whether there is even more that defines us, may, at best, be worth only for a week-end philosophical speculation.

One could point out that these philosophical theories can’t go far by refusing to open themselves to something that goes beyond a status quo made of two Lego pieces, and then, after having built upon it a huge abstract ontology, wonder why it is affected by inconsistencies and contradictions that don’t reflect reality.

But the central point is that the way we think of ourselves and the world strongly determines our practical actions in everyday life and, directly or indirectly, always frames human activities. For example, in psychology, education, and all social sciences, if you believe that the human being is ultimately only a machine that needs to be fed with matter and chemical cocktails, you will conceive forms of psychology, education, and social sciences in a specific manner. While, if you think like an idealist—that is, only in terms of mind and body—you might take a step further but your view will still not consider the deepest nature and essence of our individuality. Part of what we really are will continue to be cut out, and this also will determine a certain attitude towards our fellow humans. We need to build a comprehensive and integral view of our true nature and learn to take the ‘soul perspective’ at an individual and collective level. Only by taking into account all the planes of consciousness and our parts of being will we be able to address humanity’s troubled times.

1. Reality might, again, be more complex. We might misapprehend that witness consciousness or ‘soul’ for our ego, a separate subject, a personality, a character. This also is something witnessed. But, for the time being, let us speak about consciousness or the soul. It suffices this didactical introduction.

2. The distinction between the subconscient, unconscious, inconscient, nesceint, or whatever label and categorization we might use, is, for the time being, not so relevant in the present context. This wants only to be a first understanding of our different planes and parts without going too deep into the details.

3. To my mind come, theosophists, the Kabballah, Buddhist cosmologies, philosophers like Jean Gebser, etc.