I am Not a Ghost

Mind over matter.

When Jesus came back from the dead, his followers worried—quite reasonably—that he might be a ghost. Reasonably, because everyone had heard stories of spirits that walked the earth after death; worried, because no one expected such a thing to bode well for anyone involved.

Right around Jesus’ lifetime, it was said, the philosopher Athenodorus was haunted by the awful clatter of chains in the night. The specter of an old man in manacles led him to a pitiful skeleton, its bones in shackles. The remains were given a proper burial, and the spirit was put to rest.

Everyone knew there was some force in man that made his body move. When it left the body at death, it must go somewhere. But by the 1st century BC, lots of people—Stoics and Epicureans alike—thought the most natural outcome was for the soul to evaporate back into the air and lose its form, like Changelings in Star Trek melting down into the living ocean of their home world.

The uncanny thing was for the soul’s vapor to retain an imprint of its individual consciousness, stubbornly resisting absorption into the air. Ghosts represented a snag in the order of things, an offense to the gods and the natural world they ruled over. The thing to do was to correct the burial ritual so the law of decomposition could be restored.

That was simply good sense—the second law of thermodynamics at work. It has become conventional wisdom again today: “There is no me,” says a dying woman at the end of Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series Midnight Mass. “There never was. The electrons of my body mingle and dance with the electrons of the ground below me and the air I’m no longer breathing.” The self breaks down just like the body, and for the same reasons: worms and disintegration. The cosmic digestive system is a machine in which there can be no ghosts.

So the disciples were “seized with fear” at what looked to them like a pneuma, a “spirit” wrinkling the smooth lines of the material world. But no, said Jesus: he was in that world, capable of touching its people and eating their food. “Touch me and see,” he said. “A spirit has no flesh and bones, as I have.” But that must mean the philosophers hadn’t got nature quite right. The human individual was no passing phantom after all but a permanent fixture, an enduring whole.

He might be built of atoms and sinew. But it was he that made the atoms what they were, not the other way around: Christ resurrected became the organizing principle, the first fact. No other fish roast has ever made quite the contribution to philosophy that this one did. By eating, Jesus demonstrated to the disciples that the soul didn’t emerge accidentally out of proteins and lipids. Proteins and lipids were drawn up into the enduring logic of the soul. It followed that the flesh could break down while the spirit remained—not the other way around.

This not-a-ghost story has been told around this time of year for centuries; yet somehow it emerges now as a commentary on the most important issue of our time. Did mind come first, or matter? The question is no longer as settled as the most overconfident children of the Enlightenment used to assume.

“Every item of the physical world has at bottom—at a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation,” wrote the physicist John Wheeler, proposing that the building blocks of reality are not objects but bits of information. If the basic unit of existence is knowledge, then the universe existing is almost the same thing as its being known. In which case the universe is something spoken, and seen—something that emerges in and from a mind.

Uncanny enough for a ghost story—but real enough to touch. Fluids may drain back into the sand; bones may disintegrate into the earth; flowers may wither and die. But the word that commanded them to bloom endures to speak new life into dry bones.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

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