Body, Mind, Spirit: The New Age Tripartite Person

 

        It was about 2000, that I first noticed the triad body-mind-spirit in a feature story in the Bowling Green Daily News. A man had kicked bad habits. Now he was "taking care" of his "body, mind, and spirit." This caught my attention because it seemed to be presented as common-sense language, but I didn't get it. Isn't spirit a function of mind? Doesn't mind include all cognitive activity? Of course, some idioms do imply a narrower sense, like reading to improve the mind. 

If body-mind-spirit meant something obvious to the reporter and his subject, my best guess was that "taking care of" them is something like (1) exercising and eating right, (2) reading and learning, and (3) worshipping and praying. I envisioned body, mind, and spirit as places where people are variously nurtured, centered on (but not limited to) gym, library, and church. This may indeed be many people's understanding, but, searching the Internet, I found other interpretations. New Age psychology seems to reword the ancient body-soul-spirit triad in a way that inverts the traditional emphasis on intellect, elevating feeling over it.

I've explained Max Scheler's version of the ancient trinity of body-soul-spirit in earlier posts. (1) Body, as part of a conscious person, is the experience of hungers, pains, and pleasures. We experience our bodies as we experience the weather--as facts that prompt reactions but don't not direct them. (2) Soul is the life-support function shared with all animals, instinctual, impersonal and directed toward objects desired or avoided. These objects are images in the senses, the memory, or the imagination. Again, like the weather, soul isn't subject to our will. I can't choose not to want a donut when I'm hungry and see it. (3) Spirit is voluntary, personal, and abstract, capable of image-free thought. Spirit applies moral precepts and predictive reasoning--the categorical imperative and deferred gratification. My spirit may choose not to eat a donut either because it's your donut or because it's unhealthy. Spirit creates theology and science. Spirit is independent of images and sensations, allowing us to transcend unstable real things.

These distinctions are represented (of course, not always with philosophical precision) in the traditions of the Bible and Platonism and have been adopted by recent schools of Jungian psychology. In one of the four times that Paul uses the word soul (psyche) in his letters, he blesses the Thessalonians in "spirit, soul, and body" (1 Thessalonians 5:23), and, as Henri de Lubac shows, tripartite human nature was assumed by the early Christian fathers. Irenaeus (c. 130-c. 202), wrote that when "spirit, in mixing with the soul, is united to the modeled work [body], thanks to this effusion of the spirit, the spiritual and perfect man is achieved." As late as Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the presence of a soul was assumed in non-human animals. When Aquinas bundled together all human sentience in one "soul," he did so by splitting it into two functions, one animal, the other angelic. Aquinas' two functions of soul, the one facing toward the flesh, are in tension--a tripartite activity in a dual nature--but this yielded an radical separation of spirit and matter, "a trap into which both later Scholasticism and Descartes seem to have fallen" (White 16).

Contemporary body-mind-spirit (or body-mind-soul) seems to devalue classical logos, Plato's teaching that physical objects are shadows of logical forms. The teachings of Plotinus, the form of Plato's tradition that influenced Christian theologians, divide creation into three "emanations" or levels of existence: mind, soul, and matter. Mind (or intellect), which translates Platonic nous and can also be called reason or spirit, is elevated above the soul to the realm of eternal thought-forms. Mind is philosophy's nearest approach to God. Soul is a lower energy that animates living things, even plants, and desires for objects outside of itself. While mind seeks knowledge, soul seeks food and procreation. Soul doesn't contain, in Aquinas' terms, the image of God even if it enjoys immortality on the coattails of mind. In sharp contrast, the New Age body-mind-spirit construct demotes the mind-intellect, making it inferior to a spirit-soul that is associated with intuition and feeling--even worded viscerally as "gut feeling."

According to Eckhart Tolle, "The soul is your innermost being. The presence that you are beyond form. The consciousness that you are beyond form, that is the soul." This parallels almost identical definitions from Wayne W. Dyer and Deepak Chopra in Gian Kumar's Spiritual Power: Being and Becoming (2017). This New Age soul "beyond form" (that is, superior to mind) contrasts with Platonic soul, which is inferior to the eternal forms of reason and mind (logos and nous). In Platonism, soul is not beyond form, but beneath it--trapped in the cave of subjective illusion, blind the eternal forms that the spiritual philosopher has learned to contemplate. Tolle's soul also contrasts with soul (Seele)) in depth psychology, where it is a function that mediates between the body and the rational, self-conscious spirit. New Age thought radically inverts traditional Platonic values, elevating heart over head, inchoate feelings over rational forms. 

