Part I: The “Spirit Crisis”: “No-self” in Science

We have unlearned something. We have become more modest in every way. We no longer derive man from the “spirit,” from the “god-head”; we have dropped him back among the beasts… Formerly it was thought that man's consciousness, his “spirit,” offered evidence of his high origin, his divinity. … Here again we have thought out the thing better: to us consciousness, or “the spirit,” appears as a symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping, a misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up nervous force unnecessarily… The “pure spirit” is a piece of pure stupidity: take away the nervous system and the senses, the so-called “mortal shell,” and the rest is miscalculation – thatis all!... (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

Ours is the age of a significant paradigm-shift in the understanding of human existence – undoubtedly, we are currently undergoing a fundamental identity crisis as a species. In the last several years the unprecedented wave of progress in the fields of biotechnology, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, neuroscience and other research areas that are capable of dramatically reshaping the human condition sparked a renewed interest in the transdisciplinary dialogue between science and religion on the issues of the origin and the nature of human consciousness. Interestingly, what appears to be the bone of contention between science and religion is the problematic of the actual existence of such a notion as the human self – disputes revolve around the question of whether the human selfhood eventually exists as a continuum – as Christianity still wants to believe, – or whether a permanent self is a mere illusion – as ancient Buddhist philosophy and contemporary neuroscience tell us. The reason why the problematic of the existence of the coherent selfhood catalyzes the ongoing transdisciplinary controversy is that it is conceptually linked to the metaphysical notion of the “external consciousness surviving physical death,” which has been traditionally cherished within most religious traditions of the world but was ultimately rejected by science. Throughout most of the history of the human race, “the human spirit” has been interpreted in transcendental terms and revered as sacred, sustained by the belief in the afterlife and spiritual reality; personhood, selfhood, identity, and subjectivity were conceptualized as eternal souls, transcendental essences, ancestral spirits, spiritual energies and other forms of life-generating-and-sustaining external consciousness. However, as these premises have changed in the age of scientific enlightenment with the invention of a “natural man,” the meanings attached to the concept of “spirituality” have been reinterpreted in humanistic terms and devoid of revelatory, transcendentalist implications. Today we are born into the rationalist-empirical post-Enlightenment universe, experimentally-provable, universally-replicable, tangible, palpable, observable and scientifically describable, delimited by temporal-spacious parameters of this-worldly existence. Science had been defined in opposition to mythical modes of thinking, delusions, superstitions, and any other phenomena beyond natural reality that are impossible to measure using the scientific method have been reduced to the mere products of human imagination or phantoms in the brain. As heirs of scientific Enlightenment, we often fail to realize that this dualism of empirical and revelatory is a fairly recent modernist invention: a separation into the intuitive and the rational (in favour of the rational) embedded in Cartesian humanism has not yet been clearly marked in the premodern conception of cognition. Premodern intellectuals favoured allegorical means of expression and did not think of the mythic and the scientific as opposing discourses, rather the creation of new allegories was associated with the work of creation, linking the work of God with that of the composer of an allegory. But at the dawn of modernity, following an epistemological split between rhetorical speculation and empirical inquiry in the Renaissance, scientific discourse was gradually restricted to the observable, empirical and measurable evidence of the natural world, gradually excluding the notion of the supernatural reality from its parameters. This historical transition from the dualist/supernatural ontology to a materialist dominated scientific paradigm entailed an epistemological gap between science and the humanities, science and religion, science and spirituality – a gap that we are presently facing and trying to bridge.

Reintroducing revelatory spirituality into the transdisciplinary analysis of selfhood could significantly inform not only our understanding of the spiritual spectrum of human self-awareness but it could also shed new light on the materialistic paradigms of human existence. However, how can this task be realistically accomplished, considering that no academically recognized framework, no scientifically validated methodology for the study of revelatory spirituality exists today? Without exaggeration, our modernist predecessors gradually did away with the notion of the human soul and axiomatically postulated that there is no such thing as the “otherworldly,” transcendental aspect to human essence. Theological propositions aside – even philosophical attempts to suggest an existence of some kind of vital force or bioenergy non-reducible to chemical processes (conceptually equivalent to religious concepts of soul, qi, or prana), known as the philosophy of vitalism, have been widely discredited as pseudoscience in early modernity and beyond. When scientifically analyzing religious phenomena, religious spirituality is approached as a by-product of the evolution of human consciousness, as a social psychological response to the environment, or as a natural outcome of a basic human need to romanticize reality, rooted in fear, search for recognition or hope for a better world. In the context of dialectical materialism, “the soul discourse” was interpreted as a utopian idealization of existence, escapism from reality, and other psychopathological phenomena – presumably, it was the fear of death and hope for immortality that prompted the humanity to invent the concept of “a ghost living within a body” passing into a new realm of existence. Finally, under an onslaught of epiphenomenalism, physicalism, monism, functionalism and other materialistic trends in philosophy of mind, substance dualism has increasingly become ostracized, replaced by the assumption that all mental processes are but mere manifestations of physical events in the brain. As John Searle, the author of The Rediscovery of Mind, summarized this materialistic position, “the famous mind-body problem, the source of so much controversy over the past two millennia, has a simple solution... Here it is. Mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain.”¹ Thus, in a materialistic view, the millennia-old dilemma has been settled: external consciousness simply does not exist – a fruit of religious imagination, it should remain where it belongs – within the domains of theology or religious apologetics, and no roundabouts or insinuations as to sacred revelations within the academic discourse are welcomed any longer.

Yet, however paradoxically, with the rise of scientific materialism, the romantic longings for some sort of mysticism and transcendence among secular academics did not cease but inspired instead an alternative conceptualization of the so-called “humanistic” or “non-theistic” spirituality that undercuts the assumption in the belief in the supernatural as the only condition for a spiritual orientation. “Spiritual-humanistic tradition” suggested by Marx and developed by Fromm; the “new mystique” elaborated by Julian Huxley, “spirituality without God” advocated by Móller de la Rouvière – these holistic, non-binary paradigms of human condition claimed to have deconstructed substance dualism and elaborated a new model of the undivided, non-metaphysical spirituality. Under the umbrella of this humanistic spirituality one may discuss spiritual phenomena in romantic, aesthetic, poetic or ethical terms or within the discourse of palliative healing, but to suggest that the eternal soul actually does exist – in whichever form, – and to imagine that it survives physical body – in whatever fashion – would be naive and retrograde and would not be worthy of serious academic exploration. Obviously, these humanistic conceptualizations of spirituality may be regarded as valid and legitimate ways to account for human condition in their own terms; however, under an honest critical consideration, they appear to be nothing more than “spiritualistically embellished” philosophical offsprings of mechanistic materialism, failing to accomplish the ambitious task of the transcendence of mind-body conceptual dichotomies. There is no such a thing as a transcendental aspect to human existence compliable with this spiritualistically-disguised materialistic worldview; nothing like that of a soul in the absolutist, Platonic, Hegelian, or Christian sense – this is the verdict that scientific materialism has passed.

