Excerpt:
Souls in Boxes

Chapter 1
The Soul at Work

About a year ago I had a clarifying experience of the way the soul is at work, and not at work, in our daily lives.

A longtime and beloved friend came to see me unannounced in my office at school. He shut the door behind him. Before he spoke I could feel the tension he had carried with him into the room. The impromptu visit, the unease, did not entirely surprise me. I knew my friend was in trouble. Less than a week earlier he had received a grim diagnosis. He had cancer, an especially aggressive kind of cancer, in his prostate gland.

When he first told me the news, he seemed a little numb. Very bright, logical and analytical by nature, he let loose a torrent of information about the cancer, its likely progress in a subject like him, alternative treatments and their theoretical consequences. Given my friend’s cast of mind, it seemed a relief for him to have so much to tell me in such exact detail. By carefully wrapping language and data around unthinkable horrors – the likely loss of his sexual capability, the possibly imminent loss of his life – he was able to exercise a kind of control. Who knows what I looked like or sounded like in response. The instant I understood the crux of my friend’s condition, a slow, dark weight began to swell miserably between my heart and belly. If it were music, it would have been a dirge. I know I offered language – questions, consolation – but I had no meaningful words. My soul’s tongue had grown thick, and I had somehow slowed to a stupor.

My friend sat down opposite me and took out a little spiral-bound notebook from his jacket pocket. He told me he had been thinking and making lists, and he wanted to hear what I thought in response. The lists were composed as “t” diagrams, with a heading – such as “remove prostate” or “irradiate prostate” or “chemotherapy only” – over two adjacent columns of “positives” and “negatives.” Positives, under the various headings, might be “longer life expectancy,” “retention of sexuality.” “no hair loss,” “ intact immune system.” My friend read me every word on each list, elaborating where he thought I might need clarification. As it happened, I didn’t need much clarification. His physician had apparently told him his chances to live were greatest if he had the cancerous gland and surrounding tissue taken out surgically, as soon as possible. The physician must have said or assumed that continuing to live was the paramount “positive.” This greatest “positive,” however, would entail the most dramatic negatives, including the loss in middle life of my friend’s sexual expression. Also obvious, but hardly reassuring, was the fact that the less radical, prostate-preserving treatments promised the most heartening positives – but one chilling negative, a high likelihood of more, untreatable cancer, resulting in early death.

When he had finished the recitation of his lists, my friend clapped his notebook shut, got up from his chair and, physically shaking with tension, said, “I don’t know what to do.” I was unable to bear the pitch of his distress, and I blurted out, “You’ve got to do the surgery, then the chemo – anything that is going to keep you alive.”

He looked at me with stupefaction. He opened his book and reread the attendant “negatives” that came with such a course of action. He did not have to tell me; they were unthinkable. In fact, as we fumbled on in our discussion, most of the “negatives” were unthinkable. This was because, I realized at last, thought is not much help in such matters. My poor friend! Cancer had taken hold of a crucial center of his manhood, and none of the consequences thought and medicine could devise were reassuring. My friend could not by cerebration alone evaluate the relative merits of bad consequences. Evaluating implies valuing, and valuing requires surrendering to feeling. At the core of my friend’s crisis was an inability to feel, to trust feeling, to take in fully the relative feeling of living in a sexually diminished way or the feeling of living only a little while longer.

My friend stood frozen in front of me and repeated “I don’t know what to do.”

We have, nearly all of us, lost our way. We are lost not only in matters of grave human consequence but in navigating our way through the most basic and ordinary experiences and relationships.

Too often, like my friend in crisis, we don’t know what to do, and when we think we know, we cannot bear the way it feels. Is this bewilderment the inevitable human condition, or could it be a saving sign? Finding one’s way often begins in the realization that one is lost, that something essential is missing. What exactly has been lost? I believe it is the human soul.

