On the True Nature of the Soul: Essays for the Seriously Curious

By Robert Colacurcio

This book is a compilation of essays written mostly to family members and friends in response to their questions and comments to my other books. These essays were written in over a period of two years and can be read singly, although I have grouped them to try to achieve a cumulative effect.

Many people seem satisfied with the childhood information about the soul that they carry into adulthood. Some people just find the subject beyond them, even though the soul is their most intimate companion. Everyone agrees that proper feeding requires accurate information about the animal or person being fed, and yet the spiritual nurture of the soul is not examined with the same critical eye. Much that I have to say, therefore, has to do with the proper feeding of the soul based on a critical examination of the true nature of the soul. As in all my books, I am indebted to the methods of examination from the Buddhas spiritual technology toolkit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524580230

Robert Colacurcio

Robert Colacurcio has been practicing the methodology of the Buddha’s spiritual technology for over thirty five years under the guidance of some of the most accomplished meditation masters in the Vajrayana lineage of Buddhism. Earlier in his life he studied to become a Jesuit priest, and earned his PhD from Fordham University in philosophy. His spiritual background includes two years at the New York Zendo, extensive study in the Human Potential Movement under the direction of Claudio Naranjo and Oscar Ichazo. His journey then took him to a Sufi commune learning the disciplines of the Russian savant, G.I. Gurdjieff. He is also deeply indebted to the works of Carlos Castaneda, Robert Pirsig and Jane Roberts. He currently lives with his wife, Carol, in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia, and delights with pride in the growth and constant source of revelation that are his children and grandchildren

Book preview

On the True Nature

of the Soul:

Essays for the Seriously Curious

Robert Colacurcio

Copyright © 2017 by Robert Colacurcio.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 02/15/2017

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Uniting the Spiritual with the Material

2. Spiritual Relativism

3. Emotional Ignorance

4. Embracing Ignorance?

5. When Enough is Enough

6. Some Thoughts on the Idea of Perfection

7. Identity as Refuge

8. Questions from a Nephew

9. The Soul as Construct

10. A Diet that Feeds the Soul

11. Who Am I, Really?

12. Why Are There So Few Of Us?

13. The Turtle and the Yoke

14. Essay on the Novel Touch

15. What Substitutes for Vision?

16. Thinking about God Appeals to Me Not at All

17. Illustrating the Appeal

18. Tommy Tucker’s Triad

19. Why Catholics Need the Buddha

20. The Soul as Intimate Companion

Epilogue

Thanks to my family and friends

For their curiosity and questions

Which inspired these essays

Preface

The essays in this book were written mostly as responses to questions or comments posed by some of my family or friends. So while each one targets a particular question in almost every instance by a unique individual, they nevertheless have a potentially universal appeal because of their subject matter. I say potentially universal appeal because even subjects that touch upon matters of profound concern for everyone, don’t appeal to everyone all the time. As a neighbor friend of mine put it to me, Why don’t you write about subjects that I can understand?

The true nature of the soul is not a subject that everyone is curious about, even though it is the answer to life’s most fundamental questions; namely, Where did I come from? Who am I, really? and What comes next? Instant information via Google and a thousand apps on one’s smart phone can’t answer these questions, but curiously, most people’s curiosity is satisfied with what they can download. These essays may appeal, therefore, only to those people for whom an appetite and hunger has awakened that is not being satisfied by sources of instant information. Their curiosity requires more substantial food, and quite probably their usual spiritual diet has left them with an appetite for something more.

So it must be acknowledged that if one has no appetite because their hunger has been completely satisfied, then sending them an invite to a sit-down feast will result in a negative RSVP.

Each of these essays can be read in isolation because they were written ad hoc, not as sequential chapters following a book outline. Even so, I have arranged them to follow a cumulative development. Now, whether they can be understood in isolation, I can’t say. I don’t apologize for the difficulty of the subject matter. The nature of the soul is not my doing. If, however, after having applied oneself with focused, open-minded attention, a reader is still as much in the dark as before, then I truly apologize for wasting their time.

One more thing by way of a preface. Everything I’ve written in these essays—and in all my books as well—is an effort to apply the methods of the Buddha’s spiritual technology to the spiritual needs, as I understand them, of contemporary Americans. The application of the Buddha’s ideas is, therefore, my own, but the source material is his. So, if my efforts have come up lame and limping, it is really to the three jewels (the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha) that I must apologize for not being in better shape to carry home this project.

