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# 2021-07-12 - Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore
I picked up a cheap copy from the local thrift store. I enjoyed the
creativity and depth of the writing, and i received much food for
thought. What follows are excerpts from the book with square
brackets around my commentary.
# Introduction
It is impossible to define precisely what the soul is. Definition is
an intellectual enterprise anyway; the soul prefers to imagine. We
know intuitively that soul has to do with genuineness and depth, as
when we say music has soul or a remarkable person is soulful.
Tradition teaches that soul lies midway between understanding and
unconsciousness, and that its instrument is neither the mind nor the
body, but imagination. Fulfilling work, rewarding relationships,
personal power, and relief from symptoms are all gifts of the soul.
What I am going to present in this book, then, is a program for
bringing soul back into life.
We yearn excessively for entertainment, power, intimacy, sexual
fulfillment, and material things, and we think we can find these
things if we discover the right relationship or job, the right church
or therapy. But without soul, whatever we find will be unsatisfying,
for what we truly long for is the soul in each of these areas.
In these pages we will consider important differences between care
and cure. We will look at several common issues in everyday life
that offer the opportunity for soul-making, once we stop thinking of
them as problems to be solved.
As you read this book, it might be a good idea to abandon any ideas
you may have about living successfully and properly, and about
understanding yourself. The human soul is not meant to be
understood. Rather, you might take a more relaxed position and
reflect on the way your life has taken shape.
# Chapter 1, Honoring Symptoms as a Voice of the Soul
"Soul" is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing
life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness,
heart, and personal substance. I do not use the word here as an
object of religious belief or as something to do with immortality.
When we say that someone or something has soul, we know what we mean,
but it is difficult to specify exactly what that meaning is.
Care of the soul begins with observance of how the soul manifests
itself and how it operates. We can't care for the soul unless we are
familiar with its ways.
Observance is a word from religion and ritual. It means to watch out
for but also to keep and honor, as in the observance of a holiday.
The "serv" in observance originally referred to tending sheep.
Observing the soul, we keep an eye on its sheep, on whatever is
wandering and grazing--the latest addiction, a striking dream, or a
troubling mood.
When people observe the ways in which the soul is manifesting itself,
they are enriched rather than impoverished. When you regard the soul
with an open mind, you begin to find the messages that lie within the
illness, the corrections that can be found in remorse and other
uncomfortable feelings, and the necessary changes required by
depression and anxiety.
Observance of the soul can be deceptively simple. You take back what
has been disowned. You work with what is, rather than what you wish
there were.
The basic intention in any caring, physical or psychological, is to
alleviate suffering. But in relation to the symptom itself,
observance means first of all listening and looking carefully at what
is being revealed in the suffering. An intent to heal can get in the
way of seeing. By doing less, more is accomplished.
It is not easy to observe closely, to take the time and to make the
subtle moves that allow the soul to reveal itself further. You have
to rely on every bit of learning, every scrap of sense, and all kinds
of reading, in order to bring intelligence and imagination to the
work. Yet at the same time, this action-through-nonaction has to be
simple, flexible, and receptive.
To feel and imagine may not sound like much. But in care of the soul
there is trust that nature heals, that much can be accomplished by
not-doing. The assumption is that being follows imagination. If we
can see the story we are in when we fall into our various compulsive
behaviors and moods, then we might know how to move through them more
freely and with less distress.
Modern interventional therapy sometimes tries to solve specific
problems and can therefore be carried out on a short-term basis. But
care of the soul never ends.
Taking an interest in the soul is a way of loving it. The ultimate
cure ... comes from love and not from logic. It has often been noted
that most, if not all problems brought to therapists are issues of
love. It makes sense then that the cure is also love.
Taking an interest in one's own soul requires a certain amount of
space for reflection and appreciation.
Often care of the soul means not taking sides when there is a
conflict at a deep level. It may be necessary to stretch the heart
wide enough to embrace contradiction and paradox.
Our effective "trick" in caring for the soul is to look with special
attention and openness at what the individual rejects, and then to
speak favorably for that rejected element. We tend to divide
experience into two parts, usually the good and the bad. But there
may be all kinds of suspicious things going on in this splitting. We
may simply have never considered the value in certain things that we
reject. Or by branding certain experiences [as] negative we may be
protecting ourselves from some unknown fears. We are all filled with
biases and ideas that have snuck into us without our knowing it.
