What do you do with a frozen soul? You could lick it because, speaking in general terms, a Popsicle is as much a piece of frozen soul as a human being is. And so are rattlesnakes and monkeys and rocks hurtling through space. You can also saw frozen soul, beginning the process of making a house for sparrows. That leads to the insight that you can hammer a spike of frozen soul driving it straight so boards of frozen soul are held in place.
Some chunks of soul are less frozen than others. Some are described well by quantum mechanics as being some sort of strange vapor which might condense into a liquid or ice with any of a variety of properties and locations. Frozen soul also interacts with spacetime in ways that make the entire topic still stranger from the viewpoint of embodied creatures who detect something else in their own selves and, perhaps, a lesser something in other sorts of created beings. We’re surrounded by vagueness and strangeness, abstractions and soul-stuff, when we try to understand the more fundamental stuff from which ordinary or concrete stuff was shaped. Stranger and stranger and stranger, surpassed only by outright weirdness.
When God chose to create, He manifested certain truths — perhaps an infinite number of truths — as the raw stuff of Creation. How do I know this? I don’t. I’m speculating, working up a plausible story based upon the evolutionary and developmental nature of this universe as modern empirical knowledge would have it, history and Biblical exegesis as well as physics and biology. I don’t wish to either greatly qualify or excessively constrain any view of the `truth’ value of these great mounds of empirical knowledge, themselves not well-explored in true scientific, that is — systematic, ways. This body of knowledge, partly digested and occasionally plundered and wrongfully exploited by ideologists, is the best knowledge we have outside of a very small body of truths revealed to us — but even those truths were and are revealed through the eyes and ears and brains of the embodied creatures which we human beings are, and ultimately that process of revelation is describable in the terms I’m explaining in this essay.
The intellectual enemies of religious believers and also of some skeptics who believe in something more than this material stuff aren’t those who acknowledge the importance and goodness of matter and physical energy but rather those who talk in such terms but litter their talk with reductionistic words such as `just’ or `only’, most especially when those words are implied rather than stated explicitly. We should remember that many who claimed to be believers in a Creator-God have also spoken in such reductionistic terms of matter while claiming to believe in some sort of a higher world. I’ll leave that thought hanging and go on to deal with the totality of things and relationships and events in this universe. That totality implies a greater scope to created being than does any sort of reductionism. We start with what we can see and touch and explore, but soon enough realize that even the most vulgar entities in this universe show that evidence of something not reducible to pig-flesh nor granite nor ionized hydrogen gas. Something so simple as a journey to somewhere tells us the road, dirt and rock or asphalt, is more than `just’ a road made of one or more of those forms of matter. That journey also tells us the traveler is `more’ than a slave to his genes, more than a `mere’ product of evolutionary forces, biological and cultural, more than even a `mere’ product of his personal development. As the road is that road-stuff but more, so the traveler is his genetic-stuff and his soma-stuff but more. He is a product of various developmental and evolutionary processes. All that stuff and all those processes are more than `mere’, more than `just’.
Extrapolating backward in time is nearly as foolish an endeavor as extrapolating forward in time, but some good can come from it, some ability to understand at least some aspects of Creation and to maybe anticipate potential opportunities or problems. This sort of foolishness can be great fun but it’s also necessary for the founding of a civilization, an activity perhaps possible to conscious intention for the first time in history. We live in an age of not only heightened self-awareness but also an historical self-consciousness which renders some modern communities minded in the way that individuals first became minded at some time during the development of the human race — I’ve conjectured this had happened about the half a millennium before the birth of Christ in some of my writings because of the sudden appearance, or at least sudden recording, of self-aware and abstract reasoning in several regions — Greece and India and Israel and China and perhaps others.
In any case, some modern men have minds allowing for an understanding of abstract forms of being and also events which must be seen as abstract such as the one we refer to as the Big Bang. I call this an abstract event for the simple reason that it left behind some concrete evidence of what happened, but the event itself occurred before mass and energy had settled down to a state where human observation, by way of sight or hearing or touch, could have happened even in principle. Electromagnetic energy was bound up with other sorts of entities in such a way as to exclude even a hypothetical vision of the events in the first few hundreds of thousands of years after that Big Bang.
If we imaginatively travel backward in time toward that Big Bang, we see mass and energy melt down towards strange states which I interpret as being more abstract versions of the various sorts of mass and energy. For example, weak nuclear energy and electromagnetic energy melt into a form of energy labeled `electroweak’. This doesn’t happen because of some approach to a mysterious creation-event but rather because of a compression into a tiny region or, more or less equivalently, because of an unimaginably high temperature. What compresses? What turns up the burner?
Let’s first think of the process in temporal order, from the Big Bang forward. The `stuff’ of this universe expanded out of that very tiny region in an event which can be described as explosive though it was not like an explosion that shatters a seam of coal in a mine-tunnel. It was an explosion in which our spacetime were shaped into a particular form and then participated along with the more palpable stuff which are more particular or more concrete forms of being. That change of state was a great expansion or, equivalently, a cooling down. I often speak in terms of a freezing of more abstract forms of being. I’m only somewhat joking when I say instead: a freezing of soul or soul-stuff. I think this sort of abstract being was the intuited state of created being which was the point of discussions of `soul’ or even `mind’ by the more clearheaded thinkers of ancient and Medieval and modern times. We, and all the other entities of this universe, are shaped from this abstract being, this soul-stuff, but it’s still with us, part of us, as clay is still part of the bricks of our houses and walls.
In fact, we can view the Big Bang as a change of state at least analogically similar to the explosive weather events which occur when warm, moist air moves up the slope of a mountainside and water begins to cool so that the moisture condenses in the form of rain and/or snow.
As I see it, that change of state during the Big Bang was from a more abstract form of being, let’s call it vapor in warm air, into a more concrete form of being, let’s call it condensed water or even ice-crystals. So it is that I say that concrete stuff, water or ice-crystals, is frozen soul, vapor or water in a highly energized state of being. We human beings are frozen from the same soul-stuff as the most humble entities in this universe but we are in a form that makes us capable of exploring Creation, of struggling toward an understanding, even — in principle — of encapsulating in our own being the acts of our Maker in shaping the created being of our universe and of all Creation. Each human being, however humble, is born a potential image of his Maker and can become a better image by actively responding to the opportunities and problems which he encounters when living his humble life.