For anyone looking to see what credentials my background provides for attempting such an ambitious project, please see the back cover of any of my books, even this one.

The anonymous poem that concludes this preface I found at a seaside beach house. To me it presents a setting that invites that focused and open-minded attention that I hope each reader will make use of to get a deeper understanding of subject that is near yet far.

The Ocean remains our unbuildable front.

No roads run over it. No buildings

rise from it. No man can alter it.

Beyond the shoreline, the view never

changes, the ocean serving as the

keeper of something we so rarely see

inland—the horizon.

Maybe that’s why we are drawn to it

every summer, more than the smell

of salt water, more than the thrill

of being swallowed by a wave, more

Than the touch of sand under our bare feet.

Maybe we go there simply for the

Unobstructed outlook.

—Anon.

Introduction

During my career in sales I experienced the introduction of the CB radio in cars, the car phone, the fax machine, the desk top computer, email, the cell phone and the laptop computer. Every telecommunication advance was introduced by my boss as the next best way to increase sales and achieve competitive superiority over other companies similar to ours. My personal experience, however, belied these rosy predictions. For me, every technological advance did two things: 1) increased the pressure to respond more quickly to customer demands and 2) put another buffer between me and the decision maker I wanted to have face time with. The more telecommunications technology advanced, the harder it became to actually visit with the decision makers in person. The more this happened, the less I enjoyed the sales game. For me, it was the making of established relationships built on confident familiarity with one another that made sales both challenging and satisfying on a deeply personal level.

From my observation of the human scene today (2016), it seems virtual interactions predominate over actual face-to-face physical interactions. The slump-shouldered media screen stare has become emblematic of our times. The immediacy of screen time information and entertainment seems to produce something more than just physiological near-sightedness. There seems to be less time, interest, opportunity and energy given to the long-range view. The quality and appeal of gazing at things from afar seems to be fading. For example, National Geographic is concerned by the fewer number of young people visiting our national parks which give one the very best of long-range vistas. When was the last time you saw two people sitting comfortably side-by-side gazing off into a common distance sans cell phones at the ready?

Paradoxically, the true nature of the soul is immediately available yet can only be seen if one takes a long-range view. The true nature of the soul, and the questions it answers simply by one becoming intimately familiar with it, cannot be answered by questioning Google or calling upon any of a thousand or more apps. The paradox is that the soul’s sacred spaciousness is immediately available once the long-range view can become clearly focused without the clutter of media-mind distractions in the foreground.

Curiosity about the true nature of the soul is piqued by questions that goad one to pay attention to the long-range view. One such question I was frequently asked in my early religious education by the Jesuits: quid hoc ad aeternitatem? Of course, at that time Latin was a regular part of the curriculum, and one easily translated this pithy question as, What’s the point in relation to eternity? The question looks for the lasting value of a thing. In other words, does it make a deposit in the only bank that counts in the end? Relative to our current media screen addiction and the trivialization of information via the 1000+ apps, quid hoc ad aeternitatem? But then who asks a question like this anymore?

For anyone reading this Introduction to see whether reading further will be worth their time and effort, if quid hoc ad aeternitatem piques your interest relative to a desire to delve deeper into the nature of spiritual realities, then this book is for you. If not, no harm no foul. You’ve spent only a few moments away from your smart phone.

The essays in this book are all about clearing away some of the clutter that hides the true nature of the soul from an intimate and familiar view. What truly feeds and nourishes the soul can be known only when one comes to understand more clearly the true nature of the soul. This is a simple yet mostly overlooked truth. It becomes obvious to anyone responsible for the careful feeding of an infant, an invalid or even a pet or a wild animal. Truly nourishing food must correspond to an understanding of what the body being fed truly requires for its health. The same goes for the soul.

In the West, the teaching has always been that the soul’s destiny is to return to its true homeland in heaven. In mythological terms, the Garden of Eden is the earthly paradise our distant ancestors once enjoyed; but since the fall and redemption, heaven is the new paradisiacal homeland, the eternal goal of our earthly journey through this vale of tears. Hell is not spoken about much today from most pulpits, but it remains a dogmatic truth and a distinct possibility for the fallen, unrepentant reprobates who remain unredeemed. In other words, it is simply assumed that the nature of the soul gives it only two very different but equally eternal options: either the everlasting paradise of heaven or the everlasting torments of hell. Both of these mutually exclusive and limited options are ultimately based on a limited—and to that extent, misunderstood—nature of the soul.

