-A Case for the Immortality of the Soul-

The preeminent American-western actor, Sam Elliott, stars in the 1883 drama as Shea Brennan. Shea is a former Civil War captain turned cantankerous cowboy leading a wagon train of inexperienced immigrants west through hostile territory for pay. But Shea has an ulterior motive for the journey. He reveals the motive as his “secret” in episode 6. The backdrop to his secret is from the first episode in the series depicting a harrowing scene when Shea burns down his frontier ranch house with the bodies of his wife and daughter inside, dead from smallpox. His sorrow from this loss nearly causes him to take his own life. This is the canvas on which he paints the telling of his deeply moving secret which I take as part of my inspiration for writing what follows.

For years I have had a thought (now a personal belief) about love. I’ll present my thought in the form of questions, then I will attempt to provide answers using physics, mythology, an anthropological discovery, Shea’s secret, and—of course—a recent personal dream. My dream presented to me the symbolism of the horse, a fierce childlike love expressed without guile, and a mysterious fragment of material shared between the child and her grandfather. This dream inspired me to write what you are now reading. It seemed to carry a mythopoetic truth to me, and I believe my unconscious gave me the dream in compensation for my ruminations on Shea’s secret.  

Here are my questions. What if love is the source of life itself as the animating energy of the human soul within? And if so, would it be possible to transfer or transmute this energy like light (through our eyes), or like heat (through our skin/touch), or like sound (through our voice)? If we answer yes—if the existence of life itself, including its quality and duration both here and beyond, was dependent on how we use our eyes, hands, and mouths in every waking moment—how might this understanding change us and our behavior toward ourselves and others?

Physics – Energy Transmutes But Never Dies

Energy can be defined as the manifestation of power, force, work, or a capacity to determine outcomes. Archetypal symbols and manifestations of energy include fire (Prometheus, the thief and sharer of fire as the light of understanding or knowledge) and lightning (Zeus, the Greek god of thunderbolts). Energy is indestructible. I’m no physicist, and I have no background or training in science, but I’ve learned enough basics to generally understand the universal law of conservation. This law states that although energy may change its form, it will never die. This is a generally accepted reality in the world we inhabit as living, breathing humans. Energy moves instead of dies.

Obviously, our bodies only work so long as they are ensouled or animated by life energy. Call it whatever you want, I like the words spirit or light, but ultimately love. Whatever you call it, this is the substance of who we really are, the deeper, animating source of our life. The ground of our being is much more than the tiny light of ego awareness. This is proven by the simple fact that our beating hearts and breathing lungs work without the ego functions. Our egos have very little to do with the deeper source of our life, the ground of our being. But I believe it is possible to share our deeper self, the soul energy we possess, with others. One example of this is what a mother does for her baby if the mother is not too distracted by narcissism or her own traumas that may have destroyed her life source to begin with—after all, she cannot pour from an empty container. Maternal-infant researchers describe this by saying, “If [a baby] doesn’t receive love it is unable to give it—as a child or as an adult.”^[1]Montagu, Ashley. “A Scientist Looks at Love.” The Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 51, no. 9, Phi Delta Kappa International, 1970, pp. 463–67. This is the transmutation or transfer of love as the life force, discussed in further detail below.

Myth Is Not Fiction – Power As Love’s Shadow

When we give this personal animating energy (our manifestation of power) to another, when we willingly surrender our fire without condition, we are sharing a life force with the other. This is love. And in this way, love is the shadow or opposite of power.

The will to power is the wielding (or use) of our energy to dictate our own outcomes. Think of Zeus—the most powerful god in the Greek pantheon—throwing his angry, rageful thunderbolts carried by Pegasus (his horse) and then retrieved by Aetos (his eagle). This is the height of command and power’s terror. The sharing or giving of such power was severely punished by the hierarchy as depicted in the story of Zeus’s punishment of Prometheus for stealing fire then sharing it with mortals. A similar story is told of severe punishment being meted out to a snake for his sharing of fruit (fire, i.e., knowledge) in a garden.

Such a will to power is an absence of love if we understand love to be the surrender of that power, the sharing of our life energy. This principle is movingly told by St. John who wrote of Jesus saying, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”^[2]John 15:13

John seems to have understood Jesus’s teachings concerning the opposing forces of power and love. He uses the word love or its correlates over 40 times in his first epistle alone. It is no wonder, then, that Mary Magdalene referred to John—the youngest of the 12—as the apostle “whom Jesus loved” and why Jesus called John the son of thunder^[3]Mark 3:17 (meaning the son of a mother who, like Zeus, was ambitious of only power, position, and prestige^[4]See, e.g., Matthew 20:20-22. While looking down from his agony (as God on the cross) at his mother sorrowing unto death, Jesus said to Mary—referring to John—“Woman behold thy son.”^[5]See, John 13:23; 19:26; 20:2; 21:7, 20. This is love as self-abnegation, the renunciation of power! John, the “son of thunder,” refused his mother’s power problem and thereby became the son of Mary the mother of God. He learned to do this through his process of becoming the disciple whom Jesus loved. And it was the death of God that brought John to an understanding that love is life. Read that last sentence again, it is my entire point.

