SPIRIT and SOUL

Living human beings breathe.  That's what they do.  When they stop breathing, they die.  There is really no way around this that I know about.  Yet, there are a few mysteries in this breathing thing.  For instance: what kick starts the first breath?  Why can't we just pump air into a set of lungs to get a human being going again, when the breath has stopped for too long?  Why can't I simply choose not to breathe when I want to?  How do I know the difference between a living human being and a dead one when there is a life support machine involved?

In these mysteries is something else.  Like the breath- like the spirit in respiration, inspiration, aspiration, and expiration-living human beings share another form of animating principle.   Something beyond breathing, yet much like it in form, invigorates us.  It is something that needs to be present for a human being to be alive.  It is the difference between a sleeper on a breathing machine and a genius with ALS in a mechanized chair.  It is somehow tied to the way in which a human being is capable of communication, the ability to have relationship with another.  

We have then, two words: Spirit and Soul.  One we define as breath, life and energy.  The other we define as the essence of breathing, living energized humanity.  Both start mysteriously.  Both end the same way.  Both exist beyond our mechanical means to duplicate.  Both somehow define what it is to be a living being.  The absence of either is death, though the death of Soul may not mean the end of breathing, and the death of Spirit may not mean the end of relating one to another. 

We live in an unsettled time, with many experts at cynicism and war.  We live into undreamt possibilities of change for the whole of humanity-changes in human biology, society, and person to person communication unforeseen and unknowable to any but our ancestors yet to come.  It is a scary time in which to be, with creation and destruction so close at hand.  It is a scary time in which to be, having to create new rules for a set of circumstances well beyond our control.

Spirit and Soul are important here.  What it is to be alive is important here.  We seem to be pretty good at the Spirit thing.  We seem to be pretty good at finding ways to breathe, but I am convinced that the Soul thing matters, too, and I will tell you why: breath belongs to the biological, but relationship belongs to the personal.   Without the ability to reach, touch, hear, see, know, converse, share, or relate, we become the living dead-breathing biologicals that somehow miss the mark at being human.