In the course of these essays the reader will find cogent reasons—based upon a more complete understanding of the true nature of the soul and its place in the universe—to believe that there are quite a few other options. Notice that I’ve presented belief as following upon understanding, not the other way around. In the late and high middle ages, for example, the medieval scholastics of the Church frequently proposed this guiding principle: fides quaerens intellectum. That is, faith seeking understanding, meaning belief comes first as a guide directing the mind to deeper understanding of the accepted truths of the faith. Let me make a fundamental disclosure: I am following the methodology outlined in the spiritual technology of the Buddha. In Buddhism, there are no credos, no dogmatic articles of faith. There is nothing like the Nicene Creed, for example, which puts the dogmas of the faith in a creedal formula. The Buddha often said with insistence that his followers test what he taught against their own experience. He strenuously counseled against taking what he said on faith and letting it go at that. His spiritual technology was designed to be proven over and over again in the experience of each individual. In this sense, the Buddha placed understanding superior to faith. Of course, everyone cannot understand everything, and perhaps faith always arises relative to the distant goal of a more complete understanding. However, it is ignorance of one’s true nature, not the inherent sinfulness of that nature, that is the impediment in one’s way. Therefore, addressing this radical and specific kind of ignorance that skews one’s journey on earth comes first. A specific kind of knowledge and understanding starts and continues to guide the soul on a trajectory leading to its destination. Notice that I did not say ultimate destination. Correctly understood, the soul does not have an ultimate destination because its true nature is never over and done. It is never finished in the sense that either heaven or hell completely exhausts its options.

These essays will introduce the reader to an understanding of the soul as the potential to be one with all things. The implications of this more complete understanding of the soul give it open-ended options for developing its unlimited potential which go on forever. The perfection of heaven when pictured as a closed and completed environment is replaced by an open-ended, never ending ability of the soul to participate co-creatively in the energy of divinity. The rather static picture of heaven as the everlasting but passive enjoyment of The Beatific Vision is replaced by the soul’s unending, renewable manifestations or incarnations of divine energy throughout the height and depth, breadth and width of any and all universes that may compose our multiverse.

As I write this Introduction, most families in America are celebrating Christmas. Occasionally a parish marquee reminds the faithful to put Christ back into Christmas, remembering with gratitude the one-time gift of the only begotten Son made man for the salvation of the world. Gratitude, however, might be more deeply pondered in response to the continuity of divine energy and life that is given continuously every nanosecond. One aspect of the deeper truth of our soul’s nature is that it is not a miraculous one-time deposit of a spiritual substance infused into the fetus by God at conception or sometime thereafter, who knows when. The soul is rather the continuous receptivity of divine life and energy that had no beginning and will have no end. Gratitude, therefore, should be the continuous recognition that we live and move and have our being by virtue of a continuous receptivity. We are continuously on the receiving end of the gift-giving relationship, even though our hard as horn habit of taking things for granted is barely awakened out of its lethargy by the jingle of Christmas bells and the twinkle of Christmas lights.

I’d like to close this Introduction with a Christmas sonnet my older brother wrote for me a long time ago, titled Wise Men.

If every road you come to leads to Rome,

How do you get to Bethlehem? And where

Amid flamboyant fashion’s flame and flare

Can you expect to find a stable home?

The blaze of mighty empire’s gold renown

Can frighten back the light of any star,

And glaze your eyes you travelers from afar.

There simply isn’t any little town.

Or if there is, it’s one you’d never hope to find

Not in a million Christmases at least.

Pursuing truth, you quit the silky East.

If you find Bethlehem, Wise Men, you’re blind.

You find it, blinded, half blind so do we.

The seers miss it; seeing they don’t see.

Uniting the Spiritual with the Material

The question often asked, and recently by my older son is, How do I adapt to live in this world where I know everything is impermanent but some things are necessary for survival?

My first question in reply today is whether you have given this question any further reflection based on the suggestions made in items ##1-5 of that footnote #14 at the end of The Virtual Self: Beyond the Gap in Buddhist Philosophy. (See the end of this essay for that footnote.)

Your question reveals a struggle to adapt to a world you perceive to be impermanent but seeming nonetheless to require efforts to survive that are somehow hard and fast. I feel you need to remind yourself of what you regard as most important and then renew the process of realignment in relation to that ideal.