Materialistic hegemony over human consciousness further shapes a broader secular public discourse on the nature of human self, which habitually refers to the laboratory-based scientific authority as an ultimate tribune in human affairs. Par example, while contemplating on the matters of brain-mind dualism, the Washington Post columnist Joel Achenbach – a recognized popular science journalist – logically concludes that if a mind (in contrast to brain) cannot be empirically tested, then it virtually does not exist at all:

The classic idea of “dualism” solves the location problem by defining it away: the mind is perceived as separate from the body, something that cannot be reduced to machinery. It is unreachable by the tools of the laboratory. Dualism flatters us, for it suggests that our minds, our selves, are not merely the result of rambunctious chemistry, and we are thus free to talk about souls and spirits and essences that are unfettered by the physical body. Dualism is pretty much dead to serious researchers ... but here’s the most radical idea of all: the reason why the mind is so hard to define is not because it has some mysterious, ethereal, spooky qualities but because it does not really exist. We just imagine it. You might say it is all in our heads.²

Referring to philosophical arguments against mind/body dualism summarized by Daniel Dennett, the author of Consciousness Explained (1991), Joel Achenbach ironically laments that, “it is bad enough that astronomers tell us that the Earth is not at the center of the cosmos; it is worse that biologists tell us we are all descended from pond scum. Now we have philosophers saying that the self is illusory. You are not really there.”³

The above excerpt appears as a classic example for the Foucauldian critique of hegemonic discourse-formation, whereby power-knowledge⁴serves to justify the regimes of truth by rules of exclusion, marginalization and conceptual devaluation of the contradictory viewpoints. That is to say, the proposition that consciousness is “merely the result of rambunctious chemistry” is certainly a legitimate theory in itself. However, the intrinsic reductionism of the above argument is embodied in the assertion that any idea of the non-material self – souls, spirits, unfettered essences, etcetera – “is pretty much dead to serious researchers.” This kind of intellectual death sentence pronounced over transcendental spirituality aborts any possibility for brining up this subject without risking academic suicide. Indeed, who wants to jeopardize their careers and undermine their research by falling into the “non-serious” category of intellectual ignoramuses?

And yet, intellectual curiosity did (and still does) provoke many researchers to take the risk in the exploration of the outrageously non-conventional, academically stigmatized phenomena – scientists throughout the world have been at search for external consciousness, focusing on experiential as well as experimental evidence to see whether consciousness functions independently of the physical brain, implying the existence of the independent life spirit or élan vital. From the famous “21-gram” experiments conducted by physician Duncan McDougall in the early twentieth century, which tried to detect the exit of the soul from the body by measuring a person’s weight immediately after death, to the most recent confessions by a Harvard-educated neurosurgeon, Dr. Allan Hamilton, who in his book, The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with the Surgery, the Supernatural and the Healing Power of Hope, (2008) speaks out about his experiences with brain-dead patients (no heartbeat, no breathing, no brain waves, et al. for significantly long periods of time) recording in full detail what was going on and what was said in the operating room. Such testimonials are nothing new – numerous records of supernatural experiences have been collected throughout the world by the International Association for Near-Death Studies, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and numerous other organizations. But despite the fact that supernatural phenomena of all kinds have been universally experienced throughout the world since the dawn of human history, contemporary science has been persistent in denying any kind of evidence of the spiritual realm and discrediting any attempts at researching it as preposterous and anecdotal.

However, very recently something has dramatically changed in scientific approaches towards supernatural experiences – due to rapid developments in neuroscience and the emergence of neurotheology, mystical phenomena suddenly became “real” and have gained the attention of neuroscientists striving to uncover neurological underpinnings of human spirituality. As soon as neuroscientists and neurotheologians gained confidence in the possibility to decode the supernatural and to provide the evolutionary basis for religious behavior and human perception of the spiritual realm, all kinds of spiritualistic experiences (which had been previously considered to be purely cultural phenomena) are now becoming unprecedentedly relevant and officially existent. Many new theories and speculations have been put forward recently to discover “the God gene” and to explain away spiritual experiences of humans in terms of mere chemistry in the brain, however, neurotheology of today goes further yet – thus, Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili, and Vince Rause – the authors of Why God Won’t Go Away – have recently studied the brainwaves of meditating Buddhists and Franciscan nuns with the help of high-tech brain-scanning devices and they discovered solid evidence that the mystical experiences of their experimental subjects were manifested in the brains as a series of observable neurological events. This brought them to the conclusion that human beings have a seemingly irrational attraction to God and religious experiences simply because their brains are biologically wired to pursue mystical sensations. “Mystical experience is biologically, observably, and scientifically real,” – admits Andrew Newberg, a researcher in nuclear medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, – “gradually, we shaped a hypothesis that suggests that spiritual experience, at its very root, is intimately interwoven with human biology.”⁵ Par example, near-death experiences are now officially “real phenomena,” which emerge as the result of the suppression of activity in the superior parietal lobe. Apparently, the orientation association area (OAA) in the superior parietal lobe is responsible for our physical spatial orientation, the control of bodily motions, and the consistent awareness of the physical limits of the self – basically, neuroscientists believe that OAA is precisely what creates a coherent sense of self in humans. So, when the sense of orientation is suppressed in the near-death experience – neurotheologians explain – “self” no longer feels anchored to the body… and one often seems to be rising to “heaven…”⁶ When asked how to account for “the light at the end of the tunnel” that many patients see as a part of their near-death experiences, neurotheologians explain that this comes as “a result of the brain’s visual cortex ‘looking’ for sensory input it cannot see…[while] the visions of a beautiful … garden or … landscape… are the result of the memory centers acting…”⁷ As for the sense of full awareness of the surroundings in brain-dead patients, the materialistic explanation of this mystery would be that “these phenomena can occur with very minute amounts of electrical activity in the brain.”⁸ Et cetera. Basically, a simple technical explanation is now found for practically all mystical phenomena that neuroscience believes to be capable to analyze, including the sense of the infinite presence of God, which is explained as a result of miscommunications between the temporal lobes of the brain. Here: our human sense of self is produced by the left-hand lobe with only partial contributions from the right-hand lobe, but sometimes due to stress or disease the right-hand-lobe-generated-sense-of-self becomes experienced as an independent presence by the left-hand temporal lobe, so the right-hand-generated and left-hand-generated senses of self overlap.⁹ Hence, here is a delusional God-experience – a schizophrenic misperception of one’s own self as a separate presence. Neuroscientists Newberg and d’Aquili argue that all neurological phenomena of deafferentiation – that is, feelings of unity with the universe, a sense of being absorbed into divinity, and other modes of self-transcendence, such as sensations of “infinite sublimity,” “the sense of timelessness and spacelessness in prayer and meditation,” “communion with the universe,” “hyperlucid unitary consciousness,” “the dissolving of boundaries between the self and God, gods, universe,” “being consumed by the presence of God, Jesus, Mary, or any other religious agency,” etcetera – emerge as a result of the suppression of the OAA during meditation:

