Category Archives: Imagination

Reflections on Soul and Soul Loss

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Down the Rabbit Hole by Kbetart, CC BY NC-ND 2.0

One morning in the fall of 2021, as Mary and I walked the dogs in a nearby park, we turned a corner, and at the other end of a parking lot, saw several police cruisers pulled up next to a pickup truck with a camper shell. The area was cordoned off with caution tape. The pickup was there almost every morning, so although we had never seen or spoken to the owner, we assumed it was one of the homeless men who spend their nights in the park. We chose another path to continue our walk, and I remember thinking that it seemed like a lot of police to bust a guy for sleeping in his car.

The next day we learned the man had hanged himself from the tree next to his truck.

It’s impossible to grasp the full extent of suffering and the death toll of the pandemic years, and just as the world did after the 1918-19 pandemic, we seem hell bent on trying to act like things are back to normal, but out of all the statistical and personal losses, this man’s death continues to haunt me. Potentially, there was help nearby if he had been able to reach out. There’s a megachurch, with various outreach programs, visible from the place where he died. A twelve-step group met several days a week that year in the park near the spot where he parked. Other homeless people sometimes gathered in the evenings for company or to share a pizza, but this man he never seemed to have joined them.

Most of us know what it’s like to get stuck in a dark place, where there doesn’t seem to be any way out. Most of us might also agree that the culture, the nation, the world are in a parallel state. In earlier times, in shamanic cultures, “soul loss” was the diagnosis for conditions we now call Anxiety Disorders, Dissociative Disorders, PTSD, and in general, the feeling of being “outside oneself,” “beside oneself,” or “not all there.”

But what kind of soul is it that can be lost and found? This has been a world-wide concern of shamans, spiritual seekers, and poets for millennia and has resurfaced for modern psychotherapists like Carl Jung and James Hillman.

Soul eludes precise definition, though I suspect everyone has a sense of it. Somehow it relates to depth, to intensity, to vibrant experience. Contact with soul, for an individual or a group, involves a sense of connection to an inner wisdom, an inner compass, like touching “the still point in the turning world,” to borrow Eliot’s phrase. To be out of contact with soul was reflected in a line from Yeats, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

At the end of 2016, a lot of people in the Bay Area were upset by the election of Donald Trump. I was invited to a two day soul-retrieval ceremony in the Bon Tradition of Tibet, which dates back thousands of years and has shamanic roots. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, a contemporary Bon meditation master, wrote that “In the context of the Bon soul-retrieval practice, the soul…is understood as the balance of the subtle energies and related qualities of the five elements: earth, water, fire, air, and space.”

At the end of the second day, the presiding lama performed a traditional test of this ceremony’s success. The result was about 50% effective, and that’s what it felt like subjectively – nothing had really changed. I found the result disappointing though not surprising. The ceremony grew from indigenous roots, among a people who shared the same consensus reality, a condition that no longer exists in America, where it feels like our 20th worldview is gone and the future is not yet in sight. Also, regardless of our conscious beliefs, at deeper levels, we are steeped in the imagery of our native culture, and other iconography, no matter how attractive, remains more distant. As Garrison Keeler once quipped, “In Minnesota, even the atheists are Lutherans because it’s a Lutheran God they don’t believe in.”

Joseph Campbell wrote extensively of the Grail Legends, which became popular in Europe during the liminal time between the dissolution of the medieval world and the emergence of the Renaissance. The mysterious Grail, which could heal individuals, the kingdom, and the land, was something mystical, sometimes imagined as the cup of the last supper, and at other times, as a stone, like the philosopher’s stone of alchemy. A key feature for Campbell was that every seeker of the Grail had to enter the wilderness alone.

“Haunted Wood” by Arthur Rackham. Public Domain

In the Grail stories, a single hero (in some versions, Galahad, in others, Parsifal) finds the sacred object which redeems the kingdom and the king. No single hero or culture or nation can solve the issues as complex as those which confront the entire planet during our time of cultural dissolution. Solutions that seemed to work in the past are the very source of the problems that face us now.