Much soul can be lost in such splitting, so that care of the soul can
go a long way simply by recovering some of this material that has
been cut off.
# Chapter 2, The Myth of Family and Childhood
[The soul] feeds on the details of life, on its variety, its quirks,
and its idiosyncrasies. With all of these felt details, [family]
life etches itself into memory and personality. A family is a
microcosm, reflecting the nature of the world, which runs on both
virtue and evil. In other words, the dynamics of actual family life
reveal the soul's complexity and unpredictability, and any attempts
to place a veil of simplistic sentimentality over the family image
will break down. At a deep level, however, family is most truly
family in its complexity, including its failures and weaknesses.
When we encounter the family from the point of view of the soul,
accepting its shadows and its failures to meet our idealistic
expectations, we are faced with mysteries that resist our moralism
and sentimentality. We are taken down to the earth, where principles
give way to life in all its beauty and horror.
We are so affected by the scientific tone in education and in the
media that without thinking, we have become anthropologists and
sociologists in our own families. The soul of the family evaporates
into the thin air of this kind of reduction. It takes extreme
diligence and concentration to think differently about the family: to
appreciate its shadows as well as its virtue and to simply allow
stories to be told without slipping into interpretations, analysis,
and conclusions.
Usually when we make every effort not to be like our mother or
father, there's some particular quality that we want to avoid, having
known it too well as a son or daughter. But repression tends to make
a wide swath; it's not very precise in its work of ridding the
personality of some unwanted quality. David tried not to be his
father. Not wanting to have many intimate relationships, he had none.
Not wanting to wander around the country aimlessly, he couldn't move
far from home. Not wanting to be like his father, he had little
trace of fathering of any kind in his own life.
# Chapter 3, Self-love and its Myth: Narcissus and Narcissism
In this early episode we see Narcissus before he has attained
self-knowledge. He presents an image of narcissism that has not yet
found its mystery. Here we see the symptoms of a self-absorption and
containment that allow no connections of the heart. It is hard as a
rock and repels all approaches of love. Obsessive but not genuine,
self-love leaves no room for intimacy with another. The echoing
aspect of Narcissism--the feeling that everything in the world is
only a reflection of oneself--doesn't want to give away power. To
respond to another or to an object in the outside world would
endanger the fragile sense of power which that tight, defensive
insistence on oneself maintains. Like all symptomatic behavior,
Narcissism reveals, in the very things it insists on, exactly what it
lacks. The Narcissistic person asks over and over, "Am I doing all
right?" The message is, "No matter what I do or how much I try to
force it, I can't get to the place where I feel that I'm doing okay."
In other words, the Narcissist's *display* of self-love is in itself
a sign that [they] can't find a way to adequately love [themself].
The story of Narcissus makes it clear that one of the dangers of
Narcissism is its inflexibility and rigidity. Suppleness is an
extremely important quality of the soul. In Greek mythology, the
flexibility of gods and goddesses is one of their primary traits.
They may fight each other, but they recognize each other's validity.
Polytheism... as a psychological model... means that psychologically
we have many different claims made on us from a deep place. It is
not possible, nor is it desirable, to get all of these impulses
together under a single focus. Rather than strive for unity of
personality, the idea of polytheism suggests living within
multiplicity. ... poly means "several," not "any." In a polytheistic
morality we allow ourselves to express the tensions that arise from
different moral claims. When you find tolerance in yourself for the
competing demands of the soul, life becomes more complicated, but
also more interesting.
A neurotic narcissism won't allow the tie needed to stop, reflect,
and see the many emotions, memories, wishes, fantasies, desires, and
fears that make up the materials of the soul. As a result, the
Narcissistic person becomes fixed on a single idea of who [they are],
and other possibilities are automatically rejected.
We can see Narcissism as an opportunity rather than as a problem: not
a personal defect, but the soul trying to find its otherness.
Narcissism is less a single focus on ego and more a manifestation of
the need for a paradoxical sense of self, one that includes both the
ego and the non-ego.
The ego needs to be loved, requires attention, and wants exposure.
That is part of its nature.
The Narcissistic person simply does not know how profound and
interesting [their] nature is. In [their] Narcissism [they are]
condemned to carry the weight of life's responsibilities on [their]
own shoulders. But once [they discover] that there are other figures
who surround the "I" personality, [they] can let [those figures] do
some of the work of life. Narcissism may look like an indulgent
pleasure, but behind the façade of satisfaction lies an oppressive
burden. The Narcissistic person tries very hard to be loved, but
[they never succeed] because [they] don't realize yet that [they have
to love themself] as other before [they themself] can be loved.