Would the orientation area interpret its failure to find the borderline between the self and the outside world to mean that such a distinction doesn’t exist? In that case the brain would have no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real.”¹⁰

Other roots of religious experiences were discovered in the limbic system and some other parts of the brain, including hypothalamus, amygdale, and hippocampus. The trends are rapidly growing to decode the mystical experiences based on the argument from brain damage or in biological-evolutionary terms: John Horgan in Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality,¹¹ writing from personal experience with drugs in search for self-transcendence, pronounces the direct relationship between chemical influence of psychedelic drugs on the brain and having a mystical experience; Daniel A. Helminiak in Neurology, Psychology, and Extraordinary Religious Experiences¹². explains religious experiences as a product of some personality disorders like temporal lobe epilepsy and other pathologies; Matthew Alper in The “God” Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God,¹³ argues that spirituality is a “nature’s white lie, a coping mechanism selected into our species to help alleviate debilitating anxiety caused by our unique awareness of death.”¹⁴

Finally, for those willing to rewire their brains for the “God experience” on demand, there is a “God machine” presently available: neurobiologist Michael Persinger devised a wired electromagnetic helmet constructed to induce mystical sensations by stimulating presumably spirit-generating areas in the brain. Persinger’s helmet works by inducing electrical signals with magnetically induced mechanical vibrations in the brain cells of the temporal lobes of the brain that produce the so-called “forty hertz component” detected in encephalograms. Scientists do not have a clear picture yet as to what the “forty hertz component” is and how it functions but they tracked it to be always present during the experience of “self.” By turning off the forty hertz component and diminishing the sense of selfhood which differentiates a person from the outside world, Persinger’s helmet creates the illusion of a sense of infinity, borderlessness and unity with the universe.¹⁵ So far more than nine hundred people have already had an “instant God experience” with the help of Persinger’s helmet and reportedly all Tibetan monks and the Franciscan nun, who took part in this experiment, had experiences identical to those resulting from their authentic meditative practices.¹⁶ (Persinger’s “God machine,” however, is no magic hat – when “the God-gene” proposer evolutionist Richard Dawkins volunteered to test the helmet, he reported to have been “very disappointed”¹⁷ by not being able to experience anything at all).

While some neurotheologists, such as Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili claim to maintain an unbiased scientific approach, trying to neither prove nor disprove the existence of God through their experiments, other researchers, on the contrary, speak in a clear-cut hostile, anti-religious tone. “How much longer will we be slaves to destructive religious creeds...?” asks Matthew Alper in The “God” Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God.”¹⁸ “What are widely regarded as evidence for the existence of a spiritual realm can easily be explained by the material, the mundane … your most powerful, persuasive evidence, namely your own powerful, personal experience, can now be easily and rationally explained, in all its features…. So now, religionist, how do you prove your case?” inquires Scott Bidstrup in Experiencing God, The Neurology of the Spiritual Experience.¹⁹ “How could evolution have favoured wasteful investment in preposterous beliefs? How can it be that human minds, evolved to cope with the real world, can hold beliefs that are patently improbable?” challenges spirituality Scott Atran in In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion.²⁰ The answer to these questions is self-evident for neurotheologians – it is but mere biology, humans are simply neuro-physiologically hardwired this way.

However, all recent efforts to mechanically replicate authentic spiritual experiences in the brain, that seem to have visibly contributed to the scientific “demystification of soul,” pale in significance when compared with some of the most up-to-date developments in neuroscience, which suggest the possibility of artificially replicating the emergence of consciousness itself in a laboratory setting. Thus, scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) recently developed the so-called “neurally controlled animats,” which consists of a few thousands rat neurons grown atop a grid of electrodes and connected to a robot or computer-stimulated virtual environment.”²¹ The researchers at GIT claim that these laboratory-generated brain clumps in some ways act like actual living brains and have “a certain amount of awareness.” According to Steve Potter, a neuroscientist at GIT, “since our cultured networks are so interconnected, they have some sense of what is going in themselves… we can also feed their activity back to them, to mediate their “sense of self…”²² And scientists at GIT express hope that the next phase of animats will likely have an even keener sense of self. While such inventory approaches to selfhood may be somewhat presumptuous and prematurely enthusiastic, there is still the possibility of being able to replicate an artificial “sense of self” or “self-awareness” in a laboratory setting and, if realized, could be a fatal blow on our age-old notion of transcendental external consciousness.

So, why does the question of the coherent human continuum still stand and why are we reluctant to let go of the idea of our “selves” objectively being there – and not only in our imagination, despite contemporary neuroscience tries to convince us otherwise? Or should we take an advice of the Soviet ideologists of scientific atheism who half a century ago urged us to throw away the obsolete notions of souls, spirits, and transcendental essences into the “garbage can of history”?

Obviously, intellectual naiveté, nostalgic sentimentalism, death-related insecurities, and escapism from reality are not the only reasons for human transcendentalist cravings – there are still many significant intellectual reasons to preserve a healthy attitude of non-reductionist open-mindedness towards the transcendental. Evidently, there are still too many blind spots, controversies and inconsistencies in the evolutionary analysis of human consciousness. When discussing the evolutionary emergence of consciousness, which apparently has not been experimentally demonstrated with the use of the proper scientific method, neuroscientists and neurotheologians will eventually invite us to make a leap of faith, by utilizing mytho-graphic lingo such as, “as soon as the human brain became sufficiently complex in structure, mind took shape, consciousness sparked into being”²³or by suggesting some over-stretching explanations for mystical experiences as by-products of sexual development in humans, as in the following excerpt:

We believe the neurological machinery of transcendence may have arisen from the neural circuitry that evolved for mating and sexual experience… Scientists think the quiescent and limbic systems evolved partly to link sexual activity to the pleasurable experience of orgasm, with obvious evolutionary benefits. Components of the limbic system are involved in the deafferentation process. … Sex and prayer are obviously not the same experience… Neurologically they are quite different, but “mystical prayer and sexual bliss use similar neural pathways.²⁴

Human capacity to sublimate sexual desires into other passions or otherwise to substitute longings for emotional (spiritual) intimacy for physical satisfaction is nothing new – these psychological phenomena had been extensively described both in religious as well as in scientific literatures. But the problem is that such theories of the genesis of consciousness rely on the quasi-religious notion of evolution as a supra-natural metaphysical agency, capable of consciously planning the course of its development. That is to say, how and why would evolution – presumably impersonal and non-purposive – logically trace beneficial effects of pleasure on reproduction while simultaneously ascribing teleological significance to reproduction itself? And if evolution is indeed reproduction-driven, then why would it refract physical pleasures into something as ephemeral and elusive as mystical experiences? Finally, does the fact that mystical experiences utilize “similar neural pathways” [my emphasis] as those of sexual pleasure really prove that the “neurological machinery of transcendence” evolved from the experience of orgasm? Obviously, the above theory properly fits the conveniently-predominant scientifically-approved evolutionary meta-framework. Not to mention that actually spiritual experiences are not always pleasure-grounded and, on the contrary, often produce negative emotions of inner conflict, agony, and emotional frustration rather than bliss, exaltation and peace. In fact, some occultists, and sometimes even New Age followers and practicing Buddhists report “seeing demons” or experiencing uncontrollable irrational fears during transcendental meditation; other spiritual experiences eventually entail ascetic self-destruction and even communal self-destruction as evident in some extremist religious cults… In summary, as demonstrated above, the evolutionary analysis of consciousness operates within an exclusionist materialistic meta-discourse, and is geared toward data documentation that defends its hypotheses.