Modern, technically advanced peoples have lost track of the soul. We have stopped trusting and responding to soulful manifestations, and, with the exception of a few passionate questers, we have lost the language to convey the soul's messages. In our era when we tell stories of human progress through the world, we typically do so without reference to the soul and to the experiences that make life soulful. Or perhaps we use the language of the soul “metaphorically,” to express the ineffable “inner” quality of life. Rarely, however, do we embrace the soul as real, as a phenomenological fact.

The truth of the matter is that we make two kinds of progress through the world, practical and soulful. Our practical experience is defined biologically and materially. We grow physically, in identifiable stages, through a more or less predictable life span: infancy, childhood, maturity, apparently gaining in consciousness and effectiveness as we progress through time. We age, weaken, and experience, usually, diminishing consciousness and effectiveness, and then we die. Our practical progress through the world includes family, social and institutional relationships. It includes the work we do and the social impact of that work. Practical life can be objectively observed and assessed. One’s progress is a social fact, and can be compared to the progress of others. It is public; there is a public record. Jung called the conscious experience of this practical and public self as it moves through the world one’s persona. There has been a strong tendency among western peoples to identify one’s whole being with persona, but this is always a mistake. The mistake is to deny the existence and the primacy of the soul.

Not that the soul is easy to conceptualize clearly or to talk about. The soul feels rather than thinks, values rather than knows. The soul is utterly fluid, elusive, impossible, literally, to categorize or to pin down. Our soulful progress through the world is experienced as a sequence of feeling-impressions of persons and places and situations, feelings often in a puzzling lack of relationship to how well we are progressing practically. In fact, soulful impulses and longing, if indulged, frequently threaten to take us off the practical and moral course of our lives. Because the soul is so practically problematic, so fluid, so elusive, it can be a conscious annoyance. We resist thinking about soul and soulful matters in the same way we resist thinking about the charged but fleeting fragment of dream that vexes us as we first behold ourselves in the morning mirror.

Although the soul itself will make a mockery of attempts to define it with too much precision, to bind it with verities and certainties, or, in the western habit of thought, “to scientize” it, it is nonetheless essential to identify what the soul is, so as to distinguish between it and all that it is not.

There has been no lack of consideration of the soul in the history of ideas. The word “soul” is an Anglo-Saxon derivation of the Teutonic seele, used, with more or less consistency, to express the spirit housed within the flesh. Seen this way, soul is a kind of vitality or “interior self” – but more than mere consciousness. Consciousness, although clearly an “interior” condition, is largely a practical matter. There is, obviously, a still more interior awareness, one that is capable of evaluating the conscious self. This is the soul.

In classical Greek literature and thought psyche is often used to suggest the workings of the soul. The mythological figure of Psyche is an irresistibly beautiful woman who falls in love with Eros, although she is forbidden to behold him in the flesh. Ultimately Psyche does catch a glimpse of Eros, and after a period of suffering and seeming doom, the gods grant her and her beloved an eternal union. The forbidden but inevitable relationship between Psyche (soul) and Eros is a central and enduring theme in the human story.

Plato retains the term psyche to describe the totality of human mental functioning. Prefiguring scientific moderns like Freud, Plato divides psyche into three dynamically related sub-systems: the appetites, the will, and reason. While the appetitive element of the psyche, like the Freudian id, is the original and quantitatively greatest psychic component, it can be subordinated, for its own good, to the will, and the will, in favorable conditions, can be educated to and aligned with reason. A soul aligned this way is a just soul, and its ruling function, reason, is capable of seeing ultimate truth: the relationship between the illusory material world and the eternal perfections that lie behind it. Modern social science has retained the term psyche, but has “scientized” it in a number of competing psychological models. With the possible exception of Jungian archetypal psychology, modern psychology generally equates “psyche” with “mind,” seen as an epi-phenomenon of one’s biological brain, a mental “organ” functioning to guide the human system adaptively through the world. This scientific tendency in modern psychology, and its general acceptance, has done a great deal to obscure the earlier understanding of the soul’s place in human experience.

In English “soul” and “spirit” are often used interchangeably, and in some important philosophic and sacred texts, the word translated as “spirit” is the Greek pneuma, or “breath.” The notion that the soul is a kind of breath-spirit making rhythmic exchanges between the self and the oceanic, atmospheric All is also suggested in the Tibetan Buddhist understanding that the original generative impulse in creation was a Karmic, or soulful, wind.