The secret in healing Narcissism is not to heal it at all, but to
listen to it. Narcissism is a signal that the soul is not being
loved sufficiently.
Unless we deal with the shadow of love, our experience of it will be
incomplete. A sentimental philosophy of love, embracing only the
romantic and the positive, fails at the first sign of
shadow--thoughts of separation, the loss of faith and hope in the
relationship, or unexpected changes in the partners' values. Such a
partial view also presents impossible ideals and expectations. By
nature love feels inadequate, but this inadequacy rounds out the wide
range of love's emotions. Love finds its soul in its feelings of
incompleteness, impossibility, and imperfection.
Love is elicited [for clients, patients, and students] in therapy, in
medicine, and in education by the caring conversation, the intimate
confessions, and by the listening alone. Listening to another and
caring for their welfare can be such a comforting experience that the
magic aureole of love descends when no one is looking.
Love takes us out of life and away from the plans we have made for
our lives. Love may seem to offer some benefits for the ego and for
life, but soul is fed by love's intimacy with death. The loss of
will and control one feels in love may be highly nutritious for the
soul. ... [Love's] fulfillment is death--more an ending of what life
has been up to this point than the beginning of what we expect to
happen.
One of the strongest needs of the soul is for community, but
community from the soul point of view is a little different from its
social forms. Soul yearns for attention, for variety in personality,
for intimacy and particularity. So it is these qualities in
community that the soul seeks out, and not like-mindedness and
uniformity.
Loneliness can be the result of an attitude that community is
something into which one is received. Many people wait for members
of a community to invite them in, and until that happens they are
lonely. There may be something of the child here who expects to be
taken care of by the family. But a community is not a family. It is
a group of people held together by feelings of belonging, and these
feelings are not a birthright. "Belonging" is an active verb,
something we do positively.
# Chapter 5, Jealousy and Envy: Healing Poisons
In Greek tragedy the gods and goddesses address us directly. At the
opening of Euripedes' play about Hippolytus, Aphrodite confesses, "I
stir up trouble for any who ignore me, or belittle me, and who do it
out of stubborn pride." Here we find a Freudian observation from the
fifth century B.C.--repress sexuality and you are in for trouble. We
learn from the goddesses mouth that the deepest point in our
sexuality can be disturbed when we--our consciousness and
intentionality--do not give it the response it requires.
Jealousy feels overwhelming because it is more than a surface
phenomenon. Whenever it appears, issues and values are being sorted
out deep in the soul, and all we can do is try not to identify with
the emotions and simply let the struggle work itself out.
Erotic creativity is the making of a world, jealousy is the
preservation of the hearth and interiority. Jealousy serves the soul
by pressing for limits and reflection.
Our task is to care for the soul, but it is also true that the soul
cares for us. So the phrase "care of the soul" can be heard in two
ways. In one sense, we do our best to honor whatever the soul
presents to us; in the other, the soul is the subject who does the
caring. Even in its pathology, and maybe especially then, the soul
cares for us by offering a way out of a narrow secularism. Its
suffering can only be relieved by the re-establishment of a
particular mythical sensibility. Therefore, its suffering initiates
a move toward invisible spirituality.
# Chapter 6, The Soul and Power
In the soul, power doesn't work the same way as it does in the ego
and will. The power of the soul, in contrast, is more like a great
reservoir or, in traditional imagery, like the force of water in a
fast-rushing river. It is natural, not manipulative, and stems from
an unknown source. Our role with this kind of power is to be an
attentive observer noticing how the soul wants to thrust itself into
life. It is also our task to find artful means of articulating and
structuring that power, taking full responsibility for it, but
trusting too that the soul has intentions and necessities that we may
understand only partially.
What is the source of this soul power, and how can we tap into it? It
comes first of all from living close to the heart, and not at odds
with it. Therefore, paradoxically, soul power may emerge from
failure, depression, and loss. The general rule is that the soul
appears in the gaps and holes of experience. Other sources of
deep-rooted power are simply concrete peculiarities of personality,
or body, or circumstance.