Do you experience your job as a distraction from your ideal? Why or why not? If the energy and effort expended to support your family feels like a distraction from what you regard as life’s most important task for you, why is that? Do you perceive your material goals (support of family, advancement, financial affluence etc.) to be somehow at odds with your spiritual goals? This might be a question of conceptual variance or of definitely felt experience. Conceptual variance is the inability to reconcile concepts that seem, by definition, to be at odds or even incompatible. But more serious would be the situation where what you do day in and day out doesn’t support, enhance or allow you to deepen in what you regard as most important.

So, my first suggestion as I write this today is that you reformulate your question for greater clarity. Not only do good answers come only to good questions, but the solution to a problem is best achieved when the problem is most clearly and correctly formulated.

I don’t now how you might re-phrase your question at this time, but for the sake of discussion, let’s suppose it takes this form: How do I deepen in the spirit having to be immersed in the material world of finance and family? Or perhaps, How can I make my material efforts be the very means for deepening in my spirituality?

These questions play off your original question and assume that, however conceived, you regard going deeper or getting beyond the material surface of things as most important. If this is not the case, then this essay will require a different reader to make its point. For example, along the evolutionary arc towards enlightenment, which everyone is traveling willy-nilly, some folks are content going forward full bore with ambitious motivations that are purely materialistic: the bigger salary, the finer house, the more luxurious car, etc. Until and unless these efforts exhaust themselves, proving to be untrustworthy and in the end unsatisfactory, there is no real motivation to push beyond the Is this all there is? Your question, however, seems to be how to reconcile the effort required to maintain a satisfactory level of material sustenance with a spiritual effort that seems to put one at odds with the requirements of maintaining that sustenance. In a world where constantly changing circumstances demand constant vigilance and tenacity to survive, let alone thrive, what time and energy is left over for a serious pursuit of the things of the spirit? Maybe the ancient religious culture of India practically solves this problem by charting the course of life in 20 year segments: 1) 0-20 education 2) 20-40 the family foundation is established 3) 40-60 satisfy one’s business ambitions and 4) 60 – turn one’s attention to spiritual pursuits.

Perhaps you will detect the problems inherent in this segmented approach to spiritual maturity. Even given life’s current expectancy beyond 100, who can say which will come first: tomorrow or one’s next life? Further, in my view, spirituality is a seamless garment woven out of the very fabric of everyday life from the get-go, or at least it can be. And, given the proper spiritual technology, it is not an additional thing competing for one’s finite supply of energy and time. Spiritual technology offers a way to be in the world where the right kind of focused attention paid buys the pearl of great price, as the Gospel has it. This is the example Mr. Bottiglia offers in Spirituality in Disguise; and in Demystifying Mysticism: Seeing through the Illusion of Our Separateness, I spell out a method in some detail.

The systemic problem is the dualistic matrix. Whether one has no spiritual aspirations or one’s primary motivation is to deepen in the spirit (however this may be conceived), the fundamental obstacle is the same:

mistaken perception. If the nature of reality obviously revealed itself as spirit in disguise and presented itself as such with the familiarity of a friend’s handshake, there would be no conflict about having to make one’s way in the world of the material impermanent. The systemic problem is the mistaken perception we are all born with and educated into as card carrying members of the dualistic matrix. The illusion of our separateness pervades everything because we’ve started out with the mistaken perception that spirit and matter are two separate things.

Overcoming the illusion of that separateness is the result of mind training where mind and body are not separate in their conjoined effort. The question I feel you have to ask yourself is whether the effort is worth the effort. No one achieves performance excellence without diligent and persevering effort. The reconciliation of spirit and matter, in my opinion, is the most important effort one can engage in until enlightenment is reached. It is the practical way to seriously address and satisfyingly resolve the biggest questions in life: Who am I and why am I here?

If you are motivated to engage in this effort with adult seriousness, I suggest a reality check be done first. How do you spend your free time? For example, time in the car to/from work, time waiting for the computer to boot up or respond, the time spent in idle curiosity on the computer etc.? Seriously check it out and estimate the time in minutes averaged per day. Are you willing to take just HALF of that time and dedicate it to the performance excellence of the spirit? When last I checked (12/2016) the average adult is now spending 9.5 hours in front of a media screen of one kind or another, and less than half of that is at work. So, are you willing to just take 10% of that time and devote it to performance excellence of the spirit?

Your heart lies with what you treasure. When your brother asked Mom and me what is the secret