Some Reflections on the Soul

As I was baptized a Catholic when I first entered a middle school run by Irish Catholic "brothers" and  been subjected to its influence throughout my school years and I still continue to attend church, the question of what some have called the human "soul" is naturally something of great interest to me. Although I now have quite a different understanding of what that term may mean, I continue to find what some deeply spiritual people have to say about it. One of such people whom I like enormously is a psycho-therapist and former relgious called Thomas Moore, quite different of course, from the Sir Thomas More the English Lord Chancellor, political philosopher and a saint, who died a martyr during the reign of Henry VIII for opposing his marriage to Anne Boleyn and the English Reformation and the author of the book Utopia. According to the Wikipedia, when young, he joined the lay Catholic order of the Servites, where he studied philosophy and music and later got a BA from dePaul's University of Chicago, an MA in musicology from the U of Michigan and an MA in theology from the U of Windsor, Ontario and in 1975 a Ph. D in religion from Syracuse U and later taught at the Glassboro State College and then the Southern Methodist U and then became a writer. His most famous work is Care of the Soul (1991).

To retain my interest in the care of my own soul, I try to read a little about spiritual subjects every week, especially during the weekends, to balance out a little my almost entirely secular life during the week. Last night, I read a the introductory chapter of a Chinese translation of his Original Self: Living with paradox and originality (2000) as I could not find the English original. The chapter is entitled The Soul's Journey.

Moore starts off with the remark that the direction in which our soul wanders is the opposite of the direction in which our secular life wanders. To him, the adventures of the anti-hero Odysseus in Homer's epic are in fact, not secular adventures but a spiritual adventure. In that sense, it is an adventure into the sacred, a journey back to where everyone longs to return, his spiritual home. 

He complains that in the modern world, we stubbornly hold on to the details of a man's journey in the external world to establish the meaning of his life and we judge a man by external and objective standards and expectations e.g what he did and what happened to a man etc. There was an exception, however. It is the life of Jung's "Memories, Dreams and Reflections"  which to him , is the story of a soul. 

To Moore, we often ignore what the internal world of our psyche is trying to tell us or the way it expresses itself  in the form of the poetry of our actions and the events of our lives and the symbolic meaning fo such events in the economy of our psyche. Our neglect of them will not however, make such desires disappear: they merely go underground and there gather force, quietly, in the silence of our soul. Because we are unfamiliar with the ways in which such desires express themselves, we sever our links with them. We try to control such amorphous and ambiguous feelings through drugs and other forms of medication instead of answering to the deepest needs they seek to express by making appropriate adjustments in the way we live.

Moore thinks that rhythms of the life of our psyche may be very different from those of our waking life: they follow its own time table and certain familiar motifs re-appear over and over again in cycles in which the past may seem more important than the future, and death may be as important as life and feelings and meaning seem of paramount importance: our joys may be more profound and our pains may reach to the roots of our existence.

The way we detect signs of what our psyches are telling us is to observe our dreams and to treat the hidden messages of our dream language more seriously. Paying attention to them will enable us to focus more on our internal than our external needs. We read them to get hints of what our psyche may wish to tell us: our deepest hopes, fears, atttiudes, mindframe, and the secret influences moving our interior life. We must reflect upon, discuss and familiarize ourselves with them and the complex and unexpected ways they express themselves.

But generally, people nowadays try to avoid having to deal with what they most deeply desire. More often, once they sense signs of problems, they rush to see their pharmacists or therapists and hope to deal with their problems through the language of everyday experience, behavioral methods and drugs. They prefer to deal with the symptoms, not the disease. They do not really know what is going on because they have allowed themselves to be estranged from their psyche. Their soul has become so strange and unfamiliar to them that they know practically nothing about it. We no longer write any detailed diaries. We seldom correspond with each other by writing long letters or have any deep conversations. We abandon such methods as outdated, as something overtaken by our latest technological methods.

To Moore, poetry and profound works of literature may often tell us more about how we are than scientists because they are often filled with very meaningful symbols. The progress of our souls is not something linear: certain themes repeatedly play themselves out and they progress by spirals towards our spiritual home. The Gnostics tell us that we always return to where we started and where we started is not usually this world. The journey or odyssey of our soul usually involves drifting in the sea of emotions towards our home and not some ideal of perfection. 

Moore is right. Modern life has become too external. All our attentions are placed on attaining externally defined targets: in job, in mating, in our concept of what constitute "success". Sucess is no longer harmony of ourselves with ourselves, the satisfaction of our deepest emotional needs for peace, serenity, for emotional bonding with others, for friendship, for love, for unity with others and with the world. It is how much money we got in our bank accounts, how many holiday homes we have, how many cars, how expensive are our clothes, our furniture or how renowned are their designers. Everything is measured in material and monetary terms. We seldom concern ourselves with music, poetry, literature, art and other things which answer to our deeper need for unity with others and with this world and with the ultimate questions of value of man's existence and what gives meaning to our lives. "We haven't got time", we tell ourselves. Is that so?