But the soul practices a different kind of math and logic. It
presents images that are not immediately intelligible to the
reasoning mind. It insinuates, offers fleeting impressions,
persuades more with desire than with reasonableness. In order to tap
into the soul's power, one has to be conversant with its style, and
watchful. The soul's indications are many, but they are usually
extremely subtle.
The soul doesn't necessarily benefit from long, hard work, or from
fairness of any kind. Its effects are achieved more with magic than
effort.
In general, we keep our power when we protect the power of others.
The word violence comes from the Latin word vis, meaning "life
force." Its very roots suggest that in violence the thrust of life
is making itself visible.
"Repression of the life force" is a diagnosis I believe would fit
most of the emotional problems people present in therapy.
If violence is the repressed life force showing itself
symptomatically, then the care for violence is care of the soul's
power. Socrates and Jesus, two teachers of virtue and love, were
executed because of the unsettling threatening power of their souls,
which was revealed in their personal lives and in their words.
# Chapter 7, Gifts of Depression
Care of the soul requires our appreciation of those ways it presents
itself. Faced with depression, we might ask ourselves, "What is it
doing here? Does it have some necessary role to play?"
Depression grants the gift of experience not as a literal fact but as
an attitude toward yourself. You get a sense of having lived through
something, of being older and wiser.
# Chapter 8, The Body's Poetics of Illness
It isn't easy for us, so imbued with modern categories of thought, to
remember our own biases in this matter. Of course the heart is a
pump. That is a fact. Our problem is that we can't see through the
thought structures that give value to fact and at the same time treat
poetic reflection as nonessential. In a sense, that point of view is
itself a failure of heart. We think with our heads and no longer
with our hearts.
Symptom is close to symbol. Etymologically a symbol is two things
"thrown together," whereas a symptom is things that "fall together,"
as if by accident. We think that symptoms appear out of nowhere, and
we rarely make the move of "throwing together" the two things:
illness and image. Science prefers interpretations that are
univocal. One reading is all that is desired. Poetry, on the other
hand, never wants to stop interpreting. It doesn't seek an end to
meaning.
Rather than blame, we could respond. Listening to the messages of
the body is not the same as blaming the patient.
When we bring imagination to the body, we can't expect
dictionary-type explanations and clear solutions to problems. A
symbol is often defined and treated as though it were a superficial
matching of two things, as in dream books that tell you a snake is
always a reference to sex. More profoundly, though, a symbol is the
act of throwing together two incongruous things and living in the
tension that exists between them, watching the images that emerge
from that tension. In this approach to symbol, there is no stopping
point, no end to reflection, no single meaning, and no clear
instruction on what to do next.
Clarity is not one of the gifts of poetry. On the other hand, poetry
does provide depth, insight, wisdom, vision, language, and music. We
simply don't think about these qualities much when faced with illness.
Many people going to the doctor have their own "cognitive maps" of
their bodies, their own imagination of what their bodies look like
inside and what is going on at the moment in its illness. If we
weren't so insistent on univocal meanings, wanting only expert
opinions, which are as much fantasy as a patient's thoughts, about
what is going on, we might pay more attention to the patient's
imagination of the illness. Even hypochondria could be taken
seriously as a true expression of the soul's malaise.
Ferenczi is inviting us to shift the mythic base of our ideas about
body organs from performance to pleasure.
The word disease means "not having your elbows in a relaxed
position." "Ease" comes from the Latin ansatus, "having handles," or
"elbows akimbo"--a relaxed posture, or at least not at work. Disease
means no elbows, no elbow room. Ease is a form of pleasure, disease
a loss of pleasure. A specialist in disease should begin [their]
questions for diagnosis with issues of pleasure. Are you enjoying
life? Where is it not pleasurable? Are you fighting pleasure
somewhere or in some part of your body that is seeking pleasure?
We might imagine much of our current disease as the body asserting
itself in a context of cultural numbing. The stomach takes no
pleasure in frozen and powdered foods...
Modern medicine trusts the microscope to reveal the roots of illness,
but the microscope doesn't look far enough within. The Paracelsian
physician would take into account the invisible factors at work in
illness--emotions, thoughts, personal history, relationships,
longing, fear, desire, and so on.
Illness is to a large extent rooted in eternal causes. The Christian
doctrine of original sin and the Buddhist Four Noble Truths teach
that human life is wounded in its essence, and suffering is in the
nature of things. We are wounded simply by participating in human
life... To think the proper or natural state is to be without wounds
is an illusion.
