The last article was about living things and the activities of thinking, feeling and wanting. We assigned those activities not to the body, but to the soul. This way, we enabled us to look at these human abilities independent of the laws of physics. Based on the processes in the soul, a will can take form. This will is the result of sympathies. The soul judges all sensations that are impressed on it. What we judge as pleasant, the soul wants to turn to. This is how a desire is formed, and if we surrender to it, an action will follow. With experience, we learn to estimate the consequences of actions. If we took candy from our parents stock as children and ate it, and then reliably got punished for doing so, we learned to renounce stealing. Although in the short run it would give us what we desire, we do without it, because our desire is not strong enough to compensate the suffering that comes with the punishment. Obviously, this also works the other way around. If we learn that we get attention and approval for something that we do not like to do (for example tidying up our room when we were a kid), then we overcome the pain of doing it because the joy we get out of the approval makes up for it. Traditional child-rearing shapes the soul o fa human to fit into social expectations, and the person will act appropriate simply by following the dynamics of the soul. If we are brought up well in this sense, life in human society is easy for us, because we automatically act as we are expected to.
If we act based on this, we may live a proper life, but we are not free. We act as a result of processes in our soul, wich follow strict laws of soul life. Of course, our soul is unique. There is no second soul identical to it. But that is not what makes our freedom. As long as we let the outside world shape our soul and act accordingly, we are not free. We become free by shaping our soul from within and by guiding its activity. The approach for this is an observation of our thinking. Doing so, we can only look at us, because we only have full access to our own thinking, not anyone else’s. Thoughts are a conscious confrontation with all our impressions, including our feelings. This leads to the question of who is observing our thoughts. We usually answer with “I”: I am observing my thoughts. This “I” is a third layer of a human, on top of body and soul. We can call it spirit. The I is the spiritual core of a human, the individual who owns both soul and body and inhabits both of those shells. The I can ride along as a passenger, as it is the case in small children. Or it can take more and more control, as it is the case for some older humans.
If the I is just a passenger, we are controlled by the forces in our soul. Then we act immediately based on the needs that we feel. We express our well-being unfiltered, and live fully in the moment. The sympathies and antipathies that arise in our soul define our attention and aversion. The sensory perceptions and other messages of the body impact our soul and the I allows that the soul’s reaction can immediately turn into an action. We watch as the outside world shapes our soul and we watch while acting based on the condition of our soul. While we are children, our body and soul are shaped by the outside world. The child does not need to worry about growing and unfolding. It grows “by itself”, as long as it is adequately provided for. Children grow and unfold with the help of the vitality that is given to them from outside. As a passenger, the I of the child does not yet take any responsibility. That is why children are treated differently by the law. Only when they come of age they are allowed to take full responsibility for their own life as adults. Usually, only from then onwards we need to carry the full legal consequence of our actions.
However, when we come of age at 18 or a similar age, the I of a human has not yet taken full control of the soul. At that age, we are mostly acting in consequence of the forces in our soul, which we still cannot control. If we were lucky to enjoy a good childhood, then our soul is shaped to match the requirements of the world by the time we come of age, so our trained behavior is compliant with expectations. Then we act lawfully and get on well in the world we know. But our I is still mostly a passive passenger. The outside world still has our thinking, feeling and wanting in its grip. We are not yet free at this age. But our fight for freedom has already begun. The I is beginning to confront the world, the body and the soul. It braces itself against them, and begins to take control of our thoughts. What we previously learned, we can now question. Where we previously acted, we can now pause. What we previously experienced as a given reaction of our soul, we can now shape and create. Shaping the soul is the primary objective of the human I in today’s word.