What is your philosophical or religious view of
the human soul? I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments.
In the meantime, permit me to share mine.
In both Taoist metaphysics and Mahayana Buddhism,
there’s a concept called soul dualism, premised on yin-yang theory, where everything,
all aspects of this universe, can be bifurcated into a yin-yang duality, or also dichotomy.
Duality meaning that it comes in a pair,
and dichotomy as in you can conceptually divide it into two separate parts.
What we conceptualize as our soul has a yin aspect and a yang aspect. Recall
in the previous video on Spirit Maps, we discussed the yin-yang bifurcation
of our world into yin spirit realm and yang physical realm?
This all relates back to the basic Taoist cosmological principle that all units are
in fact dualities of yin and yang. All things are inherently a binary. And so,
too, our soul, which we think of as a single unit, is inherently a binary of yin and yang.
Húnpò. The yang aspect we call hun 魂. The yin aspect we call po 魄. When we put the two words
together, Húnpò 魂魄, that means the soul of one who has died. We also conceptualize this soul,
this hunpo, as still retaining many of the deceased person’s personality traits, or psyche.
Hun 魂 is associated with shen 神 (god, divinity, an ethereal or celestial spirit) and po 魄 with
gui 鬼 (a term that designates a ghost or devil, some form of a lower vibrational spirit entity).
Here we really need to take a pause and talk about the translation of “gui” to
devil. In East Asian metaphysical philosophy, we don’t quite have
the same negative connotation to “devil” that you might find in Christian theology.
“Gui” is a really broad umbrella term that essentially means a yin-dominant spirit entity.
The aspect of your soul after you die that returns to Heaven
we tend to refer to colloquially as the shen. This shen is your inner divinity.
The aspect of your soul that stays behind here on Earth after death,
which is the aspect of a dead person that’s,
in essence, resurrected or contacted in necromancy and mediumship, is your gui.
Your hun is in your blood. Since your liver is the storehouse of your blood,
your liver is the seat of your hun.
Your po is in your breath, and since your lungs store breath,
according to Traditional Chinese Medicine, your lungs are the seat of your po.
You’ll find that explanation of hun and po in your blood, liver, breath, and lungs in the Líng Shū
Jing 靈樞經, the second volume of the Huangdi Neijing 黃帝內經, or Inner Canons of the Yellow Emperor,
an ancient treatise on Chinese internal medicine, dated back to around 400 to 200 BC.
In astral travel or lucid dreaming,
it’s your hun aspect that leaves your body while your po remains behind.
Do you recall a previous video where we talked about meng, the word for dream,
and how the ideogram resembles someone walking,
astral journeying? That’s your hun going off on an adventure.
A Fāngshì 方士 methods master, a ceremonial magician, is one who possesses the knowledge
and experience of ritual work that can communicate to a person’s hun and po.
The Book of Rites, Lǐjì 禮記, which you’ll remember as one of the five Classics, which we date back to
the Zhou dynasty, discusses hunpo soul dualism, noting that the hun yang aspect of your soul
returns to Heaven after death, while the po yin aspect of your soul stays here on Earth.
There’s a passage in the Records of the Grand Historian,
Shǐjì 史記, by Sima Qian dated to the early Han, some time between 145 and 86 BC,
that recounts an incident of really drunk people who were passed out in their beds,
and an old seer woman observed their hun as “dragon spirits flying over their bodies.”
So your hun, at least according to a Han dynasty seer, looks like “dragon spirits.”
Whereas your po resembles you. It will bear an uncanny resemblance to your physical
tangible body. And also be a projection of your current personality and psyche.
According to Ge Hong’s Baopuzi 抱樸子, written some time in the late 3rd or early 4th century AD,
the yin-yang dualism of your soul, your hun and po, need to be in balance for you to
be physically and spiritually healthy. If either your hun or your po is weak,
or part of your hunpo leaves your body—more on that in a second—then
you get sick. If both your hun and po leave your body, then you die.
