First and foremost thank you Steve for your generosity of thought and referencing (perhaps 'generosity' is a quality of soulfulness?). I am trained in a 'psychology of soul' (psychosynthesis) and often wonder how little this word 'soul' is explored, examined, challenged. It is presented all too often as a 'thing, place or dimension' that exists 'a priori'. I agree with you that we are bound by language and in particular by our preference for nouns which reify, rather than verbs and adjectives. As Jay Griffiths suggests 'all things that represent life at its most vital and wild wiggle. Words wiggle into metaphor'. So let's wiggle! Let's be playful with our language and see where this takes us. Right now, I am playing with the words 'emergence' and 'emergency' to explore the nature of soul. My experience is that soul is essentially emergent, and that this emergence takes place in the in-between spaces, through dialogue, interplay, intercourse. Leaving aside the search for nouns to describe what soul IS, perhaps we can play with how soul appears - soul as 'dawning', 'greening', 'springing', as well as 'breaking through', 'bearing' and 'birthing'. Robert Macfarlane reminds us that we see 'in webs of words, wefts of words, woods of words'. We see most deeply through metaphors that hold together counterpoint of feelings, thoughts and sensations, without reducing them to a single form. Like music, our experiences of being human are polyphonic (from the Greek polys = many + phone = voice). Dissonance and harmony interweave to create a richly textured sound capable of communicating the dynamic complexity of human experience. Psychological terminology seems to have taken us backwards towards a kind of 'monophony' characteristic of medieval plain chant in which only one note can be sounded at a time. Your approach to 'soul' has brought me back into the rich sound of polyphony and I thank you for this. (www.susanholliday.co.uk)
This echoed so much. I've been on a ontological crisis with the word "Soul", so much of this crisis has been described on your essay. But also much of my sense making of "the thing beyond the word" is also cunjured by animism, and the inter-intra relacional and complex aspects of our evolucionary more than human biology. Thanks for this reading.
I remember discovering The Souls Code at a pivotal moment in my life. It provided a sense of validation that the unpleasant experiences in my life were in service of something and not completely random or caused by me. When I look backwards I see a red thread. and yes I only see through the lens of how I think, perhaps because safety and solidity has been so necessary to ground me in an abusive and neglectful environment.
Your essay in contrast, it seems displays a great pleasure in the whirling dervishes of ideas, comparing and contrasting , the great preference for continually opening out and not coming to conclusions, citing many different rabbit holes for research.
I have come to see a great need for grounding not only for me but also for humanity, grounding in our physical forms which we think means doing some exercise and eating vegan or whatever.....No what I feel is grounding is within your soul or whatever you might call it ....to feel your gut and heart wisdom which has a coherence and a consistency of integrity to it. Which needs to make choices to exclude certain things simply so there is not an overwhelm that short circuits the system and that you can focus on what brings you joy
James Hillman's acorn provides an individual organising principle for each soul, just as the lily differs from the rose - they are organised differently. But they are not organised by thinking or by determining labels, they follow a life force that flows through everything to create their contribution. In humans that life force flows from the gut and the heart, not the intellect. And yet it is clear that for some the intellectual capacity is a wondrous gift they could share ONCE the grounding has occured. Until then the intelligence is used in service of soothing agitation which occurs because we are not living according to that guiding principle but rather because we want to preserve our social status and therefore must compromise ourselves . This reliance on the intellect and by extension science and medicine, technology to soothe our collective agitation, is actually killing us all.
And its not our fault, we have been trained into. this way of seeing ourselves as thinking beings that feel whereas in truth we are feeling beings that think. We all at heart know this but we desperately want to belong, we don't want to have to put our stake in the sand and commit to our true essence because it will shake up our comfort zones. And then one must really feel the intensity of this world - the horrors of corporatisation of the globe, how little children are repeatedly being raped and go to sleep at night wondering when this hell will end, elderly people sleeping in their cars, plastic in our beautiful aquatic friends, many places on the earth where wanton destruction of life and property in sanctioned wars, people denied food, water and land in many places in the globe. ... so many horrors, you don't have to look far.
But like everything we make choices but what are they based on. Even the constant refusal to make conclusions is a choice...but in service of what ?
