The Fighting Spirit

What is the value of self if we don’t believe in a spirit? An essay for the atheists who call themselves agnostic because yeah, I mean I guess anything’s possible.

It’s been a long time since I've believed in any god. The closest I’ve gotten to religious faith in recent years is a heavy crystal phase, and like all phases, it didn’t stick. The thing about not really believing in a god is that you don’t really believe in an afterlife, and the thing about not really believing in an afterlife is that you don’t really believe in a spirit. I don’t believe that there is a translucent ghost version of myself residing right underneath my flesh acting as a “real me”—an essence that decides who I am and what I mean to the world. And since I don’t believe that one day when I die my true inner self will float up from my body and go find peace in heaven or go spook brave teenagers exploring the halls of their local abandoned mental asylum (depending on the circumstances of my death of course), that leaves me with the question, “Who am I?”.

I’m unsure of who first came up with the idea that we are not our bodies, and that we are instead our souls/spirits. It was 1641 when philosopher Rene Descartes shared his thoughts on the matter, writing, “Mind and soul of the man is entirely different from the body”. The quote, “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” haunted the dashboard of my teenage tumblr for years. Marina (formerly Marina and the Diamonds) on her most recent album sings, “I am not my body not my mind or my brain...not my thoughts or feelings I am not my DNA…I am the observer I’m a witness of life…I live in the space between the stars and the sky”, lyrics that first struck me as a possible reference to what Michael Singer writes about in his New York Times best-selling book The Untethered Soul. I then considered she might be referencing Eckhart Tolle and his popular spiritual teachings. Or perhaps she is referencing neither or both or something else entirely. There is certainly no shortage of sources to pull from. Wherever it came from, the idea that we are not our bodies has permeated into me through years of internet use, the books I’ve consumed, the music I’ve absorbed, the tv shows I’ve binged, late-night parked car conversations with friends, and the religion that I was raised with. Told to me over and over again as if it were a fact, rather than a nice idea. And it’s left me with a personal problem. If I am not my body, and I do not believe in a spirit, then I am nothing. 

But the thing is, I don’t feel like nothing. Not really. Not inherently. Not in my bones. In my physical, tangible bones. The ones that developed spurs after I defended a kimura the wrong way. Not in my heart. The one that beats so erratically in my chest that I have to fight the urge to run out of every building I show up to compete in. Not in my ligaments. The ones I tore at pans after waiting too long to tap to an americana. And definitely not in my skin. The skin that was tortured with the intense heat of embarrassment after getting americana’d at purple belt. 

Tormented by my inability to grasp the value of my self-identity without attaching it to a metaphysical source, I decided to take a walk to the park. I sat down on the bench determined to find the solution to my existential crisis. Who am I if I don’t believe in a spirit? Am I anybody, anything at all? I googled the definition of spirit, and two appeared. The first, another sentiment about how it is the non-physical part of self that governs who we really are. I was disappointed. It didn’t give me much to work with. Still hopeful, I moved on to the second definition, reading, “those qualities regarded as forming the definitive or typical elements in the character of a person”. Almost immediately, the light bulb I was searching for lit above my head. Even if my entire personality and the essence of who I am is completely a result of the way my brain physically formed due to how my genetics interacted with my environment, and I am nothing more than a bag of meat running on electricity—the definition applies. If the definition of spirit is, “qualities regarded as forming the definitive or typical elements in the character of a person”, and the qualities that I regard as forming these elements reside in the body, then the spirit, by definition, is the body. And since I have a body, I do have a spirit after all.

 If our spirit is our body, that makes our spirit constantly vulnerable. Subject to injury, subject to age, subject to death. Wouldn’t this add much greater stakes to the self, and through these stakes perhaps even add meaning to the self? How extra special it is as a martial artist to view my body as the beginning and end of who I am. To think that I am quite literally fighting with my spirit gives the experience of competing a magnificent sense of feeling totally complete. How beautiful it is to know you have the fighting spirit so long as you’re fighting.

Perhaps a spirit outside of the body and an afterlife to meet me when I die would actually dilute the meaning not only in self, but in life as well. The idea seems like a way to relieve the pressure of it all. Put it off onto something else so we don’t have to face it head on. No need to feel so intensely. No need to take ourselves so seriously. Lighten up! It’s just life! We’re just specks of dust in the universe! Doesn’t looking at the stars make you feel so small? No. It does not. It makes me feel special. It makes me feel huge. It makes me feel chosen. It makes me feel safe. It makes me feel like a god. It makes me feel at home. I will not water down the human experience by acting as if it is only a precursor to something greater.

I’ve been sensing an unspoken thought in our culture, pervasive yet perhaps unconscious, that something being less tangible makes it deeper and more meaningful. Like the harder it is to grasp, the more sacred it is. I reject this. Abstraction does not equal depth. Mystery does not equal importance. I am in love with the known. The intensity of the isolated system. There is no need to fantasize an escape to another realm. After all, it would no longer be a fantasy once I’ve reached it. It would only be what this world is to me now—reality. And then would I feel the need to fantasize yet another realm to add meaning to the new one? If we were to find out that the bodiless intangible version of spirit was in fact real, it would through that reality become tangible. Would we then feel the need to yet again put a meaning on it “greater” than itself to make it feel valuable? Would the idea that everything we are is all that we are still make us feel empty, or would we allow it to make us feel whole? And if we could allow it to then, why can’t we now?  If the intangible becomes tangible, will we feel the need to make it intangible once again? Where does it end? When do we get to find meaning in what is rather than in what could be?

Maybe my question isn’t “Who am I?”, but “What am I?”. Or even more accurately, if I’m more of a what than a who, can I still find value in the what? If what I am is a bag of meat, can the meat bag mean as much to me as the soul means to those who believe? And I think the answer is: why the fuck not?  Whether I am who I am because of some ineffable essence or the actual structure of my brain, I am still the same me that I have known all my life. Created by god or crawled out of the ocean, here I stand. When I try to work out why there would be any more inherent value in being made of an otherworldly energy than in being made of flesh and bones, I cannot.  And I do not want to. What I am is a human being living a life on earth. And that is the value that I attribute to self. Not the why or the how, but the what. I am a human, and I am home. I have always been home.