Sitting in my philosophy class it occurred to me that, among the sleepy-eyed students who only wanted a good enough grade to pass, I was one of the few who wanted to verbally debate everything I was hearing. It irked me greatly because we currently teach young minds that we are a product of repeated generations with no creativity, ingenuity or spiritualism that differentiates us from others. I never knew the way people feared the unknown variables that prompted life until I truly analyzed everything I was being taught. 

The regurgitation of science is alarming because philosophy stopped being about the knowledge of the human condition and, instead, became about genetic makeup. It felt like a slander of lies. We listened to a dribble of facts that predominated everything, even our sense of self. Some need an equation for life to dull their fears of the unknown into unwavering silence, but those equations essentially ‘kill the soul’.

Just because science hasn’t caught up to fully explaining spirituality, or life after death doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. I am a believer that the consciousness can flourish and evolve into different states and that the soul is an immortal thing comprised of our morality. It’s something I feel on the most personal level, that there is something else out there besides ourselves. The concept of the spirit has existed in culture since before documentation of Christ. Religion is etched across every corner of this world in every single era. No matter the small differences that have divided populations, there is one thing in common- something else is out there connecting us all together in some kind of grand design. Spirituality is not always religion, it is the feeling, a source of connection and outstanding iteration of the complexities that are etched inside of our own existence. 

Generations are being taught to disconnect from the spirituality they were born with. I remember growing up and hearing stories and reports of twins that were so connected to each other that they knew when the other died a world away, that some people could intimately describe the way another person lived and died decades ago in perfect detail. 

It’s as if we were mapping out the terrain of the world because our first and last instinct is to fear the unknown. We relive the historic debate if the world is flat or round, through the never ending debate of the soul. Although strikingly different, they are both based on missing facts on a known thing. We may one be the fools that denied the world depth because we could not see it. I sat in a class where philosophers are turning that unseeable substance that contains our individuality, into a numerical value with a specific handful of mere neurons firing. It’s the only concrete evidence for an intangible thing, emotions, behavioralism, machine-like components- whatever the idea or name it ruins the just cause of discovering the human condition beyond summing up the unseen with a simple sequence of events. 

I know without any doubt that if we cut out the spirit inside of us for however long a moment even in the smallest teaching moments that, that mentality will reach inside of us and poison us throughout, it would destroy the precious meaning that gives us purpose and for some sanity itself. We as a society are so lost that our youth are choosing to die young because they lost the belief and the path to finding themselves and connection to the world. I simply think in all the noise that maybe philosophy could have been someone’s path that saved them as it was supposed to be deeply intertwined with the knowledge of self, but now all it is is dispassionate science that only sees us as animals with a capacity to think and feel.