Exercise could be more soulfully performed by emphasizing fantasy and
imagination. Usually we are told how much time to spend at a certain
exercise. [etc] ... Five hundred years ago Ficino gave somewhat
different advice for daily exercise. "You should walk as often as
possible among plants that have a wonderful aroma, spending a
considerable amount of time every day among such things." Emerson, a
great New England walker, wrote in his essay "Nature": "The greatest
delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an
occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and
unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them." In this Emersonian
exercise program, the soul is involved in the perception of an
intimacy between human personality and the world's communing body.
A soul-oriented yoga might go through its many postures and forms of
breathing while paying attention to the memories, emotions, and
images that arise in conjunction with physical motion and posture.
Inner images are as important to the soul in exercise as images from
nature and culture are to the person on a walk.
# Chapter 9, The Economics of Soul: Work, Money, Failure, and
# Creativity
Care of the soul requires ongoing attention to every aspect of life.
Essentially it is a cultivation of ordinary things in such a way that
soul is nurtured and fostered. One of the most unconscious of our
daily activities from the perspective of the soul is work and the
settings of work... I have found in my practice over the years that
the conditions of work have at least as much to do with disturbances
of soul as marriage and family. Yet it is tempting to make
adjustments in respect to problems at work without recognizing the
deep issues involved.
Surrounded by plastic ferns, we will be filled with plastic thoughts.
In many religious traditions, work is not set off from the precincts
of the sacred. In Christian and Zen monasteries, for instance, work
is as much a part of the monk's carefully designed life as are
prayer, meditation, and liturgy.
Sometimes we refer to work as an "occupation," an interesting word
that means "to be taken and seized." In the past this word had
strong sexual connotations. [As does the word consummation,
sometimes used to describe sealing a business deal.] [Work] can
excite us, comfort us, and make us feel fulfilled, just as a lover
can. Soul and the erotic are always together. If our work doesn't
have an erotic tone to it, then it probably lacks soul as well.
Therefore, like a sacristan who reverences everything he tends, we
might want to buy tools of satisfying quality--well made, pleasing to
look at, and fitted to the hand--and cleansers that respect the
environment. A special table cloth might help ritualize a dinner, or
an office desk of special design or select woods could transform the
workplace into an arena that has imaginal depth.
When we think of work, we only consider function, and so the soul
elements are left to chance. Where there is no artfulness about
life, there is a weakening of the soul.
Work becomes Narcissistic when we cannot love ourselves through
objects in the world. This is one of the deeper implications of the
Narcissus myth: the flowering of life depends upon finding a
reflection of oneself in the world, and one's work is an important
place for that kind of reflection. In the language of Neoplatonism,
Narcissus discovers love when he finds that his nature is completed
in that part of his soul that is outside himself, in the soul of the
world. Read in this way the story suggests that we will never
achieve the flowering of ourselves, that lovable twin, which lives in
the world and as the world. Therefore, finding the right work is
like discovering your own soul in the world.
The lives of some people are shaped by the lure of money, while
others sense the temptation and take an ascetic route, in order to
avoid being tainted. Either way, money retains its powerful position
in the soul.
The experience of wealth is, after all, a subjective thing. Wealth
cannot be measured by a bank account because it is primarily what we
imagine it to be.
In religious orders, monks take a vow of poverty, but if you visit
monasteries you might be surprised how often you find beautifully
built and furnished buildings on prime real estate. The monks may
live simply but not always austerely, and they never have to worry
about food and shelter. Monastic poverty is sometimes defined not as
a scarcity of money and property but rather as "common ownership."
The purpose of the vow is the promote community by owning all things
in common.
What if, as a nation, a city, or a neighborhood, to say nothing of
the globe, we all took such a vow of poverty? We would not be
romanticizing deprivation, we would be striving toward a deep sense
of community by feeling ownership of common property.
Ideally, money corrupts us all not literally, but in the alchemical
sense. It takes us out of innocent idealism and brings us into the
deeper, more soulful places where power, prestige, and self worth are
hammered out through substantial involvement in the making of culture.
Perfection belongs to an imaginary world. By appreciating failure
with imagination, we reconnect it to success. Without the
connection, work falls into grand Narcissistic fantasies of success
and dismal feelings of failure. But as a mystery, failure is not
mine, it is an element in the work I am doing.
