Several ancient creation stories speak of God’s loneliness, God’s longing before creation. God “longed” and this longing, this need to connect and to be connected on God’s part, created life as we know it. Other stories speak of God being “roused,” from within, that this was what sent God seeking other. This early oral tradition suggests that this longing, this reaching out to connect, is something universal in man, implanted from the very beginning.
I suggest soul is this longing in God and in man, for life, for one another. Soul is the medium between spirit and matter — the longing each has to connect with, to touch, to be touched by, to be in relation with the other. This divine discontent, this divine longing and restlessness, “created man in his own image,” so man’s essence, too, reflects this longing, this discontent, at its core.
Isn’t this what Buddha said: “Life is discontent, life is suffering”? There is a restlessness, a longing in man that does not cease. I see this in soul. Buddha’s second noble truth is that discontent or suffering is caused by clinging and attachment; desires are endless and distract from the path. Desires, run amok, make one want what doesn’t exist anyway. For me, the dark side of soul – everything has its dark side – is possessiveness, a desire to control and dominate.
Soul cannot adequately be defined. An image that comes to mind, when I think of soul, is Stephen Speilberg’s “E.T.” with his finger, dimly lit, raised in longing to connect. Light, reaching out to darkness, darkness reaching for the light, yearning, wanting the fullness that true connecting brings. Spirit reaching for matter, matter reaching for spirit, with soul being how they connect. Talking about soul is talking in metaphor.
The body, matter, is heavy, grounded in the things of earth, full of emotion and complicated urges and drives. Spirit is airy, would steal us away from the body, have us caught up in ideas, tempt us to leave the earth behind. Soul wants to bring these two together, to feel, to reflect, to experience most of all.
The body can move through an event and not experience it. The mind can move through an event and not experience it. The soul wants to experience it, to be pulled headlong into it, to be absorbed by every detail of its character and story. Soul is the inner angel who embraces each experience as it enters us. What is imagined, felt, celebrated, brooded over is more important to soul than what is visible and collectable.
Buddha said that we are “souls on a journey of awakening.” This implies a sensitivity, an agility to be able to walk simultaneously in the eternal realm of spirit and the temporal realm of earth. Soul holds this reality for us, allows us to experience both while standing on the earth. Soul is how we experience wholeness in our lifetime, how we come to Center and experience the silence at the core of us, the wholeness at the core of life.
Soul is the pull between our remembrance of wholeness and our ground in matter. Both are vital for soul – the sacredness and the earthiness of life. Questions of meaning and purpose take soul on a journey through the invisible world while the beauty of earth delights soul’s fascination with the visible world.
To be soulful is to be filled with deep feeling or emotion, to be connected in an intuitive, felt way with something or someone, to wander events and feelings like a labyrinth until we find the center and the meaning of them. Every step is important to soul, a part of the whole, none more important than the other, each essential to the journey. Soul is a starting point, an opening, different for each person, with the journey different for each.
Soul tracks the human journey on its continuum, from its roots in the material to its ultimate evolution into the immaterial — from unconscious matter to conscious spirit – delighting in the longing, the reaching, the extending of self it takes in order for this to happen.
By paying attention to the non-physical world through introspection, self-awareness, attention to dreams, identifying purpose, plus other internal exercises, man becomes more inner directed than outer directed, more spiritual than animal, directed by the presence of the sacred within. Images and symbols speak the language of soul and nurture this internal, intuitive reality.
Plato taught that the soul resides in the body and is freed at death. For him, the body was a prison of sorts; the soul was something to be saved. For post-modern writers like James Hillman and others, it is the soul that saves the body, saves man, by allowing man to experience divine energy during his lifetime; by releasing more conscious light into the unconscious body.
This suggests that it is not in death that we come face to face with the divine, but in our lifetime, in our body, through the conscious soul that resonates with wholeness wherever it can find it. The wholeness we experience, in beauty, in reflection, in love — in life — evokes a remembrance in us of the wholeness at our core, present from birth, from before birth perhaps.
If we accept this as our birthright, that we are eternal spiritual energy in a human form, on a human journey, this remembrance evoked in us is the sacred in us. When this remembrance is evoked, we experience it, briefly. Walking in pristine nature, a lovely piece of art, music, prayer – this evokes the sacred at our core.
The sacred is “roused” in us, reaches out for us; we reach back. For me, this reaching, this finding, this moment of intimacy is soul.