Like it or not, every individual now living has the choice of clinging to nostalgic fantasies of an imagined idillic past, or of looking within to see what our individual soul and the soul of the world need from us now. The time of the winter solstice and the New Year is conducive to such reflections. “Peace and an hour’s time” are needed for creativity, according to photographer, Edward Weston, though he admitted that neither are easy to attain. How to get there is worth reflection as the new year dawns, and worth considering in the new year at greater length here.

Meanwhile I wish you all Happy New Year, with peace and time to enjoy it.

The Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens

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Path through the Woodland Garden

“For me beauty is the primary proof of the existence of God. Beauty is sublime, transcendent, and fulfilling. It takes us to the very edge of our capacity for knowledge…The world considered without its beauty is a world perceived without its God.” – Thomas Moore

“You must protest, you must protest, it is your diamond duty; ah but in such an ugly time, the true protest is beauty.” – Phil Ochs

James Hillman often railed against psychology’s “medicinal complex.” He looked to Greece and the Renaissance for inspiration as he championed a psychology of soul, image, and eros, in which “the primary value is beauty,” (A Blue Fire). A lack of beauty is pathological, he said, both in the lives of individuals and cultures. I thought of this often during this seemingly unending summer, with its record heat, smoke from another disastrous fire season, and a resurgent pandemic, set against a backdrop of too much traffic, too many angry drivers, and too many miles of billboards and decaying strip malls. For those, and other reasons, in mid-September, we set out for the coast, which we hadn’t visited since 2018.

Begonia Pavillion

Two days before we left, the temperature hit 106, so the 60 degree days alone would have made the trip worthwhile, but there was more than just a preview of fall in Fort Bragg, where we hadn’t stayed before. There were independent restaurants, coffee shops, a marine museum and the Skunk Train terminal, in the “downtown” area along the coastal highway. A few blocks away, wide streets and and quiet neighborhoods invited evening walks in glow of the coastal evening light. But the real surprise and most inspiring feature of the trip was the Mendocino County Botanical Gardens, just a few miles south of Fort Bragg www.gardenbythe sea.org.

We spent portions of two days at the gardens, which was only enough time to begin to explore, but that didn’t really matter. When a place mirrors the landscape of the soul, feeling like home on a deep level, it’s enough to just be there, and rest, and pay attention, letting the sense of presence arise.

“The flowers had the look of flowers that are looked at.” – T.S. Eliot

In the Dahlia Garden

Multiple paths meander through multiple groves, gardens, and open spaces, opening onto new vistas a every turn. Huge old trees bend and twist as if synchronized to the smaller plants that surround the trunks.

I’ve always enjoyed Japanese gardens, which blend the natural world with design and draw us into stillness. Here, there’s a wildness at the center of the garden designs, like an echo of the wildness of the ocean. The result is to draw us into wonder.

Memorial benches border the paths, with small plaques given by families of people who loved or supported or worked on these gardens. What a wonderful tribute that seems as one sits, surrounded by the beauty of the place they helped to create!

“The soul is born in beauty and feeds on beauty, requires beauty for its life.” – James Hillman

It rained the second day we went to the gardens, but everyone there seemed to enjoy it, both those who live on the coast and those, like us, visiting from inland. The clouds and rain added an extra shimmer to the foliage.

These gardens are an inspiring place to visit if you get a chance to visit the Mendocino coast. They brought to mind at least one similar feature near home that I haven’t explored in some time, and must get back to. Tt was also rewarding to pot several of the succulents we brought home. Just a small thing, but nothing that feeds the soul is ever too small.

A Contemplation of Heroes, Toilet Paper, John Wayne, and John Ford.

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Paramahansa Yogananda told a story of two families, one Hindu and one Muslim, who were neighbors during the violence that preceded Indian independence in the late 1940’s. Food was scarce due to rioting, but the mother of the Hindu family got hold of a bag of rice. When she realized her neighbors had nothing to eat, she took half the rice to the Muslim family before lighting her own stove. When we were young, many of us aspired to that kind of heroism. Now we hoard toilet paper.