An Internet search of body-mind-spirit turns up dozens of expos and businesses with these terms (always in that order) in their commercial advertising, often offering massage and acupuncture, but some advising on nutrition, aromatherapy, yoga, and meditation. A recurring theme is balance, implying that a healthy balance between these three functions has been lost and needs to be restored. This is explicit on the Trivedi Effect website where personal harmony is necessary for happiness, and people lose this harmony by thinking through decisions rather than by following "gut instincts." Our big mistake is thinking rather than feeling. Restoration of balance (and peace of mind) can be achieved by tuning into our "natural and instinctive inner guidance system," and correcting our over-reliance on mind. Stress, depression, and boredom result when people are logical and make "decisions with their heads rather than inner feeling." 

I've noted earlier that it is obviously unhealthy for a bullheaded intellect to force the instinctual body to violate its own nature. However, after forty years of grading 500-word papers in college, I'm not impressed that young adults implement logical arguments over gut feelings. If the trend claimed is real, it seems weak. Or maybe weak logic is the problem. At one point, the Trivedi site describes a life of mind as "a compromised life directed toward satisfying the standards set by others and pressures created by society." If most of us (like my  students) reason poorly and end up defaulting to social programming, that is a problem, but a problem attributable not to excess of mind but to simplicity of mind. "MBA jobs pay well, so I will study business even if I hate it," is simple, soulless "reasoning." Or, "Moving this factory is necessary because it will slightly reduce costs, even if thousands of employees suffer." In both cases, a false middle proposition ("All things that maximize money should be done") begs to be modified by cautionary heart-cries, "gut" instincts that should not be ignored, but these cries might be also accommodated logically by utilitarianism or by Kant's categorical imperative. In any case, conformist arguments in need of "gut instinct" are not Socratic ones, which deconstruct "standards set by others" so radically that the reasoner runs a risk of having to drink hemlock.

This flipping of priorities that promotes feeling above reason may have philosophical roots in the 18th century with Hume's view that knowledge is based on verbal analysis of sensory data  and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which demonstrated that the material world as we know it is constructed by the human mind. Put simply, all that we can know is a subjective (even if humanly universal) construct of thought acting on sensation. For centuries before in the West, it was assumed that intellect had direct access to objective reality: in Plato, to eternal forms in the divine mind; in Aristotle, to essences that reason derived from experience. And there were blends of these through a millennium of Christian theology. If, as Kant seemed to prove, reason could not understand things as they are, then reason was demoted from understanding the real world to calculating profit. No longer a seer, reason was demoted to, at best, a moral cop and, at worst, an accountant--giving us, among other theories, Pragmatism, Behaviorism, and Logical Positivism.

The Romantic Movement, reacting to the hobbling of reason, has taken many forms in the last two centuries and continues in New Age philosophy. All of its forms assume direct emotional-intuitive perception of ultimate reality (especially in nature) because rational spiritual perception has been denied. Mind has been demoted to little more than a bookkeeper. Given this, I am amused that these rubrics of New Age appear in business names and that the clearest explanation of them was on the website of a group that sells cure-all pills and claims by psychically multiply crop yields. Body-mind-sprit, whatever its meaning, labels bottles of snake oil. Words are slippery things. Of course, balance is needed, but recent conspiracy theories suggest that our balance may have tilted as much away from fact-based reasoning as toward it.

Returning to the original question--what does body-mind-spirit mean?--I come up with several answers. One, noting the Indian origins of yoga and popular meditation movements (not to speak of the Trivedi site), is that spirit implies non-dualistic consciousness--realization of the unitary Self or Atman, or at least sensitivity in that direction. Mind, even some variant of its Platonic non-imagistic "forms," is devalued as dualistic, thus disrupting personal balance. Another answer is that spirit really does signify emotional impulse, going with the flow of Scheler's instinctual soul--spirit in the sense of a spirited horse. Thus, the advocates of the New Age triad are inverting traditional values to free the culturally uptight from their hangups. 

            A third answer is the one I started with. Maybe most users of the triad don't bother their brains over the question and take the three terms as equivalent to something like good health, a open mind, and clarity of feeling. It's not about metaphysics, but about having a nice day. For instance, one site that lists actions to improve body-mind-spirit balance includes, along with meditation and yoga, green vegetables, volunteer work, time outdoors, adequate sleep, travel, and a whole-house water filter.

Reference

White, John R. "Max Scheler's Tripartite Anthropology," in Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 75:255-266, 2001. White explains concepts in Scheler's Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics (1913-1916), translated by M. Frings and R. Funk, 1973.