But if we were to bring our very idea of creativity down to earth it
would not have to be reserved for exceptional individuals or
identified with brilliance. In ordinary life creativity means making
something for the soul out of every experience. Sometimes we can
shape experience into meaningfulness playfully and inventively. At
other times, simply holding experience in memory and in reflection
allows it to incubate and reveal some of its imagination.
# Chapter 10, The Need For Myth, Ritual, and a Spiritual Life
In her extraordinary book, Ordinarily Sacred, Lynda Sexson teaches us
how to catch the appearance of the sacred in the most ordinary
objects and circumstances. She tells the story of an old man who
showed her a china cabinet filled with items related to his deceased
wife. This was a sacred box, she says, in the tradition of the Ark
of the Covenant and the Christian tabernacle. In this sense, a box
of special letters or other objects kept in the attic is a tabernacle,
a container of holy things. Emily Dickinson's forty-nine ribboned
packets of poems, carefully written and stored, are true holy
writings, preserved, appropriately, with ritual bindings. We all
create sacred books and boxes--a volume of dreams, a heart-felt
diary, a notebook of thoughts, a particularly meaningful album of
photos--and thus in a small but significant way can make the everyday
sacred. This kind of spirituality, so ordinary and close to home, is
especially nourishing to the soul.
Growing old is one of the ways the soul nudges itself into attention
to the spiritual aspect of life. The body's changes teach us about
fate, time, nature, mortality, and character. Aging forces us to
decide what is important in life.
Spirituality is seeded, germinates, sprouts, and blossoms in the
mundane. [Coincidentally, the word mundane means dirt or earth. An
appropriate place for seeds to sprout.] It is to be found and
nurtured in the smallest of daily activities... the spirituality that
feeds the soul and ultimately heals our psychological wounds may be
found in those sacred objects that dress themselves in the
accouterments of the ordinary.
A myth is a sacred story set in a time and place outside [of]
history, describing in fictional form the fundamental truths of
nature and human life. Mythology gives body to the invisible and
eternal factors that are always part of life but don't appear in a
literal, factual story. Myth reaches beyond the personal to express
an imagery reflective of archetypal issues that shape every human
life.
When we are trying to understand our problems and our suffering, we
look for a story that will be revealing. Our surface explanations
usually show their shortcomings; they don't satisfy. ... Our memories
of the family are a significant part of the mythology by which we
live. Mythological thinking doesn't look for literal causes but
rather for more insightful imagining.
# Chapter 11, Wedding Spirituality and Soul
In our spirituality, we reach for consciousness, awareness, and the
highest values; in our soulfulness, we endure the most pleasurable
and the most exhausting of human experiences and emotions. These two
directions make up the fundamental pulse of human life, and to an
extent, they have attraction to each other.
In the broadest sense, spirituality is an aspect of any attempt to
approach or attend to the invisible factors in life and to transcend
the personal, concrete, finite particulars of this world. Religion
stretches its gaze beyond this life to the time of creation... that
other time outside of our own reckoning... It also concerns itself
with... the highest values in this life. This spiritual point of
view is necessary for the soul, providing the breadth of vision, the
inspiration, and the sense of meaning it needs. Spirit, the
Platonists said, lifts us out of the confines of the human
dimensions, and in doing so nourishes the soul.
The intellect wants to know; the soul likes to be surprised.
The infinite inner space of a story, whether from religion or from
daily life, is its soul. If we deprive sacred stories of their
mystery, we are left with the brittle shell of fact, the literalism
of a single meaning. But when we allow a story its soul, we can
discover our own depths through it. Fundamentalism tends to idealize
and romanticize a story, winnowing out the darker elements of doubt,
hopelessness, and emptiness. It protects us from the hard work of
finding our own participation in meaning and developing our own
subtle values. The sacred teaching story, which has the potential of
deepening the mystery of our own identity, instead is used
defensively in fundamentalism, to spare us the anxiety of being an
individual with choice, responsibility, and a continually changing
sense of self. The tragedy of fundamentalism in any context is its
capacity to freeze life into a solid cube of meaning.
We all have fundamental stories about ourselves, tales we take
literally and believe in devotedly. These stories are usually so
familiar that it is difficult to see through them on our own. They
are so convincing and believable that they lead us to resolutions and
axioms that are very much like religious moral principles, except
that they have been developed individually.
Soul is always in process, having, as Heraclitus says, its own
principle of movement; so it is difficult to pin down with definition
or a fixed meaning.