In all fairness, this is a manufactured crisis, driven by our online yellow press with so many pictures of empty paper good shelves that anyone paying attention might conclude that they better get some extra. But the TP story brings up one of our culture’s major living room elephants – our worship of individualism. Me first. I gotta be me. Do your own thing.

When I studied counseling psychology, we had a unit on “cross-cultural differences,” to learn not to project our biases onto people from other cultures or sub-cultures where identity rests as much on family and community membership as it does on our northern European focus on individuation. Without such training, we would have been ready to put labels like “enmeshed” and “codependent” on anyone who didn’t regard “self-development” as the pinnacle of psychological development.

Fun Fact: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM, the bible of mental health or its lack in our culture grew out of a study commissioned by the Marine Corps after WWI. They sought a personality test to filter out those who were most at risk of shell shock. In other words, our mental health norms in this country  are based on the attributes of a good combat soldier. Think about that for a while… Continue reading →

James Hillman – on Changing the Object of our Desire

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Watching this video in which Hillman so clearly shines a light on the core issues of so many of our current crises, it is hard to realize he left us 2011. It makes what so often passes for journalism and analysis of events seem trivial…

Soul Notes #3: A Dog’s Life

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Seven years ago today, we lost Holly, our second dog. She was 16 1/2, which objectively, is a good long life, but when it’s your dog, it’s never long enough. She was about two in this picture. At that time, I’d get up around 5:30, do some stretches, and spend about 20 minutes in the meditation room before getting breakfast for myself and the dogs.

One morning I found Holly sitting in my chair, gazing at the altar. She looked over her shoulder at me, with a “Yes, may I help you?” expression before turning back to her object of contemplation. I thought of the incident this year, when a Tibetan lama mentioned an old saying that many dogs will be reborn as humans, and a lot of humans will be dogs in their next life. It all has to do with having a good heart…

One other notable thing about Holly was her love of water. One time Mary and I were walking her by a stream in Yosemite, talking as she stopped for a drink. After a splash we looked down to see her paddling about with delight.

On her first visit to the ocean, she insisted on playing tag with the waves and letting them win:

Mary and Holly, Bandon, OR, ca. 2000

In honor of Holly, here is an article I posted in 2013, called Dreaming With Animals. The pictures and text are just the barest glimpse of how deeply intwined with Soul the animals are, all the more so now that most of them have been banished from our lives.

Soul Notes: #1

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Art as the Mirror of All Nature, Matthaus Merian the Elder, 1617. Numerous Jungians have used this engraving as an image of “Anima Mundi,” the World Soul.

Last summer, after writing on soul and soul loss, I said I’d have more to say about these subjects, but I was stymied by an underlying assumption that such a weighty subject requires a weighty post, or realistically, weighty tomes, such as the writings of Jung and Hillman, who took soul and psyche (they used the terms interchangeably) as their central concern.

Google on “soul,” and you get two billion hits. “Soul loss” returns 213 million. Soul has been a central concern of humans and their ancestors for millennia. The earliest known burial with evidence of rites “that one might characterize as religious”(1), is a 300,000 year old Neanderthal tomb!

So how do you begin to talk about soul in a blog post?

Eventually, two realizations emerged.

The first was that if blogging doesn’t support weighty tomes, it is perfect for writing notes, a valid and necessary form.

The second, and even more important realization was that no one needs to be introduced to the concept of soul, for they already have one. I’m pretty sure that everyone reading this post has an idea of soul – it’s one of those terms like “angel” or “demon” – even those who don’t believe in angels or souls or demons have an idea of what it is that they don’t believe in.

So I figure I pretty much get to do what I usually do here – “think out loud,” in this case on the notion of soul, without any expectation that my ideas may or should match anyone else’s, though I suspect we think alike about many things connected to soul ( True or False – The music of B.B. King has soul? ).