If we take seriously the deep, mythopoetic truths emanating from the life of Christ, we cannot escape this reality: that the unconditional giving of our life energy to another is the definition of love. And the enactment of love requires the surrender of our will to power, our ambition, and our need to climb Zeus’s celestial ladder and control everything from on high. There is an irony in outcomes in this power-love shadow relationship that I may write of another time for those who resist the meaning of Jesus’s life as it relates to this concept. For now, I will simply say this kind of power surrender seems to be a literal sharing of our soul which in turn lends (or creates) life where it might not otherwise be. A touching example of how this works in the modern world is a story from anthropological studies that contributed to why orphanages no longer exist in the United States.

Anthropology – Love is Life

I came across this story many years ago as I was reading about the meaning of love. It was widely researched and written about in the 1970s by anthropologist Ashley Montagu. Montagu reported, “During the 19th century more than half the infants in their first year of life regularly died from a disease called marasmus, a Greek word meaning ‘wasting away.’ The disease was also known as infantile atrophy or debility.”^[6]Montagu, Ashley. “Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin.” Harper and Row, 1971, p. 77. And as late as the first two decades of the 20th century, doctors in the United States began noticing a horrible statistic at orphanages.

“[T]he majority of infants under one year of age who entered [orphanages] and similar institutions never emerged alive. This shocking infant death rate was discussed at a meeting of the American Pediatric Society in 1915. Dr. Henry Chapin reported on 10 infant asylums located in the United States in which, with one exception, every infant under two years of age died!”^[7]Montagu, “A Scientist Looks at Love” at p. 464.

Montagu, supra, “A Scientist Looks at Love” at p. 464.

Trying to determine the cause of this sad problem and how to correct for it, researchers began asking questions and making more detailed observations. They were confounded when it seemed all nutritional and medical needs were being met or even exceeded for these babies. Then, one scientist, Dr. Fritz Talbot, made an interesting discovery when touring a Children’ Clinic in Germany.

“Dr. Talbot noticed a fat old woman wandering about the ward with a baby on her hip. Inquiring of the chief of the clinic, he was told: ‘Oh, that’s old Anna. Whenever we have a baby for whom everything we could do has failed, we turn it over to old Anna. She is always successful.’”^[8]Ibid.

The “discovery” of old Anna was the beginning of the end of orphanages in the United States. It also led to a realization that American institutions—and even many parents themselves—had adopted a deadly philosophy known as the “hands off” approach. This approach stemmed from the work of Dr. Luther Emmet Holt who believed (and unfortunately taught) that you can spoil a baby with too much touch and soothing attention. This approach had taken hold in orphanages and led to what is now known as failure to thrive syndrome and the death of countless infants. (Unfortunately, this ideology persists in some realms even today among those believing it proper to let a baby “cry itself to sleep.”)

Back to old Anna. When Dr. Talbot inquired further of her, he discovered her life-saving tactics were quite simple. In fact, her formal task at the clinic was to clean the floors.^[9]Madsen, Truman. “The Radiant Life.” Bookcraft, 1994, ch. 8, The Awesome Power of Married Love. But she loved little children. Though she had been forbidden to do it pursuant to the “hands off” approach, when no one was looking she would pick them up and hold them. She would sometimes even strap them two at a time on her big hips, and then as she worked on the floor she would lean over and talk to them. Simply stated, she loved them. And they lived because of her love. The children in Anna’s wing of that clinic thrived. And nothing else but Anna’s loving attention could explain the research or results.

Old Anna’s love led her to break the rules, to intentionally go outside the dictates handed down by the powers that be. And this was literally lifesaving to those she loved. Her love was their life, literally. And this is what I mean by power being the shadow of love. Had she obeyed the hierarchical power structure by withholding her love (retaining her power), those little ones would have died. Since she loved, they lived. Love is life.  And we can give life if we understand what it means—as old Anna did—that “to live and love are one is the only way of life for human beings.”^[10]Montagu, “A Scientist Looks at Love” at p. 467.

If love is life energy and energy is indestructible, what do we make of the afterlife? To approach an answer, we must tell Captain Shea’s secret.