Also, it appears problematic that neurotheology in its analysis of mystical experiences, particularly that of the “phenomenon of deafferentation,” falls prey to a quasi-universalistic approach to the transcendental reality, which brings a variety of spiritual experiences to one common denominator of mystical self-transcendence, higher humanness, cosmic awareness and “being at one with the universe.” This approach, however, does not withstand detailed scholastic scrutiny since it deliberately overlooks some fundamental differences between unique culturally-specific discourses on spirituality and sustaining them religious paradigms. Spiritual experiences are obviously not delimited by trances, visions, epileptic seizures, ecstasy, or exaltation; there are many other widespread religious phenomena, which today’s neuroscience can not technically explain in neurophysiological terms but which nevertheless exist and play a significant part in sustaining the religious belief-systems and shaping the adherents’ perception of self and reality.²⁵

Finally, neurotheologians consciously exclude any possibility of the external transcendental stimuli from their analytical framework. Beyond any doubt, spiritual phenomena are intrinsically physiologically-wired regardless of whether they are identical to, reducible to, are realized by, or are supervenient upon causal interaction with the external environment. Obviously, human emotions have a biological basis and, just like any other human emotions, mystical experiences are also manifest in the brain as a series of chemical reactions. But the real question is: why does neuroscience automatically rule out the possibility that mystical experiences may arise in response to some kind of ontologically existent transcendental stimuli? Human emotions are not necessarily always illusionary or self-induced but they often emerge in response to external stimuli. Why then do mystical experiences have to be so crudely reduced to the mere products of brain damage, chemical dysfunctions or psychological self-stimulations? In the words of Fraser Watts, a psychologist and theologian at the University of Cambridge, “even when the neural basis of religion has been identified, it remains a plausible interpretation of any conceivable neuropsychological facts that there is a genuine experience of God.”²⁶

Perhaps, maintaining a healthy agnostic attitude towards the possibility of the onto-transcendental aspect of human existence could notably expand methodological research-space for the exploration of human potential and significantly enlighten our understanding of human consciousness. However, the above-described spirit-related controversy transcends the limits of the purely theoretical discussion; there is more to the ongoing “spirit crisis” than is commonly realized – it may potentially entail some serious ideological ramifications, resulting in the fundamental “human crisis,” which, I would like to discuss in what follows.

Part II: The “Human Crisis”: Where Science Needs Religion²⁷

I teach you beyond-man. Man is something that shall be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass him? … All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and are ye going to be the ebb of this great tide and rather revert to the animal than surpass man? Beyond-man is the significance of earth. Your shall say: beyond-man shall be the significance of earth. I conjure you, my brethren, remain faithful to earth and do not believe those who speak unto you of superterrestial hopes! … What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is not a transition and a destruction… I love him who worketh and inventeth to build a house for beyond-man and make ready for him earth, animal and plant; for thus he willeth his own destruction. (Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra).

The curiously clairvoyant metaphor of the evolutionary model of human consciousness and its dehumanizing ramifications, which Zarathustra sarcastically articulated, urged humanity to abandon superterrestial hopes for transcendental spirituality and to remain faithful to this-earthly materialist interpretation of human existence. Zarathustra’s genius traced the link between the notion of “beyond-man” epitomizing radical anthropocentric ambitions and its potentially-destructive consequences several years before the “the philosophy of transhumanism” was even formulated and its proponents and critics were born.

Fulfilling Zarathustra’s prophetic predictions, the evolutionary model of natural selection of the species inspired the idea that scientific intervention and the further artificial selection and amelioration of humans was not only possible but highly desirable and, in fact, inevitable. Almost a century ago, Julian Huxley, a strong proponent of eugenics of his time, coined the term “transhumanism”²⁸ and enthusiastically declared that a human being (as it is present now) is not the final product of evolution in the quest for betterment of human affairs and that, “man’s role is to do the best he can to manage the evolutionary on this planet and to guide its future course in a desirable direction.”²⁹ The idea of amelioration of human species for the “common good” (and for reduction of State expenditures on the disabled) triggered holocaust, the compulsory sterilization and the artificial selection of humans in the past; it underlies some of the “positive eugenics” of today, presently practiced in China and Singapore, and it inspires the so-called new eugenics or liberal eugenics of the future. Currently liberal eugenics, or “the philosophy of transhumanism,” promotes the enhancement of intellectual, psychobiological and cognitive capacities of humans by means of biotechnological intervention, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, sub-molecular engineering, neuropharmaceuticals, prosthetic enhancements and the creation of artificial intelligence. A new transhumanist paradigm of human existence calls for reinterpretation of human essence as an intelligent machine that is to be redesigned and empowered by means of biotechnologies; it aims at overcoming biological determinism and the potential transition of the human race into a posthuman stage of evolution. The human condition, it holds, is not static as it may have appeared to be to the romanticists and the idealists of old; and rapid future innovations will allow humans to control their own destiny and to shape their own future characteristics as they see fit.

This understanding of human consciousness is based on materialist model of human consciousness that is embedded in dialectical materialism and reinforced by postmodernist anti-essentialism. According to this model, the essence of human consciousness resides in the continuous mutual transformation of the material (real) into the ideal in the process of cognition. This means that the material reality is reflected by the human mind and then translated into “forms of thought,” using Marxian terminology, i.e., ideal concepts, images, theories, hypotheses, etc. Then, the cognized laws of nature are re-materialized - transformed back from the ideal into the material, being embodied in “real” psychosocial patterns or/and substantial technical and productive materials, facilities and installations. Such is an empirical notion of consciousness as a unique constantly recurring cycle; simply put by Joel Achenbach for his Washington Post readers, “the mind, in this view, isn’t a single, specific thing. It’s more like a process, or an “emergent” phenomenon. This means that the many disparate components are not themselves conscious, but when they get together, the consciousness precipitates into being.”³⁰ This presumably elusive nature of human essence and the lack of any coherent boundaries between human and non-human existence inspires some of the contemporary futurists to sketch out the scenarios of the future world where the distinctions between humans and machines will become blurred and humans will gradually merge and co-evolve with their artificial creations. Andy Clark, the author of Natural-born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, calls the human brain “nature’s great mental chameleon”:

