Disclaimer: if you haven't read the first part of this series, or even if you have, allow me to remind you that this is entierly UPG and I am not making any claims of scholarship. Your milage may vary.
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In the modern parlance, Ka is commonly described as one’s personality and conscience, while the Khat usually doesn’t even get elaboration beyond “it’s your physical body”. On both counts, this is a significant oversimplification, but particularly so in the case of the Khat. I hate to break this to anyone who is still holding onto their western body/mind division assumptions (especially if they are also mired in the body-hate culture), but: the Khat matters. In fact, it is a uniquely important soul to the living. Yes, soul. Not “vessel”, not “soul container”—soul.
The Khat is not just the soul’s vehicle in the physical world. And because I need you to entertain that idea seriously, I will tease you with a bit of the esoteric knowledge you might be denying yourself by thinking of your Khat as unimportant: the Khat is the mechanism which allows the Khaibit and the Sahu, the two shadows, to function (more on that in a later essay). It is the seat of the other souls, yes, but it does much more than to act as container.
The Khat is the thing which feels the world and moves to the relentless beat of the cycles of life, like the dancer moves to drum beats. It is our physical ancestry—carrying the inheritance of our blood-relatives from one generation to the next. It has a mind of its own. It stores memories of movement in its muscles—as anyone who has learned to ride a bike can attest. It has needs and it speaks its needs through sensation—if we ignore it, it shouts its needs through pain. It fends off illness and makes decisions about which parts of itself are most important to preserve and which parts can be sacrificed in a pinch. We ignore its sentience at our own peril, because it shares with the other souls a responsibility for maintaining the most important organ of our earthly selves: the brain.
And this is where the dualities start to come into play.
We normally think of the Ka as our mind, but in truth, it is only part of our mind (which is also shared by the Khat and the Ba). The place where the overlap with the Khat occurs is obvious even on a rudimentary examination (we even have a cliché—mind over matter—to describe one half of the effect): the mind can have a physical effect on the body, and the body can have a psychological effect on the mind. Even if it is a phenomenon which we give little thought to, it is part of our normal experience as human beings. Most of us have experienced somatic symptoms, such as “butterflies” in our stomach, before a performance or an increase in blood pressure when stressed, and I would imagine that few people have escaped puberty without confronting the ability of hormonal changes to influence mood and decision making. The effect of the body on the mind is clearly delineated in numerous studies, as is the effect of the mind on the body.
For its part, the Ka is the opposite and double of the body. It is the inheritor of spiritual ancestry—a repository of culture and history. It is interesting to note that the Ka and Khat may have different ancestries, because the ancestry of the Ka depends on the family and friends and society that raised you and loved you, while the ancestry of the Khat depends on blood alone, hardcoded into our DNA. However, they blend and meld whether they share an origin or draw two together. In some cases it is impossible to tell the origin of some piece of ancestry: is my tendency toward an obsession with numbers is due to my father’s particular style of parenting and my willingness to learn from him and emulate his behaviors, or to some genetic feature of his line?
Others have written on the familial nature of the Ka, and how it comes to us from those who raised us and how we return to that ancestral Ka when we die. Ka is a gift of the dead, but it is also a personal and present facet of our being: it is that part of us which remembers and which makes decisions leveraging the tool of history against the challenges of the future. The Ka is the part of our personality which learns and applies the knowledge it gains. It is the part that makes the eyes follow the pointing finger of the elder teacher and recognizes the value in pointing the same for others. It holds the responsibility of the will to live and forces the body to move even when the body has given up. It also has a charge which it shares with the Ba: it one of the keepers of the Ib.
The Ib, I think, is the thing which records the actions and intents of the Ka—the subconscious, in a way, but also the ultimate seat of emotions, especially those emotions which exist outside the boundaries of conscious thought. It can be said then, to be both part of the Ka and a thing which can be separated from the Ka during the judgment to examine the life the Ka has lived—hence many heka to keep one’s heart from “speaking against” oneself during judgment. Though it is probably more accurate to say that the Ib resides somewhere between the Ka and the Khat and that the Ba has access to it indirectly.
However one views it, it is the scribe of our being and the Ka is ever mindful of what it writes down. The Ka and Ib converse in a language of emotions unique to the Ib in its role as counselor and advisor. Righteousness, compassion, guilt, repentance, remorse, validation, shame…things such as these make the language of the Ib. That heavy feeling in our chest when we have trespassed against our morals…that is the Ib speaking to us and the Khat agreeing with it. So too is that feeling of warm content when we have done as we ought, the voice of the Ib, and if it comes with a boundless light and burst of energy, the Ba agrees with it. And what we call being conflicted, that feeling is an argument between the Ka and the Ib.
But here now, you see that I have mentioned the Ba twice already. It is hard to separate the souls when they are bound so intimately to one another. I will leave it here for today and return again to speak of the Ba in its own terms, though I will hardly be able to leave it at that—the Ren may have to feature heavily in that discussion and if I mention the Ren it will ultimately bring us back to the three we have discussed today... *sigh* this is a fair bit harder than I imagined it would be. :/
Just a note after the fact: No, I do not think the Ib is by
any means a mystical or infallible moral compass. It think it largely gets its
sense of direction from the Ba (which will be part of the discussion next time)
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