Shea’s Secret – His Eyes Are Hers

If love is unconditionally shared soul energy, the bodily death of a loved one must mean their energy has traveled somewhere beyond the body. I have written previously of this concept in relation to the “death” of stars and how their light may be seen and enjoyed for years beyond the “death” of their containers because their energy continues to travel—indestructible—through space and time to our eyes. But to see that life, we must be willing to step into the dark (preferably the darkest conditions possible) and open our eyes. As we do this, we clearly see the stars are not dead to us though their containers may be depleted. If the light of a star can travel to us long after its bodily death, giving us something beautiful to look at and contemplate, and to guide our travels by, why not a human soul?

This brings us to Shea’s secret. If our love has lifted and thereby given life to another—if we have truly been like old Anna—our energy, our light, remains with that other forever and vice-versa. Speaking to a woman grieving the loss of her lover, Captain Shea delivered the following monologue:

“An Apache scout told me once when you love somebody, you trade souls with ’em. They get a piece of yours; you get a piece of theirs. But when your love dies, a little piece of you dies with ’em. That’s why you hurt so bad. But that little piece of him is still inside you, and he can use your eyes to see the world. So, I’m takin’ my wife to the ocean, and I’m gonna sit on the beach and let her see it. That was her dream. And I’m gonna see her. That’s my dream.”^[11]Sheridan, Taylor. “1883.” Paramount, 2022, Season 1, episode 6.

I was deeply moved when I heard this. It brought my wife to tears as she watched as well. There is something profoundly beautiful in this secret Apache wisdom. And it reminded me of something Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. After preaching all his hard sayings about how to truly love, Jesus said, “The light of the body is the eye.”^[12]Matthew 6:22.

How we truly see someone reflects the level of the light in our body; it is a demonstration of our love if we are capable of it. If we can truly see them (not just their ego or persona, their souls), we will love them. If we love them, they are in our light. And perhaps our eyes will indeed serve as a reflection for their traveling light after their bodies have gone. This was Shea’s secret, he would continue living so his love could live to see also as he carried her with him wherever he went. His eyes are hers. The reverse may also be true.

I had a recent dream that seemed to reaffirm this to me.

Papa’s Horse – Her Eyes (light and love) Are His

My dream depicted an exchange between my brother, Rick, and his granddaughter, Mabel. Here is the dream:

Rick is playing with Mabel when she tells him, “I am your horse, Papa.” Rick excitedly goes along with the game. Then Mabel becomes very serious and says, “You must look me in the eye.” When Rick does this, Mabel tells him he is now dead because her eyes have the power of life and death. But then she says, “It’s okay Papa, I have something to make you live again.” She gives him a small patch of paper or fabric and tells him to put it on and it will make him live again.

February 1, 2022

This dream moved me just as much as Shea’s secret, but for different reasons. The dream left me wanting to understand the enigmatic exchange, especially the re-giving of life symbolized as a piece of parchment or cloth in return for being truly–seriously–seen.

Mabel is a beautiful, innocent five year old child. As you might imagine, she possesses not a shred of guile. And because she has not yet been robbed of her innocent connection to the ground of her own being (the connectedness of all), she understands–like the children suffering in orphanages in the 20th century–that a person’s attention (symbolized as a serious gaze in my dream) holds the power of life and death. At least this is what I believe my unconscious was telling me. It is no wonder Jesus said, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”^[13]Matthew 18:3 A place, by the way, he also said was “within you.”^[14]Luke 17:21

When we truly see another, we are giving them our power and some energy of our soul goes into them through the eye. If they see us back, we receive their life-force into us also. Truly seeing or looking in this way seems to be a key to life and death. How important is it then, to try and truly see the ones we love? To touch the very ground of their being and in this way create an eternal bond. Indeed, our immortality and its quality may be determined by the level of looking we do. This heightened importance of truly seeing may be why it is so often difficult to do in the moment. We don’t always want to give up our power over another for fear we will lose our own life force or ability to determine outcomes. The deep irony is that we all ultimately die. But where will our light go when we die? Remember the stars. Wherever there is one willing to step into our darkness (the shadows of our lives) and open their eyes and meet our gaze. But how will the light of our eyes continue? If we have truly seen others while we lived; if we have surrendered our power by giving them love, their eyes will become our eyes when our bodies no longer contain the light. In this way, our eternal fates are aligned.

But what about the horse?

They’ll run forever.

They’ll gallop till they die, they will . . .

if we don’t say “stop.”

They live for us . . . just for us . . .

their whole lives.

Peter Shaffer, Equus

“I am your horse, Papa!”