In embracing our hybrid natures, we give up the idea of the mind and the self as a kind of water-thin inner essence, dramatically distinct from all its physical trappings. In place of this elusive essence, the human person emerges as a shifting matrix of biological and nonbiological parts. The self, the mind, and the person are no more to be extracted from that complex matrix than the smile from the Cheshire Cat. Some fear, in all this, a loathsome “post-human” future. They predict a kind of technologically incubated mind-rot, leading to loss of identity, loss of control, overload, dependence, invasion of privacy, isolation, and the ultimate rejection of the body. And we do need to be cautious […] But if I am right – it if is our basic human nature to annex, exploit, and incorporate nonbiological stuff deep into our mental profiles – then the question is not whether we go that route, but in what ways we actively sculpt and shape it. By seeing ourselves as we truly are, we increase the chances that our biotechnological unions will be good ones.³¹

Indeed, human destiny truly depends on the way human beings see themselves. The way the proponents of transhumanism see it, posthuman cyborgs will be nice and friendly creatures. “Robots are getting closer to humans and humans are getting closer to mechanisms”³² says Hashimoto Shuji, a professor at the Humanoid Robotics Institute at Waseda University, Japan. In his paper, A New Relationship between Humans and Machines: Is it Possible to Create Machines with Heart/Kokoro? he demonstrates several examples of human robotization in the field of high technology medicine, such as the production of artificial organs, which involve direct connection to the nerves or the brain. Some other examples include the usage of chemicals that influence the memory and mental activity for the “happinization” of the mind. Hashimoto Shuji then goes further in urging us to revise Isaac Azimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, known as the fundamental ethical criteria in robotics research (Azimov’s Laws of Robotics state that robots exist for the sake of humans and that they must be absolutely submissive to humans):

As we ponder the society of the near future, we realize that the difference between humans and robots, underlying Azimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, will become vague and the concept of “human” existence will become dubious. My dream is the creation of various kinds of robots with self-reproductive functions and with a will to live. If … a robot rebels and hits me, with my nose bleeding I would probably rejoice in my heart, thinking, “Finally, I did it. We’ve almost made it!” This is because a period of rebellion naturally precedes independence. By that time robots will probably be made not from metal, aluminum, and silicon but of some sort of soft, warm substance. And perhaps humans will also have transcended being “human.”³³

However, it appears that not everybody is equally enthusiastic about the prospect of breeding “beyond-men” and building a posthuman paradise on earth. On the contrary, in the face of the looming biotechnological revolution there are many serious concerns that the eugenics project may so fundamentally alter human nature that it will shove the human race off the center-stage of this autonomously conducted self-evolutionary drama. Many social analysts today warn us that unrestrained technological advancement puts humanity at risk of reduction, and, in the end, the complete relinquishing of its freedom to its own creations—at this point of history human nature may become ultimately altered, and history itself may take an unpredictable turn. In the recently released popular movie titled Matrix, a matrix is as a monstrous technological womb in which the human beings are fueled and thereby are delimited in their world-perception by its parameters. Matrix preprograms humanity and runs the course of its destiny. While it may be looked upon as merely a science fiction fantasy, there are numerous examples in history of how science fiction writers were capable of foreseeing the future direction of technological development and also describing, with a very high degree of accuracy, future inventions way in advance. For example, Aldous Huxley had anticipated reproductive technologies of today – in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, psychotropic drugs, and genetic engineering for the manufacturing of children – as early as 1932. In his futuristic dystopia Brave New World he also envisioned the futuristic version of the technological paradise, in which genetic reproduction has replaced natural methods; religion, art, culture, and the biological family unit has been discarded as useless; suffering and pain, emotional struggle and moral conflict have been abolished; individual identity disintegrated; and a special government body established to ensure the immediate satisfaction of human desires on demand. Strangely, this perfect illustration of the beyond-man paradise on earth with its compulsory sense of happiness rather threatens than attracts us. This picture repulses us because we realize that if we, following Andy Clark, “give up the idea of the mind and the self … in embracing our hybrid natures,” then the difference between human and non-human existence would eventually fade and human beings will have ceased being human – and humane.

What can break through this preprogrammed mind-set, this techno-evolutionary pattern of life? Where is the force so original that it has the capacity to transcend matrix and deliver humanity from its humanoid destiny (besides the courageous and manly Keanu Reeves)? Interestingly, the attempts to escape the matrix mentality have turned into the quest for the restoration of the lost status of human essence as a vital notion. Key concepts in the search for something real that would anchor humanity to its original human condition are human dignity and human nature.

As genetic engineers are trying to envision the future shape of the human being, the humanities scholars are re-opening the question of what it is to be human—for highly pragmatic as well as redemptory reasons. They point to the potential dangers of artificial selection and genetic manipulation of our species (which a transhumanist ideology underpins) and they also fear that any destiny that we may discover on our own in the desacralized and dispirited universe might appear to be the ultimate science fiction nightmare. As Francis Fukuyama notes in Our Posthuman Future, Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, “denial of the concept of dignity – that is, of the idea that there is something unique about the human race that entitles every member of the species to a higher moral status than the rest of the natural world – leads us down a very perilous path.”³⁴ “We are afraid of the prospect of human beings designing other human beings,”³⁵ echoes him Jurgen Habermas in The Future of Human Nature, noting that results of a human assuming a god-role can be devastating precisely because “a genetic designer, acting according to his own preferences, assumes an irrevocable role in determining the contours of the life history and identity of another person, while remaining unable to assume even her counterfactual consent.”³⁶ Humans are too shortsighted to be able to assure that a genetic tattoo we give our offspring will benefit its future bearer at all. As Habermas demonstrates:

Can parents wanting the best for their child ever really presume to know all the circumstances—and the various interactions of these circumstances with each other—in which a brilliant memory, for example, or high intelligence (however defined) will prove a benefit for their child? A good memory is often but by no means always a blessing. Not being able to forget can be a curse… Sometimes an overloaded storage hinders us from dealing productively with new data to be taken in. The same true for outstanding intelligence… Not even highly general good of bodily health maintains one and the same value within the contexts of different life histories. Parents can’t even know whether a mild physical handicap may not prove in the end to be an advantage for their child.³⁷

These are only a few examples of the pitfalls on the path towards the creation of the “race of supermen.” There are uncountable bioethical concerns that arise today in the new transhumanist context – as our recent history demonstrates, de-spiritualization of human existence in a post-Darwinian era served as a breeding ground for legitimization of eugenics, artificial selection, and other forms of human manipulation and social stratification. In addition, our society’s moral condition has not much improved since then. However, while concentrating on the technological aspects of the problem we must not overlook what lies at the very heart of the matter. More than fifty years ago, having witnessed the atrocities of the World War II and the nuclear holocaust, Martine Heidegger postulated, “the threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has always afflicted man in his essence.”³⁸ Apparently, the actual threat of dehumanization does not come from the implantation of artificial organs, or from nanoengineering, cloning, robotics, and mind-machine interfaces. Undoubtedly, science and technology has saved multitudes of lives and has delivered countless numbers of humans from pain and misery. It is the diminishing of the concept of the substantial coherent human self – that what separates us from the rest of the biological life on Earth and ascribes transcendental significance to our existence – that poses a danger to our perpetuation as a species. As demonstrated above, the “spirit crisis” controversy is too ideologically flavored to remain within the limits of a purely scholastic intellectual debate. Indeed, if we were to subscribe to the view that there is no transcendental aspect to the human psyche, and that no unfaltering human essence exists, then we must agree with Andy Clark in that “the question is not whether we go down that route [of re-channeling the course of human evolution], but in what ways we actively sculpt and shape it.”³⁹

Within the evolutionary framework of consciousness, the human being does not appear much more than merely an “intelligent machine” of nature, and the reality is that as long as we interpret the human being in exclusively materialistic terms, we will always approach human spirituality as a by-product of sociocultural evolution. This is the reason why recovering the conception of spirituality from its contemporary romantic and aesthetic trappings and then reinterpreting it in its original transcendental terms may have deep ethical implications on the discussion of the nature of human consciousness and the re-ascribing of the eternal value to human existence. Arguably, the restoration of the lost status of a spiritualistic paradigm of the human condition may help develop an antidote to postmodern disintegration and dehumanization of science.