First and foremost thank you Steve for your generosity of thought and referencing (perhaps 'generosity' is a quality of soulfulness?). I am trained in a 'psychology of soul' (psychosynthesis) and often wonder how little this word 'soul' is explored, examined, challenged. It is presented all too often as a 'thing, place or dimension' that exists 'a priori'. I agree with you that we are bound by language and in particular by our preference for nouns which reify, rather than verbs and adjectives. As Jay Griffiths suggests 'all things that represent life at its most vital and wild wiggle. Words wiggle into metaphor'. So let's wiggle! Let's be playful with our language and see where this takes us. Right now, I am playing with the words 'emergence' and 'emergency' to explore the nature of soul. My experience is that soul is essentially emergent, and that this emergence takes place in the in-between spaces, through dialogue, interplay, intercourse. Leaving aside the search for nouns to describe what soul IS, perhaps we can play with how soul appears - soul as 'dawning', 'greening', 'springing', as well as 'breaking through', 'bearing' and 'birthing'. Robert Macfarlane reminds us that we see 'in webs of words, wefts of words, woods of words'. We see most deeply through metaphors that hold together counterpoint of feelings, thoughts and sensations, without reducing them to a single form. Like music, our experiences of being human are polyphonic (from the Greek polys = many + phone = voice). Dissonance and harmony interweave to create a richly textured sound capable of communicating the dynamic complexity of human experience. Psychological terminology seems to have taken us backwards towards a kind of 'monophony' characteristic of medieval plain chant in which only one note can be sounded at a time. Your approach to 'soul' has brought me back into the rich sound of polyphony and I thank you for this. (www.susanholliday.co.uk)
This echoed so much. I've been on a ontological crisis with the word "Soul", so much of this crisis has been described on your essay. But also much of my sense making of "the thing beyond the word" is also cunjured by animism, and the inter-intra relacional and complex aspects of our evolucionary more than human biology. Thanks for this reading.
Beautiful sharing Steve.
I remember discovering The Souls Code at a pivotal moment in my life. It provided a sense of validation that the unpleasant experiences in my life were in service of something and not completely random or caused by me. When I look backwards I see a red thread. and yes I only see through the lens of how I think, perhaps because safety and solidity has been so necessary to ground me in an abusive and neglectful environment.
Your essay in contrast, it seems displays a great pleasure in the whirling dervishes of ideas, comparing and contrasting , the great preference for continually opening out and not coming to conclusions, citing many different rabbit holes for research.
I have come to see a great need for grounding not only for me but also for humanity, grounding in our physical forms which we think means doing some exercise and eating vegan or whatever.....No what I feel is grounding is within your soul or whatever you might call it ....to feel your gut and heart wisdom which has a coherence and a consistency of integrity to it. Which needs to make choices to exclude certain things simply so there is not an overwhelm that short circuits the system and that you can focus on what brings you joy
James Hillman's acorn provides an individual organising principle for each soul, just as the lily differs from the rose - they are organised differently. But they are not organised by thinking or by determining labels, they follow a life force that flows through everything to create their contribution. In humans that life force flows from the gut and the heart, not the intellect. And yet it is clear that for some the intellectual capacity is a wondrous gift they could share ONCE the grounding has occured. Until then the intelligence is used in service of soothing agitation which occurs because we are not living according to that guiding principle but rather because we want to preserve our social status and therefore must compromise ourselves . This reliance on the intellect and by extension science and medicine, technology to soothe our collective agitation, is actually killing us all.
And its not our fault, we have been trained into. this way of seeing ourselves as thinking beings that feel whereas in truth we are feeling beings that think. We all at heart know this but we desperately want to belong, we don't want to have to put our stake in the sand and commit to our true essence because it will shake up our comfort zones. And then one must really feel the intensity of this world - the horrors of corporatisation of the globe, how little children are repeatedly being raped and go to sleep at night wondering when this hell will end, elderly people sleeping in their cars, plastic in our beautiful aquatic friends, many places on the earth where wanton destruction of life and property in sanctioned wars, people denied food, water and land in many places in the globe. ... so many horrors, you don't have to look far.
But like everything we make choices but what are they based on. Even the constant refusal to make conclusions is a choice...but in service of what ?