There are many things the world needs. It needs nothing more than a soul.
Joe's Soul
In school, from an early age, Joe learned how stuff works. Joe learned how pulleys work, how electrical circuits work, how cells divide and how neurons process thoughts. He learned that the whole world is a big machine, and we are all little machines inside it.
Joe graduated college, got a job, got married, had kids.
Then Joe had a crisis. He needed help. He picked up books of today's most popular genre—self-help. Lots of them. The books told him he has a soul, he has purpose, that's there's something beyond just being a pleasure-seeking machine.
Joe felt better. He was able to go back to work, keep his marriage and enjoy his kids.
| There are many things the world needs. It needs nothing more than a soul. |
Joe needed to know he has a soul.
Julie's Planet
Julie wanted to save the world. She could not forget the viscous corpses of seagulls rotting on the beach of her childhood hometown after an oil spill. She loved wildlife, she found beauty in nature, and she became obsessed with saving it from the unrestrained rape of reckless human exploitation.
Julie studied environmental science at one of the best universities in America. She is a talented writer. She landed a job with a public relations firm with major clients in the environmental movement.
Julie told people we have to save the Amazon rain forest. They wanted to know why. For Julie, there was no why. It was obvious. But Julie had to find reasons.
Julie told people we have to save the elephants, the tigers and the pandas. They wanted to know why. Julie loves elephants, tigers and pandas. But Julie had to find reasons.
Julie told people that if we don't clean up our act, start making big sacrifices, and change our lifestyles drastically, there won't be much of a world left for our grandchildren. People didn't want to listen.
People said, "I have enough guilt to deal with already."
They said, "I'm not taking care of my own life—how do you expect me to take care of the world of my grandchildren—never mind make major sacrifices for the sake of that future? How many sacrifices have I made for the sake of my own future?"
Julie stares at a photograph of Planet Earth—the classic one, taken from a satellite years back. She sees something there, but she can't say what it is. She sees something of it in every cloud and in every drop of water; in the elephants, in the tigers and in the panda. In the oily corpse washed up upon her childhood beach, and in the ecological systems and subsystems that fascinated her in college.
If Julie could say what it is, she could communicate it to others. She could save the world. But it is a world that does not want to hear. A world that is terrified to recognize it has a soul.
Sasha's Genes
Sasha works in a lab making ground-breaking progress studying the human genome. He believes in what he is doing and is furious with those who fight to hold back biotechnological progress. Sasha believes that soon we will be able to eliminate aging, wipe out all major diseases, and begin to make major advances in guided neurological development of the human species. After all, he says, no organ adapts to change faster than the brain.
| She could save the world. But it is a world that does not want to hear. |
Sasha is involved in research that identifies genotype 577R, shared by all male olympic power athletes. He's read the studies of the ACE genotype—if you don't have one, don't try reaching the peak of Mount Everest without oxygen. Another genotype seems to be associated with mathematical genius. Some research seems to point to a genotype for laziness, and another appears to encode depression.
Sasha also knows some history. He knows that biologists, neurologists, psychiatrists and others recommended schemes to guide the evolution of humanity not very long ago—and eagerly implemented them—through forced sterilization, immigration restrictions, intelligence testing and, eventually, euthanasia. He knows how this culminated in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.
That is why he is thankful that these discoveries were not made under the totalitarian regime in which his parents lived, or in Germany in the first half of the last century—or in America at that time, for that matter. China worries him. So does Iran. But, he says, better that we should make the advances first, and not them.
Ask Sasha what saves us today from the dangers of abuse of genomic technology, and he'll answer quite simply: Fascism is dead. It proved its own failure. Today, we all agree that human beings have rights as individuals and that those rights supersede the benefit of society as a whole. All modern states guarantee those rights. The human rights movement embedded in our minds the equality of all humankind, and those values are here to stay.
But then Sasha looks at that human genome. He knows there are differences—differences that concern only a tiny percentage of the genome, but significant nonetheless. Significant enough that some may consider certain families of human beings to be another species.
Under the microscope, it seems, we are not all equal. Under the microscope, human rights seems a hollow, senseless value, propelled by nothing more than irrational human emotion.
Unless there is something the microscope cannot show. Unless there is something beyond the genome. Unless each of us contains the image of G‑d.
| The need for meaning in our personal lives is sacrosanct today. |
Our Purpose
The need for meaning in our personal lives, the sense of responsibility for the ecology of our planet and the respect for the dignity of every human life—all these are sacrosanct today. Which is a good thing, because without them we would have destroyed ourselves in the century just past.
Yet they are entirely hollow. More than that: they are in utter conflict with the materialist concept of reality that we are taught in school and practice in the laboratory.
In short, we suffer an aching disconnect between our brains and our soul.
Our soul believes life has purpose and meaning, while our brains consider our bodies to be no more than a walking water-bottle of biochemical reactions. We teach small children to cry over the future of the elephants, the pandas and the blue whale, that they have a responsibility to save the planet and sustain it, and then we teach them that all this arrived due to a big bang and a series of accidents. We will not tolerate any voice that suggests the superiority of one family of human beings over another, all the while reducing this creature to a string of DNA in which serious differences have already been uncovered.
Nothing could be more precarious.
So if you think a website like this that speaks about the soul of the human being, the soul of the universe, the world as a continuously projected creation and the human being's relationship to its Creator—if you think this is all cool, nice stuff—think again. This is stuff we need to know. To cognate. To absorb into our lives. To integrate into our world until it becomes the way we think about everything.
By Tzvi Freeman 