Part III: “No-self” in Buddhism: Where Science Meets Religion

Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity – it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation. The concept, “god, ” was already disposed of before it appeared… the instinct of personality has yielded to a notion of the “impersonal”… Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more objective. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

As often observed within the ongoing dynamics of a science-and-religion interaction, some ancient religious observations of the world had anticipated certain insights of the contemporary science, and the science of today is finally “catching up,” arriving experimentally at the same conceptializations that religion had formulated contemplatively hundreds and thousands years ago. Thus, recent theories of the emergent nature of human consciousness and the illusory sense of selfhood (articulated by neuroscience) serve here as particularly vivid examples. Ironically, a new discovery that neuroscience celebrates today – the fact that human consciousness is an emergent, fluid, fundamentally processual phenomenon – has been a pillar doctrine of Buddhist philosophy for nearly three millennia.

The cornerstones of the original Buddhist teaching, articulated by its founder Gautama Siddhartha over two thousand five hundred years ago, are the conceptions of anātman, translated as “no-soul,” and pratītya-samutpāda view of reality, rendered into European languages as “conditioned genesis” or “interdependent arising.” Pratītya-samutpāda states that fundamental elements of existence, or dharma, arise together in a mutually interdependent web of cause and effect; since all phenomena of the world are constantly changing and impermanent, there is no unfaltering human essence, soul or permanent personality. Historically, original Buddhist doctrine arose in direct opposition to Brahmanism and discredited its belief in the existence of ātman – an ancient Indian concept of “self,” variously rendered into European languages as “universal identity,” “self,” “soul,” or “ego.” Instead, human essence was reinterpreted in Buddhism as constituent of five essential aggregates (khandha), which exhaustively describe the human being and eliminate any idea of an underlying soul. The five aggregates are: rupa (matter or form), vedana (feeling), sanna (perceptions), samkhara (mental states, volitions), vijñāna (cognitive awareness). The five-khandha Buddhist analysis of reincarnation also serves as grounds for rejecting selfhood. Buddhist reincarnation, although often crudely misinterpreted in the West as a reincarnation of soul, in essence is a process lacking any permanent shape or substance – at death the five khandhas get dissolved and continue, like a casual current or stream of existence-energy (bhava-sota) to influence another material substrates in a receptive womb; in terms of Buddha, “there is no permanent thing or stuff that flits from body to body.”⁴⁰ Furthermore, while Western idealistic dualism would tend to categorize the five “khandha” into “abstract” mental qualities and “physical” human body, in Buddhism, on the contrary, the non-material qualities of human beings are also considered natural phenomena; they are subject to the natural laws of cause and effect and as such are included in reincarnation. Pratītya-samutpāda predetermines the way human beings feel, perceive, think, desire and act; it is the “interdependent arising of dharma” that identifies the human being, because in reality there is no human being, but what we mistakenly perceive as a self is merely an illusion, a temporary combination of energies fused together by the will of nature. In the words of a famous Chinese Zen Buddhist priest and poet of the fourth century, Zhao Lun, “The world and I are from the same root, all things and I share the same body.”⁴¹ In a Buddhist worldview, “the universe is I” and “I am the universe”; there is no stable identity or self, there is no thinker but a flux of thoughts, there is no perceiver but a flow of perceptions, there is no craver but a stream of cravings, there is no sufferer but a continuity of the states of suffering; there is no experiencing subject, there is only an immediate experience. Thus, to refer to human cognitive awareness (vijñāna) as an act conducted by an internal subject would be false; consciousness is not an entity – it is rather a process that simply occurs; it is a result of discernment between contextually different patterns. William S. Waldron in his Buddhist Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Thinking about ‘Thoughts without a Thinker’⁴² demonstrates thatthe Buddhist conception of the interdependent arising of the world (pratītya-samutpāda) takes an extreme form in “metaphysical idealism” of Abhidharma traditions in Buddhism (200 BC – 600 AD), which interprets dharma – normally referred to as the elementary components of existence – as ontologically non-existent, having no substance or form, no location or presence. In this perspective, there are no substantive constituents of an objective world – no elementary entities can be distinguished by themselves independently, no substances can be observed unless in contrast with other substances – a context of contextual distinctions is all there is. In our sophisticated age, more than two millennia since Abhidharma was articulated, this principle of the discernment of differences fundamental to cognitive perception, was rediscovered at last in cognitive psychology. “Perception operates only on difference, – scientifically explains cognitive perception Gregory Bateson in his Mind and Nature, A Necessary Unity (1979) – all receipt of information is necessary of news of difference.”⁴³ The Buddhist fascination with the patterns of dependent relationships as opposed to actions of independent entities is the reason why Buddhist thought converges so closely with current trends in the philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, evolutionary theory, and neuroscience. Apparently, the Buddhist influence on contemporary modern science has been evident for generations before the field of neuroscience emerged. In particularly, it was the Buddhist doctrine of anātman rejecting permanent self that has had a profound influence on Western philosophy: David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, William James, Charles Moore, Charles Pierce, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Mach among others advocated the concept of the transitory nature of human self; some commentators have even indicated a strong influence of Hume’s and Mach’s pro-Buddhist ideas that deny a permanent Ego and emphasize relativity of the observer on Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity.⁴⁴ The fact that an empirical notion of consciousness as a constantly recurring cycle of information ultimately resonates with the Buddhist central thesis of no-self prompted some of the researchers working in the intersections of science and spirituality within the Asian context to claim that Buddhism is “scientific” by nature and resonates deeper with the scientific endeavor than Christianity does. There are numerous attempts to bridge Buddhist notions of “the existence in motion” with quantum physics, to analyze the concept of the altered egos in neuroscience in light of egolessness in Buddhism, to connect the Triune Brain theory in brain science with the Buddhist Doctrine of Four Mindful Establishments,⁴⁵ and to trace the conception of socially-constructed identities in postmodernist thought to the Buddhist notion of the transitory nature of the human subject (Susantha Goonatilake, 1995⁴⁶; Shih Huimin, 2007⁴⁷). (It also led some Buddhist bioethicists to argue that abortion, assisted suicide and genetic amelioration of humans can be rationalized and justified from the Buddhist perspective of no-soul (Michael Barnhart, 2002⁴⁸; Bonnie Steinbock, 1996⁴⁹).