Eventually, we might find that all emotions, all human activities,
and all spheres of life have deep roots in the mysteries of the soul,
and therefore are holy.
The intellect often demands proof that it is on solid ground. The
thought of the soul finds its grounding in a different way... It
enjoys the kind of discussion that is never complete, that ends with
a desire for further talk or reading. It is content with uncertainty
and wonder. Especially in ethical matters, it probes and questions
and continues to reflect even after decisions have been made.
Imagine a trust in yourself, or another person, or in life itself,
that doesn't need to be proved and demonstrated, that is able to
contain uncertainty. ... a real [test] of faith would be to decide
whether to trust someone, knowing that betrayal is inevitable because
life and personality are never without shadow. The vulnerability
that faith demands could then be matched by an equal trust in
oneself, the feeling that one can survive the pain of betrayal.
# Chapter 12, Beauty and the Reanimation of Things
The soul exists beyond our personal circumstances and conceptions.
The Renaissance magus understood that our soul, the mystery we
glimpse when we look deeply into ourselves, is part of a larger soul,
the soul of the world... This world soul affects each individual
thing, whether natural or human-made. You have a soul, the tree in
front of your house has a soul, but so too does the car parked under
that tree.
The trouble with the modern explanation that we project life and
personality into things is that it lands us deeply in ego: "All life
and character comes from me, from how I understand and imagine
experience." It is quite a different approach to allow things
themselves to have vitality and personality.
In this sense, care of the soul is a step outside the paradigm of
modernism, into something entirely different. My own position
changes when I grant the world its soul. Then, as the things of the
world present themselves vividly, I watch and listen. I respect them
because I am not their creator and controller. They have as much
personality and independence as I do.
James Hillman and Robert Sardello, both of whom have written
extensively about the world soul in our own time, explain that
objects express themselves not in language but in their remarkable
individualism.
The attachment I am describing is not a sentimentalizing or
idealizing of things, but rather a sense of common life that extends
to objects. Without a felt connection to things we become numb to
the world and lose that important home and family.
If things have soul, then they can also suffer and become neurotic:
such is the nature of soul. Care of the soul therefore entails
looking out for things, noticing where and how they are suffering,
seeing their neuroses, and nursing them back to health.
In a world where soul is neglected, beauty is placed last on its
list. In the intellect-oriented curricula of our schools, for
instance, science and math are considered important studies, because
they allow further advances in technology. If there is a slash in
funding, the arts are first to go, even before athletics. The clear
implication is that the arts are dispensable: we can't life without
technology, but we can live without beauty.
In a symptomatic way vandalism--which favors schools, cemeteries, and
churches--paradoxically draws attention to the sacredness of things.
Frequently when we have lost a sense of the sacred, it reappears in
negative form. The work of dark angels is not altogether different
from those who wear white. Here, then, is another way to interpret
the abuse of things--as an underworld attempt to re-establish their
sacredness.
At different times in our history we have denied soul to classes of
beings we have wanted to control. Women, it was once said, have no
soul. Slaves, the theological defense of a cruel system declared,
have no soul. In our day we assume that things do not have soul, and
thus we can do to them what we will.
Religion and theology show us the mysteries and the rites that inform
every piece of ordinary modern life. Without education in these
fields we are mistakenly led to believe that the world is as secular
as it appears to our eighteenth-century Enlightenment eyes. As a
result of this secular philosophy, the divine is met only in our
profound social problems and in our personal psychological and
physical illnesses. In the face of drugs and crime, for instance, we
feel stupefied. Nothing we do seems to help. We can't understand
these problems because the negative spark of the divine is in
them--religion revealing itself from the dark side.
# Chapter 13, The Sacred Arts of Life
Having banished art to the museum, we fail to give it a place in
ordinary life. One of the most effective forms of repression is to
give a thing excessive honor.
Living artfully, therefore, might require something as simple as
pausing. A common symptom of modern life is that there is no time
for thought, or even for letting impressions of a day sink in.
Akin to pausing, and just as important in care of the soul, is taking
time. Taking time with things, we get to know them more intimately
and to feel more genuinely connected to them.
author: Moore, Thomas, 1940-
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Thomas_Moore_(spiritual_writer)
LOC: BL624 .M663
tags: book,inspiration,non-fiction,spirit
title: Care of the Soul
# Tags
(DIR) book
(DIR) inspiration
(DIR) non-fiction
(DIR) spirit