The Soul and its 70 Faculties
On the War Within
There is a seminal Torah idea about speech splintering into 70 languages, the soul comprising 70 faculties, and the human family splitting into 70 nations. In the first essay of a three-part series presenting the meaning of these 3 interrelated subjects (here), we explored the idea of 70 languages. In this essay, we examine the soul and its conflicting faculties.
In the previous essay, we explored words and their multiple meanings. Each person has a unique sense of reality. To different people, the same word has different meanings. Perfect communication would seem to be impossible, discord – inevitable.
The path we discovered to smooth communication is translation. Common words must be translated into a common reality. This un-worded, remote reality is the inner idea which underpins a word, not known directly, but only sensed. Given the form of a word, ideas transform into specific, known meanings as different as the people who share the words; those people, if they seek unified truth, must transform the words back into the ideas from whence they are derived. This is the method through which man will not be alone, thought communicating with thought, word but its medium.
The multiplicity of interpersonal language has a parallel within every single person. Just as there are among different people conflicting ways to perceive reality, so are there conflicting forces within one’s very self. The multiplicity of ways to view reality sows discord between people; a corresponding variety of forces within one person sows discord within his own, single soul.
We are entities that comprise clashing forces. The various faculties of the multifaceted soul disaccord. Inner peace and happiness are elusive. The cause of our unhappiness is inner strife, conflict: I believe one thing but feel another, or I have incompatible emotions. The dissonance born of resistance is suffering. For example, I suffer when I have an unhealthy desire, when a want conflicts with a value. Alternatively, I suffer when I resist pain, that is, when pain conflicts with a belief or emotion.1
Inner peace is as elusive as world-peace, but in this battlefield, it is you who combats yourself.
The path to harmony within is to cure dissonance, to reconcile conflict and make yourself unified and whole. Take an unhealthy desire. Say I awaken in the morning at the time appropriate for arising in order to be productive. A part of me feels that I should get out of bed, but another part of me desires the comfort and ease of drifting back to sleep. If I am honest, I am conflicted. War is declared.
One combatant or the other will emerge victorious from the ensuing battle, not both. Either the aspect of my soul that desires productivity will overpower the aspect that desires ease, or vice versa. But I – the sum total of these conflicting forces and their reasonable general manager – I am a little more worn from the clash, more divided and uneasy.
To become unified and whole you must negotiate a peace, this through translation of conflicting feelings into a common language. Translate your conflicting feelings into their inner meaning, and you will find that they are really one. Comfort-seeking and productivity-seeking are the same essential idea. Ask yourself: What does the desire for comfort really mean? What is its essence? Why do I desire comfort? The answer, you will find, is that comfort is but a clue, a sign that everything is safe and secure, that the body’s needs are being met. Comfort-seeking is a certain language, so to speak, a window to a hidden truth. Now, as you lay on your bed luxuriating in its softness, contemplate this hidden truth that you sense. You become aware, through bodily desire, of a deeper idea about the good: It is right for things to be safe and secure and for needs to be met.
Ah, but meeting these same needs is the very purpose of being productive! When the lower-level body-language of comfort-seeking is translated into the higher language of its causes, it becomes closer to the other languages that derive from the same causes. The various “languages” you speak need not conflict.
Every sensation and every faculty of the soul is ultimately about the same unified theory; your work is simply to bring that theory to light and thereby unite them all. When that unity is understood, the real “you” becomes unified and whole, and will be able to decide in what direction to direct all of your feelings, without conflict. The comfort-seeking aspect of your soul will jump out of bed into action, if this is what reason dictates.
The same approach is appropriate for all feelings. They might duel and clash, but only until you translate them into their root language and conjoin them. Ask yourself: “What does my hunger/pain/desire/love really mean?” and you will discover the unified language of deep truth. Pain, for example, is essentially a message that something is wrong – that we are not supposed to suffer! And yet pain causes suffering, in a remarkable lie that we are tasked with unravelling and overcoming, if we would live in truth.
Just as a messiah is required for effecting world-peace, a personal messiah is required for effecting peace within your soul. Learn to be your own messiah, a peacemaker managing the conflicts within yourself. Train to become an adept translator who can redefine anything into the universal language.
Engage in translation in real-time and you will find that inner suffering is nothing but the product of an invisible idea which disappears as soon as its source is brought to light.
For the next essay in this three-part series, click here.
Concepts:
70 Faculties of the Soul/שבעים כחות הנפש
“Pain” refers to a physical sensation; “suffering” to the interpretation of that sensation, which is determined by beliefs and emotions. Pain is a bodily sensation, suffering a psychic one.
In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius addressed the desire for comfort an ease in the context of rising from bed in the morning. His response was that it is the nature of Man to be productive and have experiences; therefore, it is proper to rise from bed, rather than staying warm and comfortable beneath blankets. Your solution claims to be different, as you suggest that ones desire for comfort and ease are not in conflict with the urge to be productive and experience life, yet you fail to show how this is so.