As demonstrated above, the Buddhist rhetoric of being in flux” has had profound implications on the scientific understanding of human consciousness and it is now being empirically expanded by current research in neuroscience.

However, the question still stands as to whether this concept of “consciousness in flux” can truly exhaustively describe human existence in all its fullness. Unquestionably, Buddhist and scientific discourses can largely contribute to the exploration of human consciousness, with consciousness interpreted in terms of psyche – that is, a natural extension of human body, but they both evidently fail to acknowledge and to analyze the tout autre transcendentalist phenomenon of pneuma and pneumatological experiences inherent in Christianity, which constitutes the Christian understanding of the human self as a coherent entity.

Part IV: Beyond Soul: Towards Transcendental Selfhood

“Body am I, and soul”- so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children? But the awakened one, the knowing one, saith: “Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body.” The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd. An instrument of thy body is also thy little sagacity, my brother, which thou callest “spirit”- a little instrument and plaything of thy big sagacity. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

What is the transcendentalist phenomenon of pneuma, how is it different from psyche and how does it contribute to the formation of the coherent substantial sense of self? When analyzing human condition within the psychophysical parameters, Christian theologians probably would not argue against the idea of the emergent and ephemeral nature of consciousness as articulated in Buddhism and in contemporary neuroscience. In fact, the Christian theological critique of the natural human condition is parallel to the above discussion on no-self in that it perceives a human subject (the so-called “natural man”) as unstable, confused, constantly changing and relativistic, intrinsically intertwined with and dependent on the environment, constantly absorbing external information, alterable and transient. In Christian understanding, a “soul” is an unfolding processual phenomenon, a flux of reciprocal interaction of the cognitive apparatus with the environmental mega-context. Nevertheless, Christian theological explanation for the fragmented nature of human selfhood exceeds that of the cognitive perception arising in the processes of circular causality. Theological account for the disturbing sense of uprootedness in the “natural man” is derived from what I would call a phenomenon of a “spiritual (pneumatic) dormancy” – a condition acquired as a result of spiritual disconnectedness and alienation of the human subject from the divine Spirit. Consequently, for the adherents of the Christian faith the experience of being “born-again” that refers to the spiritual restoration of relationship between human and God through an acquisition of the supernatural divine substance articulated as “the gift of the Holy Spirit” often implies a renewed understanding of the self as a coherent entity – both in theological and experiential terms. This newly acquired perception of the self as a spiritually complete entity comes in a striking contrast with the previous experience of the self as a disconnected, disintegrated psyche of the “natural man.” Moreover, the experience of human reconciliation with the divine Spirit invokes a new perception of one’s previously incomplete and disintegrated condition as a mere deception of senses. That is to say, through the prism of the newly-discovered transcendentalist self-awareness, one’s prior experience of “no-self” or “being in flux” appears rather illusionary in contrast to a real human conditionof the permanent self (in direct opposition to Buddhism).

This argumentation, however, requires some further clarification of the difference between the functional attributes of soul (psyche) and spirit (pneuma) as well as some other Christian anthropological terminology.

Today the terms “soul” (psyche) and “spirit” (pneuma) are normally used interchangeably, erasing some of the contextual differences evident in their usage in Stoic, Platonic, and Gnostic and early Christian texts. And these terms are also frequently used today rather broadly as “the essence of things” or “the heart of the matter,” which contributes to further generalization and confusion of their meanings. Since both psyche and pneuma signify the non-physical characteristics of a human being, anthropologically there is no particularly rigid distinction between these terms even within the Christian theological context – “soul” (psyche) and “spirit” (pneuma) are often used co-terminously in the New Testament. However, there is a significant nuance in the usage of the term pneuma distinguishing it from psyche, which I would like to highlight in what follows.

The Christian notion of “soul” (psyche) signifies the rational and animating principle of the body; utilized as an umbrella-term embracing the non-physical characteristics of a human being. It is used in reference to mind, will, emotions, perceptions, conscious awareness, unconsciousness et. el. – all these manifestations of human activity are familiar concepts in Buddhist anthropology as much as in secular psychology and our daily parlance. Originally, in classic Greek the term “psyche” was used rather ambiguously but in Platonic philosophy it gained a stable interpretation as the lower or intermediate nature of the self, a so-called “animal soul,” carnally influenced and intertwined with the physical world. Pneuma, on the contrary, was utilized by Stoics and later adopted by Philo as the notion signifying the link between man and God, which makes the knowledge of God possible. This understanding of pneuma as a divine aspect of the self was further imported into Hellenistic Judaism and early Christianity, where it has acquired the meaning of the transcendental spiritual aspect in a human being, a portion of the divine essence restoring the fullness of human continuum, which had been lost in the event of the original sin, resulting in spiritual dissociation of human spirit from the Spirit of God. In the New Testament the term pneuma is used as a signification of selfhood both in the Gospels (Mark, 2:8; Luke, 23:46) as well as in the Pauline Epistles, where it is utilized simultaneously to refer to the Holy Spirit of God and to a divinely-endowed spiritual aspect latently present in a human being. As Isaak demonstrates in The Concept of Spirit:

Even in its anthropological usages, pneuma is always holy; it is man in his divine aspect. … Certainly, in Paul we find that pneuma – even when it refers to the spirit of man – is always that of the transcendent, holy and divine. … For Paul also pneuma is a term of kinship between God and man, and this explains why he does not clearly distinguish between its anthropological and theological usage. Pneuma stresses man’s affinity with God … by [pneuma] man is open to the transcendent life of God.⁵⁰

A conventional distinction between psyche and pneuma gave rise to the theories of anthropological trichotomy (spirit-soul-body) versus dichotomy (soul-body) in Christianity. However, most proponents of the biblical anthropological trichotomy also generally agree that spirit-soul attributes constitute an ontological unity and their conventional distinction is purely and entirely epistemological. Thus, The Cathechism of the Catholic Church states:

Sometimes the soul is distinguished from the spirit: St. Paul for instance prays that God may sanctify his people “wholly,” with “spirit and soul and body” kept sound and blameless at the Lord’s coming… The Church teaches that this distinction does not introduce a duality into the soul… “Spirit” signifies that from creation man is ordered to a supernatural end and that his soul can gratuitously be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God” [367]⁵¹

The Church teaches that not only there is no ontological spiritual dualism in a human continuum, but, moreover, there is no clear-cut dualism of soul and body. The Catechism of the Catholic Church postulates that “the human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual” (The Profession of Faith, Section Two, “Body and Soul but Truly One”):

The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body; [234] it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature. [365]⁵²

Within the Christian context, the body is no less sacred than the soul, and serving as a “temple of the Holy Spirit” it shares in the dignity of “the image of God.” An immortal spiritual soul “does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection” (366). Body and soul are intrinsically interconnected and depend upon each other in order to fulfill divine purposes implemented into it. The body cannot survive without a soul, yet the soul relies on the body for completeness. This principle of the unity of the complementary components can be observed everywhere in the natural world, too – every living system functions as a whole, manifesting properties that are not evident in its parts, as we know, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Par example, chemicals – once they react in certain ways, form compounds that are nothing like the original elements; and water is more than just a combination of oxygen and hydrogen – otherwise humans would have been able to breathe underwater. Likewise, a human body is something more than just a conglomerate of carbon, oxygen, and water, mixed in with a few other minerals; and a human being is something more than a physical body combined with the animating soul. Far from being antithetical elements, body and soul do not represent a dualism but they are created together and ultimately destined to form a single unity for all eternity.