I’m speaking of something in each of us, something we feel but cannot define, which carries supreme importance and value. No matter how badly I may have screwed up this day, this month, this year, this life, if I am in touch Soul, there remains something precious within something within me of value. Soul carries a sense of what’s holy. According to James Hillman, soul is intimately connected with love, religion, beauty, and mortality.

I take the position of Jung and Hillman, that soul, aka psyche, resides in the imaginal world, between the physical realm, which is apparent, and the spiritual, which is beyond our senses and ordinary conceptions. Jung said, “The psyche creates reality every day.” Hillman added, “To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the basic reality of fantasy.” (2)

Soul carries meaning and purpose and keeps us energized when we’re on the right path. It is present at moments of great beauty, joy, or loss, and is always a part of any “peak experience.”

T.S. Eliot said:

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

So this is what I am going to reflect on here for a while, and we will see where it goes. The obvious question is “Why now?”

I suspect the answer has to do with the belief of many indigenous cultures, that soul can be lost by individuals and groups, but that it also has the possibility of being retrieved. Enough said…

Cycles, Gyres, and Yugas, Part 3: Soul in a Dark Time

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Edvard Munch, “The Lonely Ones,” woodcut, 1899

“the darkness around us is deep.” – William Stafford, 1960

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.” – Theodore Roethke, 1963

“There’s a darkness at the edge of town.” – Bruce Springsteen, 1978

In a recent post I quoted Sri Daya Mata (Faye Wright), successor to Paramahansa Yogananda as president of Self-Realization Fellowship, describing a vision she had on a pilgrimage to the Himalayas in 1963:

“A huge black cloud suddenly swept over me, trying to engulf me. As it did so, I cried out to God…Through the practice of meditation, the all-knowing power of intuition develops in each one of us. I had intuitively understood what the Divine was telling me though this symbolic experience. It foretold a serious illness I was soon to undergo; and it also indicated that all mankind would face a very dark time during which the evil force would seek to engulf the world.

Daya Mata’s vision came to mind during the 2nd Democratic debate on July 30, when Marianne Williamson, a candidate I had initially dismissed as a lightweight, made the most pertinent observation of the evening:

“If you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in the country, then I’m afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days.”

Both the concept of world ages and that of dark forces are pertinent metaphors for something we sense – and most cultures have explicitly believed – there are forces greater than what we can see behind and within what unfolds in the visible world.

An especially important image for me, is Soul as James Hillman used the word, (as when we say someone or something “has soul”), and the parallel image of soul loss. This metaphor has grown in importance for me as I’ve recently read both Hillman’s and his colleague, Michael Meade’s speculations on what loss of soul can mean for an individual or culture: Continue reading →

Cycles, Gyres, and Yugas, Part 2 – Why Do We Fight?

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There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again; and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. – T.S. Eliot

In the previous post, I discussed the current “dark time,” or Kali Yuga, from the view of time as a series of ascending and descending ages, without beginning or end. The post ended with video clip from Peter Brook’s Mahabharata, where a young man asks, during a brutal civil war, “If the times are hopeless, why do we fight?”

Past critical turning points in history, involving the rise and fall of nations and empires, often hinged on battles. “Why” may have been the central question then, but now, as climate change marks an inflection point for the whole planet, we also face the questions of “Who (or what) do we fight?” and “How?” For us, these may be even more difficult than why, although that is the issue I will consider first.

As a college freshman, working my way through The Iliad, I had to get a handle on the concept of arete, meaning virtue or honor. Because this was the epic of a decade long war, in The Iliad, arete meant martial courage and prowess. The Vietnam war was raging then, and arete sounded too much like the prattle of those politicians who wrapped themselves in the flag to drum up dwindling support for a war that was a horrible mistake.

Now I understand arete from a wider perspective. The word meant “‘excellence of any kind.’ The term may also mean ‘moral virtue.’ In its earliest appearance in Greek, this notion of excellence was ultimately bound up with the notion of the fulfillment of purpose or function: the act of living up to one’s full potential..” 

Arete means seeking to do what is right in every circumstance.
Continue reading →