posted June 01, 2008 12:30 AM         

Not having thought much about their inner lives, people are often confused when faced with the traditional distinction between the soul and the spirit, but distinguishing these two dimensions of experience can be helpful. We might notice, for instance, how much we are motivated by the spirit in our concentration on the future, on understanding, and on achievement. We might then see how we neglect the soul, which has complimentary but very different values, such as slowness, the past, inaction, feeling, mystery, and imagination.... To suggest a distinction between soul and spirit is not to advocate a separation of the two. On the contrary, it seems best to arrive at a place where in effect the two work together, as in a marriage or partnership...

Therapy of the soul takes seriously the medieval philosophical notion that the soul is what makes us human, and it doesn't easily dismiss human problems and foibles as diseases to be cured, but sees them as necessary, if painful, ingredients in a fully human life.

Ancient literature makes a distinction between the soul and the spirit, and this important consideration, foreign in many ways to common thinking, has been developed in creative ways by C.C. Jung and especially James Hillman. Although the issue is subtle and complicated, in general terms we can see spirit as focused on transcending the limits of our personal, time-bound, concrete life. The spirit is fascinated by the future, wants to know the meaning of everything, and would like to stretch, if not break altogether, the laws of nature through technology or prayer. It is full of ideals and ambition, and is a necessary, rewarding, and inspiring aspect of human life.

The soul is, as Jung says, the "archetype of life," embedded in the details of ordinary, everyday experience. In the spirit, we try to transcend our humanity; in the soul, we try to enter our humanity fully and realize it completely. Egged on by spiritual ambition, a person might imitate the old saints and go into the desert or the forest to be cleansed and discover a higher level of consciousness. Full of soul, a person might endure the highs and lows of family life, marriage, and work, motivated by a compassionate and hungry heart.

Wondering about the soul, seeking adequate language for it, wanting definition and insight, all mark the beginning of the process of bringing soul to life. Care of the soul begins in the felt acknowledgment of its reality and importance. The soul becomes more present as we consider it in our conversation, writing, meditating, and the thoughtful living of our everyday lives.

In a culture largely driven in spiritual directions - evolving, growing, changing - the concerns of the soul may well appear slight and soft. Giving genuine attention to the soul, we may find ourselves somewhat at odds with the world around us. The soul finds value in dependency, the past, intimacy, a slow pace, and sometimes even regression. Introducing soul to modern life may appear at first glance to be a quiet, unobtrusive work, but because the soul has such deep roots in personal and social life and its values run so contrary to modern concerns, caring for the soul may well turn out to be a radical act, a challenge to accepted norms.

The soul is deep and attention to it is often simple, and yet is the source of our passions, our identity, and our vitality. Acknowledging its primacy for the first time, we may find that we have opened Pandora's box and let loose all the debris of a fully engaged, vibrant human life....

~ Thomas Moore, The Education of the Heart

The soul sees by means of affliction. Those who are most dependent upon imagination for their work -- poets, painters, fantasts -- have not wanted their pathologizing degraded into "the unconscious" and subjected to clinical literalism... The crazy artist, the daft poet, and the mad professor are neither romantic clichés nor antibourgeois poseurs. They are metaphors for the intimate relation between pathologizing and imagination. Pathologizing processes are a source of imaginative work, and the work provides a container for the pathologizing process... The wound and the eye are one and the same. From the psyche's viewpoint, pathology and insight are not opposites -- as if we hurt because we have no insight and when we gain insight we shall no longer hurt. No. Pathologizing is itself a way of seeing; the eye of the complex gives the peculiar twist called "psychological insight".

'To be healed' is that goal which takes one into therapy, and we are healed of that goal when we recognize it as a fiction. Now the goal as fiction has become a psychic reality, become a psychic reality itself, so that indeed the way did become the goal. This deliteralized method of healing, so ironic, slippery, paradoxical, that seems to fulfill and defeat our striving at the same time (as if the two senses of 'want' suddenly conjoin), bespeaks the mercurial consciousness of Hermes, Guide of Souls, Guide of Ways.... Goals, especially the highest and finest, work like overvalued ides, the roots of delusions that nourish great canopies of sheltering paranoia, those spreading ideals of size and import which characterize the positive goals of so many schools of therapy today. We see enough of the disastrous effect of goals in daily life, where the belief in an overriding idea about one's purpose in life, what one has to do, the raison d'être for one's existence turns out to be the very goal which blocks the way.

~ James Hillman, Re-Visioning

I remember when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen's narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruits of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sunlit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses sackcloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall: - all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at all.