Perhaps negativity about the body, which is a vulgar misrepresentation of the original Christian doctrine, arose from the recognition of the fact that if the body’s pursuits of sensory gratification are not regulated by moderation they can have a detrimental effect on the soul – and they could have no such effect if a soul-body sensorium did not constitute an essential unity. While it is true that the soul can be temporarily separated from the body – both at death and occasionally during one’s lifetime (in Cor 5:3 and ??? Paul speaks of being absent in the body (soma) but present in the spirit (pneuma). Nonetheless, the whole formation and growth of the soul is inextricably linked to the deeds and abilities of the body in life. At death separation is only temporary until the “glorified” body – a part of a new creation – and soul are reunited at the resurrection of the dead (the biblical prototype of which is the physical death and resurrection of Christ in a glorified body). What makes, however, the “soul discourse” particularly significant and relevant to the transdisciplinary discussion on the nature of human selfhood, is the fact that, as I have already indicated, it is conceptually linked to the metaphysical notion of the “external consciousness surviving physical death,” which ascribes an absolute eternal value to human existence. And pneuma – a divine imprint in human psyche – plays a crucial eschatological role here as “a seal of [God's] ownership, [who] put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.” (2 Cor., 1:22) Latently present in every human being, pneuma can be rejuvenated through the eschatological endowment of the divine Spirit, understood in Christianity as an event of salvation or spiritual reconciliation with God. According to Isaak:

In our examination of pneuma in Philo we have found two apparently contradictory statements about man’s spirit; that as the divine aspect and link between God and man it is the possession of all, and yet as the special pneuma given to the prophets it resides only within Judaism. The same two types of statement are found in Paul. He too speaks of pneuma as man’s spirit and seems to assume that it is present in all men, whether Jew or Gentile, pagan and Christian. However, Paul’s predominant use of pneuma is of the eschatological gift which he believed to be the prerogative of those who are “in Christ.”⁵³

As evident from the above excerpt, both Philo and Paul distinguish between the universally-present in all humans “latent pneuma,” which does not practically manifest itself and the “special pneuma” granted to the Jewish prophets and Christian believers, whose spiritual quests towards one's self as a transcendental spirit are often sustained through the prophetic pneumatological experiences referred to as “the gifts of the Spirit” in Christian parlance. To illustrate this, in 1 Corinthians, chapter 2, verse 10-14 Paul writes:

The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.⁵⁴

Finally, in Pauline writings, this conception of the “special pneuma” and its prophetic revelatory manifestations is further expanded and summarized in 1 Corinthians, chapter 12, verses 1-13:

Now about spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be ignorant. … There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. … There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men… Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one there is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom, to another the message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he gives them to each one, just as he determines. … The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.⁵⁵

All the prophetic phenomena outlined by Paul in 1 Corinthians: 12 (apart from “speaking in tongues” that is considered to be a unique post-Pentecost phenomenon) run through the entire Old and New Testaments and are particularly often found in the accounts of the lives of Christ and the apostles, recorded in the Gospels and Acts; they can also be traced throughout the history of the Church and her saints. While Christ is portrayed to have had all the above-described gifts simultaneously operating at all times, other prophetically-anointed biblical protagonists and Christian saints appear to have had only occasional impartations of the Spirit, receiving limited revelatory knowledge or guidance, in line with the above understanding of the Church as the body of Christ on earth, whose humanly-delimited individual members depend on each other for spiritual unity.

Evidently, these supernatural prophetic revelations did not cease with time and are widely present today across denominations. Adherents of Christianity largely rely on the supernatural experiences of the divine: depending on denomination, they may include biblical revelations and divine guidance in daily life, prophetic experiences, divine healings, exorcism and other numerous supernatural phenomena that serve as mechanisms of power in sustaining Christian framework. Some of the most commonly recognized phenomena are “the message of knowledge” and the “message of wisdom,” and “prophecy” that operate as instant and usually very particular supernatural revelations of knowledge communicated by the prophesying subject to another person and function as a supernatural response to this person’s deep inner concerns, personal struggles, questions, prayers, etcetera – such supernatural revelations normally have the most dramatic effect (and as such become powerful tools of individual conviction and devotion to one’s religious system) if the underlying condition is that the prophesying subject cannot have any natural access to the other person’s personal information or if such personal information – inner struggles, prayers, concerns, secret thoughts and emotions – has never been disclosed to anyone. There are many biblical and historical accounts of such revelatory phenomena, with the story of the Christ’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well being one of the most famous examples. While most of the above-described supernatural phenomena have been intentionally excluded from the scientific framework in the course of development of mainstream modern science and marginalized into the realm of the metaphorical or the superstitious, they are universally present throughout Christian denominations and form a specific “prophetic subculture,” having its own theory and praxis, instructional literature, symbolism, etcetera.

For contemporary neuroscience, the exploration of the above revelatory phenomena may be of crucial significance for the study of human potential; however, as demonstrated above, neuroscience operates within the reductionist empirical framework, and both Buddhism and modern science tackle the problematic of human existence on the exclusively psychobiological level. And while Buddhist or scientific understandings of the emergent nature of human psyche have no conflict with that of Christianity, still there is a significant lack – if not a complete absence – of the scientific analysis of the revelatory pheumatological aspect of human self, which may hinder many potential discoveries in the study of the nature of consciousness. Perhaps, in attempting to elaborate the framework for the study of pneuma as personhood, the first step would be to acknowledge that these long-neglected revelatory phenomena exist; they actively shape the lives of religious communities and must be scientifically examined.

Evidently, if embarked upon, this study will require a significant paradigm shift in our understanding of the human existence and invoke multiple serious concerns and questions: how can we bring into perspective spiritual experiences of the adherent agency as a valuable notion into the academic study of religion? How do these revelatory phenomena challenge our empirical frameworks for the interpretation of human subject? How can we elaborate a framework for the scientific study of the transcendent without soliciting unnecessary esoteric connotations?

Most importantly, I argue that human spirituality should not be reduced to the exclusionist parameters of psychosocial interpretation of the human subject and the discussion on human personhood must include the reality – and vitality – of the revelatory transcendental human spirit. It only took two and a half thousand years for science to come up with the same conceptualizations on the nature of human self that Buddhism had formulated millennia ago. Hopefully, it will not take science as long to recognize the significance of the Christian revelatory transcendental discourse for the exploration of human consciousness.

Endnotes