You’ll find this discussion in Volume 2,
Lùn xiān 論仙, the Discourse on the Immortals, in Ge Hong’s Baopuzi.
Fun FYI: Aleister Crowley claimed that he was the reincarnation of
Ge Hong. Hey. If that’s true, then I’m the reincarnation of Cleopatra.
We can trace back this concept of soul dualism to the Zhou dynasty, in the text Zuǒ Chuán 左傳,
written some time between 700 and 400 BC. Oh, and since the passage references Zichan 子產, who
served as a prime minister around 544 BC, that’s probably when this account is dated to.
In Zuǒ Chuán, it’s noted that contemporaneous with your birth,
your po, or the yin aspect of your soul is the first to take form. After the po is created,
the yang aspect of your soul, the hun, is created from the vital elements of
qi. And as you are birthed, the hun and po unite and become fortified.
Now, about your soul leaving your body, there’s a belief that fragments of your
soul can take flight and leave your body. Trauma can cause soul fragmentation,
and that piece to take off. The acts of a demon of some sort. Then,
once there’s been soul fragmentation, a ritual soul retrieval comes in to play.
There are varying folk and ceremonial or ritual practices for calling the soul back to its body,
which you do if and when there’s been physical or mental illness.
There are different names for these practices. One commonly found in Taiwan that’s more of a
folk practice than ceremonial, is called Shou Jing, a form of soul retrieval. The Hakka,
or Kèjiā, that’s me, hi!, also have really cool soul retrieval ritual practices.
Soul retrieval, in the event of a soul fragmentation, is a form of faith healing,
and you’ll see it practiced in many Asian traditions, be that South Asia, East Asia,
Southeast Asia, and throughout the islands of the South Pacific.
What we call mental illness today was traditionally explained as
loss of a fragment of your po, yin aspect of soul.
The strength of your hun, the yang aspect, is dependent on spiritual cultivation and,
I guess you could say the karmic brownie points you earn in life.
The aura that you can see around a person is one way to gauge the spiritual health of the hun.
Upon death, both your hun and your po, the yin and yang aspects of soul, leave your physical body.
The hun contains the storehouse of data that is your karma so when we say it goes up to Heaven,
a Buddhist perspective of that is your hun is the part of the soul that gets reincarnated.
But your po, which keeps a form similar to your physical body and your personality or psyche,
remains behind here on earth. It just becomes part of the unseen forces here in our atmosphere.
Dark matter? Who knows? Maybe.
My personal unscientific ungrounded hypothesis is that the po yin aspect of all souls that stay
behind here in our universe makes up what we’ve been referring to as dark matter.
You hear scientists talk about dark matter as being intangible
and yet having mass and having gravitational influence. So I
dunno… from my lay spiritual woo-woo perspective, it kinda makes sense.
If your po, the yin aspect of soul, is at peace, it’s usually just, you know,
hanging out. In balance with the other forces of nature in our atmosphere, in our cosmos.
But if your po is not at peace, then it could potentially cause disruptions. Ghosts,
hungry ghosts, and certain classifications of
demons could have been the po of a deceased human that is not at peace.
When we talk about mediumship and necromancy,
we’re talking about spirit contacts with the po, or yin aspect of soul.
The metaphysical theory of soul dualism is how Asians tend to explain why you can
reincarnate but also we can summon the spirit of the dead. The part getting reincarnated is
the hun yang aspect of soul after death, and the part that remains here on earth,
that we can contact, is the po yin aspect of soul after death.
And not to over-complicate the discussion, but if we want to get technical from a Taoist
perspective, this fundamental concept of yin and yang binary aspects of the
soul can also be further expressed and therefore fragmented into trinities,
sevens, and tens, like in the same way there is morphology of the human anatomy,
there’s also morphology or a classification system of the form and structure of your soul anatomy.
That, in a 10-minute nutshell,
is my philosophical and religious view of the human soul. What’s yours?