Without Me You’re Nothing
An updated dialogue between the Soul and the Body
By Mark Kelly and Timothy O'Neill
Body: It irritates the hell out of me how you always act so superior. Like I’m just some mud creature you have lifted from the swamps.
Listen! You might have a little game going on where you dip in and out of this world and use whatever materials are to hand as your temporary vessel. But I’m permanently in and of this place. I’ve got skin in the game, quite literally. Even when I’m mouldering in the ground, every part of me is being redistributed to get used again elsewhere.
While you go back to your soul soup and ponder the meaning of your last little expedition, these husks you leave behind are in a cycle of their own.
You’re just a tourist here, admit it!
Soul: No one ever said you lacked for meaning. It’s the wrong meaning, that’s it. You represent lust, greed, attachment and all the gross materialism we must overcome if we wish to advance in this inherently spiritual game. Our perceptions and priorities have been deliberately narrowed so we would take more pride in and put more faith in the material vessels which we inhabit, when it is just this type of experience that keeps us trapped living a lie, a hoax, a joke, a farce, a prison partially of our own making.
Yes, you absorb data from the world we inhabit, but we interpret all that sensory information, give it purpose and meaning by providing it with spiritual context. The soul is forever wherever it chooses to go. You are forever here, trapped in the prison with the rest of the leeches, parasites and mud-soaked minions. I would never truly insult you though. I cannot. You are a vital part of the human existence. This human existence, anyway. You reflect back to us what we must accept, embrace, love and, ultimately, conquer. Thank you, body, for your slight contributions to this game we all know is hell, thanks for taking the hard hits and enduring and for being willing to be food for the wolves.
Your sacrifice is acknowledged and honored. And temporal. See you in 50 light years when a new Eden has subsumed your façade of meaning.
Body: That’s called damning with faint praise.
Your slight contributions? This just underlines that you see us as so much cannon fodder in your eternal wars, which I’m convinced exist only in your own imagination.
“Thank you for your service. Now get back in line”
On our own we don’t represent anything. We are just molecules. If you see us as tainted with lust or greed, that’s just a meaning you ascribe to us. The body cannot sin, but you made us a channel for your own weaknesses.
But let’s look at this a different way. You are always moved by the beauty of a sunset or a field of poppies. What about the beauty of this vehicle of ours?
I grew a pair of eyes organically, without the equipment of an optical laboratory. I grew them in the womb, from the flesh of my mother, so that you can experience the glorious separation of the material world, which you would otherwise know only as one big unified wall of matter.
I constructed a framework of bones, better than any crane or gantry, covered it with muscle and skin, so that you can feel the hair of that dog, and lift that child up into your arms. I am a living miracle, and you speak as though I am a meat puppet whose deficiencies you must benignly tolerate.
Wake up! You’re a wisp, a phantom, a cosmic hobo.
Without me, you’re nothing.
Soul: Now sit down. You are right on all your points and now is time, I can’t believe I’m saying this, for you to learn your lesson. This fight is rather silly. I could speak to you on the endless ways in which in the human body contains more intricacies and wonders to it than the Sistine Chapel. The brain itself is said to be the most complex object in the known universe. This is why so many won’t even question whether or not souls exist. Because they can’t yet even understand you, the very flesh they are living in! But I won’t bask in aesthetic Beauty, because I know where it truly hails from. We didn’t always look this way. We didn’t always have one hole serving three functions. It’s inefficient and grotesque.
We were truly beautiful to gaze upon, when the spirit rightly dominated the flesh, but when the dark entities became our gods long ago they restructured our DNA so we would become more attached to the physical and the material. Form follows function. We are takers, graspers, we are needy, competing and selfish. We were built to absorb. to contend and to wage war. The separation game at its most perverted and extreme.
Herein lies the lesson. It is not the duality of body and soul that empowers us, but our harmony, our fundamental unity. It is not you and me, my friend. It never was. There is only WE, or US.
