The Weight of my Soul

 

For all my love for the so-called literary giants, I go to sleep every day with the exploits of gory, psychotic, Dexter-esque cops and killers. Something in this Mark Billingham book I'm reading set me off on the usual tangential rabbit hole.

This gay pathologist with various piercings on his body is best friends with the very-straight-and-almost-copy-book-macho cop protagonist. During a post-mortem, he tells his police-officer-BFF that an adult body weighs around 16 to 21 grams (3/4 ounce) less than it did immediately before the person died.

Or so Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts, came to believe in 1906 after conducting experiments on four tuberculosis patients, one terminal diabetes patient, and a man who was dying of undiagnosed causes. The good doctor, a religious man, attributed the sudden, substantial, and inexplicable lost weight to the soul. His beliefs were further confirmed when his experiments on dogs he killed for the sake of science demonstrated no weight loss (only humans have souls, you see).

My research shows that Dr. MacDougall’s findings were published in American Medicine in April 1907 in a paper entitled "The Soul: Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of The Existence of Such Substance."

The pathologist in Mark Billingham’s book explains the phenomenon as the release of the residual air from the lungs at the moment of death.

Most didactic philosophies juxtapose body against soul.

The body is material, the soul spiritual.
The body is effervescent, the soul eternal.
The body consumes and is therefore ultimately consumed; the soul is energy and therefore essential.
A body without a soul is dead; a shell to be discarded. 

A soul without a body is free, has gained nirvana, merged with the essence of the godhead—the param-atman—and has therefore reached its ultimate goal.

For religious philosophies, thus, the body burdens the soul while the soul enlightens the body.

One reason why I can’t subscribe to organised religions (and the eminent Dr. MacDougall) is my lack of faith in the absolute certainty of their beliefs.

If my body contains my soul within its limits (and therefore its limitations), does it not affect the shape and scope of my soul as long as it is within my body?
Does not the soul get imprinted with the experiences of the body?
Don’t my body’s properties affect the chemistry or character of my soul?

Shouldn't my soul also show some scratches from the life that has been etched into my body? Otherwise, how is it my soul and not yours (or a tree’s, or an ant’s, because why should only humans have souls when other creatures have bodies, too)?

Does the body or the soul commit the acts that will be rewarded or punished?

If my soul is essential energy, unaffected by the cage it must inhabit, how does it reap the benefits of the good committed by my body or get punished for the body's sinful actions?

If all souls are one and inseparable from each other, how is the body I inhabit today a result of my soul’s karma and a part of its purification process?

If it is my soul that is responsible for my karma on earth, why is my body incarcerated, whipped, tortured, maimed, and killed for the soul's wickedness? If it is the body that is to blame, why do I need an afterlife, or heaven, or hell once I have shed my body?