I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure that I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its secrets for me also.

~ Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Who is going up the mountain?... Is the one ascending the puer aeternus, the winged godlike imago in us each, the beautiful boy of spirit -- Icarus on the way to the sun, then plummeting with waxen wings; Phaethon driving the sun's chariot out of control, burning up the world; Bellerophon, ascending on his white winged horse, then falling onto the plains of wandering, limping ever after? These are the puer high climbers, the heaven stormers, whose eros reflects the torch and ladder of Eros and his searching arrow, a longing for higher and further and more and puer and better. Without this archetypeal component affecting our lives, there would be no spiritual drive, no new sparks, no going beyond the given, no grandeur and sense of personal destiny.

So, psychologically, and perhaps spiritually as well, the issue is one of finding connections between the puer's drive upward and the soul's clouded, encumbering embrace...

The anima, "the archetype of life", as Jung has called her, is that function of the psyche which is its actual life, the present mess it is in, its discontent, dishonesties, and thrilling illusions, together with the whitewashing hopes for a better outcome. The issues she presents are as endless as the soul is deep, and perhaps these very endless labrynthine "problems" are its depth...

The spirit asks that the psyche helps it, not break it or yoke it or put it away as a peculiarity or insanity. And it asks the analysts who act in psyche's name not to turn the soul against the puer adventure but rather to prepare the desire of both for each other.

~ Hillman, Peaks and Vales

The power I possess is sex, passion, love,
which you mortals, in honoring me,
celebrate in your diverse ways.
I'm no less the darling of Heaven.
I am the goddess Aphrodite...
Now this young man, alone
among his contemporaries,
says freely I am a despicable goddess.
Marriage is anathema to him,
he goes to bed with no girl.
The goddess he adores is Artemis, a virgin,
Apollo's sister, the daughter of Zeus.
Our young friend thinks her
kind of divinity the most exhilarating.
In the pale green forests they are inseparable,
they drive their killer hounds until the wild life,
squirrels as well as stags, is extinct.
Such a friendship between human and god
is a remarkable event --
I would not deny him this happiness.
I have no reason to.
It's purely his offenses against me
which I resent and will punish -- today.

~ Euripides, Hippolytos

You can see the beauty of Christ in each individual person, in that which is most his, most human, most personal to him, in things which an ascetic might advise him sternly to get rid of.

~ Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

posted June 03, 2008 09:16 PM         

Really though, good quotes, a lifetime of wisdom in each excerpt.

posted June 03, 2008 10:09 PM         

The Spirit cannot progress without the Soul,
nor the Soul without the Spirit.

posted June 03, 2008 10:27 PM         

quote:

---

I'll moon you, sun

---

quote:

---

When things are quiet,
and suffering exists,
just to exist,
where to turn but to the moon's pale light?

---

posted June 03, 2008 10:59 PM         

I experienced childlike awe for the first time a few days ago....an emotional state swept over me that I hadn't felt since I was a young child, maybe 9 or 10....do you remember what it feels like to have the wonder, awe, fascination of a child? It is such a pure feeling...incredibly rare to find as an adult.

posted June 03, 2008 11:57 PM         

To a great extent, words mean different things to different people.

I can relate your words to certain states of consciousness which I have felt at various times in my life, but I'm not sure it there is a way for me to know the depth of your experience, or for you to know the depth of mine. Awe can mean so many things. Did you see "The Fountain". There is a quote, which may be from Mayan scripture (I dont recall), "Death is the road to Awe." I like that. And accounts of the DMT experience, said to be very similar, if not identical to, the experience of the Bardo, which The Tibetan Book of the Dead says is like a kind of purgatory entered into just after death, is said to be utterly awe-inspiring. According to Terence McKenna, if there is a threat of death when taking DMT, it would be "Death by astonishment". McKenna talks a lot about pre-verbal experience, and what it means to see things through the eyes of a child. Without superimposing any interpretations, or even words of description, upon the experience, what is felt is pure, or direct, experience. It may be something similar to what you experienced. It is powerful... I've certainly felt it, or something close to it. Its like starting over, wiping the slate clean, seeing with new eyes. And what more can be said about it? Now begins the process of interpretation, and the attempt to assimilate that experience into the whole of our personal history, and to fit it into some kind of systematic grouping, so as to make "sense" of it. One of the perennial questions is: Should we make sense of it? Or, is that, in some way, to degrade the experience, and divest it of its purity, wonder, and mystery? To create or not to create; that is the question.

posted June 04, 2008 12:22 AM         

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