Reconstructing Reality

Erasmo Calzadilla

Sculpture by Agustin Bejerano. photo: Rafique

Read this post for the salvation of your body

Do human beings have souls or are we made only of matter?

This question has been posed for centuries, yet without finding a conclusive and definitive answer.  I came up with the solution a while ago, so if you want to find out what it is, you have nothing more to do than follow the lines below.  The prize goes to those who make it to the end.

Many cultures of antiquity believed that the soul was as physical and divine as the body and all other “material” objects.  Many of our ancestors didn’t make a distinction between the spiritual and the earthly, or they believed that these qualities could coexist within the same entity.

Among the Greeks, for example, the soul was identified with the vivifying breathe; and the world’s breathe was the wind, meaning that it was both material and divine at the same time. The subtlety, purity and dynamism of the air made it worth a great deal when these qualities ended up being important among people.

Later a crack began growing between the soul and its partners: the Earth, water and fire.  The former won in autonomy in the eyes of humans, while the other ones seemed increasingly inert and passive, as well as corruptible.

Everything fit together almost perfectly, but these resulted in a question that could not be solved: How could the soul (so fine and delicate) move its partners (so heavy and different from the former)?  Paradoxes like this they were chipping away at the credibility and hegemony of the soul-centered paradigm.

The momentary solution to the issue appeared, or at least it was propagated, with the words of a young Jewish man who history knows as Jesus Christ.  According to Christian mythology, the body of Jesus also passed into the kingdom of the heaven, but how could such a thing occur without the soul being divine?  Wasn’t the body created by God and from God?

Here, in short, is the answer, not that of Jesus Christ but my very own: The soul and the body are constructs, that’s to say they were built and reconstructed as entities by women, men, cultures and communities, which are also constructs by the way.

And us —who too are constructed just like them, and who are also active constructors— we can and should intervene in the process where the entities of “reality” are gestated.  Otherwise, we will be as passive, dependent and corruptible as they once believed the body was.

3 thoughts on “Reconstructing Reality

  • Your account of the “twin flames” and “two halves” sounds similar to Plato’s account of of one of the guests at the “Symposium” on the nature of love. I’ll be curious to know what happens when these “twin flames,” one Canadian and one Cuban, turn out, once they are “united!” I once knew a girl who told me that she used to go up to the roof of her dorm, overlooking Boston. As she looked out over the city she would say to herself: “Somewhere out there is my soulmate…someone waiting just for me.” etc. I wonder if she ever found her “other half?” As I remember, the original creations of the gods were completely round and had four legs and four hands. They turned themselves into rolling balls and zoomed up the sides of Mt. Olympus, trying to storm the redoubt of the gods. As a consequence, the gods smote them in halves, and ever since each half has been looking for the other.

  • humans do have souls my friend and so does anything that breathes gods air it is well known that humans are very few who meet once in a lifetime to discover the other half of ones self the self that is devided by god to keep the two twins and there group together for all of eternity the idea first came forth over 25 years ago when someone else asked the same question and for the past two years now i have been writing the book that explains this miracle and you never know it untill it happens to you and when it does it contains many mysteries of life we all live in the past we all have lived before in another time and in another place there are thosae who beleive that the name for this miracle is called twin flames and the event will surely change your life everything about you changes and you begin to see life as it was meant to be seen
    later this year my book twinflames the link will tell you of one very special couple one of which lives right in your own country the other lives in canada and very soon they will meet again these are the things that explain the souls true ententions in life and why some suffer more than most all to acheive the ultimate goal in life to help others and to become whole again with our twin its gods great plan to have a world that beleives in his very special ways and as long as you b3eleive in yourself and in god and miracles then anything in life is possible including saving a country like cuba

  • Your perception of the soul still sounds like a materialist concept (unless I’m misinterpreting, as I often do). More important is how you construct your “soul” during your lifetime, and how to overcome illusions and distractions. When a child, in order to be motivated to “do the right thing,” we often received discrete physical rewards. As we grow into maturity, however, it is important to lead the good life without such external rewards. Rather, we should be motivated by internal stimulii. Finally, I can’t immagine the tediousness of an eternal soul. As Gore Vidal once said: “We don’t know what to do with ourselves on a rainy afternoon, let alone an eternity.” For me, eternal life would be a Sartrian “No Exit” hell!

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