Soul Hacking

And now, some self-indulgent navel-gazing on the heels of the Alan Watts podcast sample. You’ve been warned.

When I was in college, I had a somewhat stunning realization. I had gotten into leading White Wolf role playing games, and would spend countless hours coming up with various kinds of characters to populate the background on which the players would act. I’d invent back stories and come up with an internal logic and a paradigm for these characters so that they would have both the skills and the desires that worked for the plot, but would also be accessible and realistic.

In particular, I became very adept at intertwining back stories that brought in a multitude of skills. Hunting and a rural background provides survivalist training, weaponry, and mechanics. Forensic science provides scientific skill, an eye for detail, and a background with police procedure. Growing up in Hong Kong, Belgium, Switzerland, or Kuwait gives an excuse for knowing many different languages. Playing music leads to manual dexterity and performing under pressure.

One day, while working on these characters, I was struck by a mismatch: here I was imagining characters with these highly optimized backstories, and my backstory was being filled with imagining fictitious backstories. Sure, running these games gave me some interesting background and a few minor skills (organizing small groups of people, thinking on my feet, working within a system while still being creative), but the fact of the matter was that I had reached a kind of wall with that part of my backstory, and continuing down that path wasn’t really optimizing my life really well. And those hours burnt on playing Civilization: those were really wasted.

So I started to change things up. I refocused my life, and set about trying to optimize it. I thought of myself like a non-player character in a role playing game, and the Nietzsche that I read in high school suddenly started to make sense. I cut out video games (with the exception of the occasional binge on some idiotic thing like Plants vs. Zombies and FaceBook games, which I try to resist but can’t) and I’ve gotten engaged in good organizations and taken on practically every opportunity that’s surfaced.

Most importantly, though, it changed the way that I looked at religion. Some people may be into life hacking, but I’m interested in soul hacking. It gets back to the basic existentialist sensibility that I have—truth is irrelevant unless it changes who you are in some sense. And that’s doubly true for areas of spirituality, philosophy, and religion. I want to know how the soul and metaphysics work: what are the metapatterns in the universe, and what do those metapatterns mean for the way that I live my life? I’ve always been fascinated by existential philosophy and metaphysical paradigms, but I wanted to crank it up a notch. A collegiate course on Kierkegaard later, and the realizations making up my Applied Epistemology, or, What Does “Real” Mean Anyway? post finally solidified in my head.

My ongoing research and study in religion has focused around this idea of soul hacking. When I read the scripture, I’m looking for the wisdom about how the human spirit and the universe at large works—and there’s a lot more there than the scriptures tend to get credit for. The complexities of scripture and its overtones and nuances and contradictions are the same kind of sloppy mess of our lives, and I recognize a kinship between that mess and the larger universe that’s a rich vein. The study of religion also gets me into practically every other field that relates to self-improvement and truth: psychology, sociology, ethics, philosophy, politics, or whatever. And the M.Div program that I’m involved with focuses heavily on self-improvement, particularly for first-years, which is obviously relevant to my search.

So far, I have a meager few conclusions. The key conclusion is that our universe has structure to it: there are motifs or meta-patterns that repeat themselves, and knowing and understanding those motifs can help you rapidly familiarize yourselves with new areas of truth and can help develop a sensibility about what seems true and false. One motif is numbers being a bridge into universal absolutes and specificity (as contrasted with language, which gets its power from its context and ambiguity). Another motif is holism: separating individual aspects from its context creates a disproportionate drop in capability and understanding, both for the thing separated and for the one doing the separating. These motifs are useful in recognizing what you’re dealing with in the world (and yes, I’m aware of the bias feedback loop there), but there are more practical things I’ve figured out, too. I’ve discovered that focus and drive—maintaining forward momentum, as one person might say—is a key to success: there’s a momentum to life, and turning away opportunities creates drag, whereas taking opportunities creates acceleration. Ritual (cite), meditation (cite), and prayer (cite) all have positive mental and physical benefits: we seem to be manufactured for them at the most base level. Which is ironic, because they’re things regularly dismissed by our culture as “unscientific” remnants of a bygone age (although, notably, they’re precisely the things advocated by freemasonry). I’ve also concluded that we’re wired against violence: empathy seems innate, and has to be suppressed to accomplish danger on others (resulting in PTSD, an inability to “fit in” with civil society, and other disorders). Most importantly, though, is the kenotic motif: the motif of self-sacrifice, or of victory in defeat and strength in weakness: I can’t prove it (although some have tried), and I realize I’m wired for it by religious upbringing (although I suspect that’s true of all religions, and certainly key in Freemasonry), but it seems like that’s the most powerful motif in the universe.

The most surprising and interesting conclusion I’ve reached is that there isn’t a clear boundary between the mental/spiritual world and the physical world. There’s a great tendency for spiritual conversations to divorce the physical and the mental/spiritual and talk about our “eternal selves” or some even more obscure reference to a distinct, non-physical identity. Often, this is subtly invoking a kind of gnostic take on the world where the purity and good of the “eternal self” is contrasted with the base and despicable physical world. That boundary, though, doesn’t really exist: psychopharmacology and the emotional effects of physical activity (cite) both show that the mind and the body are tightly intertwined. Now, it’s certainly possible to divorce the mind from the soul and say that while the mind may be influenced by the physical world the soul is not, but then you’re left with a “soul of the gaps” which will dwindle ever smaller as physical changes can be shown to impact more and more aspects of a person’s identity.

Recognizing the strength of the soul-body connection means a few things. First of all, it means that insofar as any afterlife concept makes sense, a physical afterlife (like the one laid out in the Jewish/Christian/Egyptian resurrection) has more credence than a nonphysical afterlife (like the one laid out in “What Dreams May Come”)—which is about as much as I’m willing to assert on the whole concept of an afterlife¹. It also means that insofar as the spirit can take action or be impacted, physical action can enhance those effects: certainly we see physical effects having spiritual impacts in things like smiling actually making you happier (through the release of serotonin) and mirror neurons, and we see spiritual effects having physical impacts in things like our will working (as in, willing my fingers to type these characters). So things demonstrably flow both ways.

¹ By the time I have a meaningful data point, it’ll be rather irrelevant what my “take” is.

More practically, though, what’s fascinating about this is that it means that soul hacking also means physical hacking: arm-chair theology can’t reveal the depths of spirituality no matter how much I’d like it to. To really engage spiritually means putting yourself into situations where your spirituality is engaged in a real, physical way. I’ve found the practices of the Quakers to really be helpful towards this end. I’ve also started to recognize spirituality in more basic daily practices, including gardening (more here) and commerce.

And that’s kind of where I’ve landed so far.