Like the Greeks, classical Romans identified the soul as a feminine force: anima. “Anima” also derives from a Greek work for wind. For both sexes, but especially men, anima is the deepest, most hidden dimension of one’s being. Jung would later use anima as a synonym for the soul entire. The anima in Jungian thought is a connector, a dynamic emissary between consciousness and the universal unconscious. As such, the anima/soul frequently presses threatening material on practical consciousness. These messages feel important, disturbing, and one’s first impulse is to banish them. But the suppression of these problematic but soulful images or urges leads to all manner of psychic distress: illness, depression, compulsions, distorting projections of the threatening material onto others. By contrast, the successful accommodation of soulful expression in one’s practical life is experienced as intense realization, a passage into fuller consciousness. At such moments one feels most alive, most animated.

Anima, then, might be the most helpful overall conception of soul. Coming to terms with it, however, is anything but easy. Toward the end of his life, Jung wrote to his friend Traugott Egloff, “If the encounter with the shadow {inner aspects of life not acknowledged by the persona} is the ‘apprentice-piece’ in the individual’s development, then that with the anima is the ‘master-piece.” (CW9, 9 Feb., 1959) The ultimate undertaking in one’s life then is coming to terms with one’s soul.

In the final years of this millenium there has been a sudden flurry of writing and thinking about the soul. This new asking after the soul’s place in life has a distinctively Jungian focus and derives from such distinguished Jungian thinkers as Robert Johnson, James Hillman, and Hillman’s intellectual disciple, Thomas Moore. The latter’s reflections on the soul, including Care of the Soul and Soul Mates, have become popular best sellers. The soul and soulful experiences held up for reconsideration in the late twentieth century are decidedly unrelated to the conceptions of the soul maintained in conventional Christianity. This is more than a little surprising, as the mortal condition and divine redemption of the soul are so fundamental to Christian teaching and practice. Yet the conception of soul that has resurfaced in recent thinking is unmistakably non- or trans-Christian. The soul as Johnson, Hillman, Moore, and Jung himself conceive it informs waking consciousness with a staggering array of mythic material from the collective experience of mankind. This kind of soulfulness colors and energizes waking life with intense, deeply felt, sometimes illicit or impossible longing. Unlike institutional Christianity’s forthright prescriptions for the soul’s maintenance and improvement, the new soulfulness, like the mythology of pagan antiquity, is unconfined by a larger moral framework. If anything, this emergent soul is the genius of its own redemption and is itself to be regarded with reverence.

In fairness, this new or revitalized conception of the soul may be related to Christian practice in deeper and more interesting ways than the cursory summary above might suggest. Robert Johnson certainly maintains as much in his remarkable commentaries on the grail legend (He, The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden) and on the Western expression of romantic love (We). But whatever its relation to tradition and orthodoxy, the renewed interest in the soul and the hunger for soulfulness represents a great cultural turning point.

We seem to have arrived at a historical moment when the western mind is at last willing to see the limitations of validating experience solely on the basis of logic and evidence. Moreover, the impulse to soulfulness and soulful relatedness is proceeding vigorously and unashamedly, no longer marginalized or a “new age” novelty. We have, in other words, arrived at the point where my friend, his way ahead darkened by the shadow of a mortal illness, might move beyond composing lists of probable consequences . By acknowledging the reality and force of the soul in one’s life, one is able to bring the depths and beauty of feeling to full consciousness.

Carl Jung and his followers have long held that the human psyche processes experience through four distinctive functions: thinking, intuition, sensation, and feeling. All people are capable of all four functions, but as we arrive at psychological maturity in our respective cultures, certain functions come to dominate, in certain types of people, while other functions remain underdeveloped. A well-known test, the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory, can be used to classify personalities into the various dominant types. Western peoples, especially Americans, have collectively come to favor thinking and sensation types – even to the point of denying the validity of intuition and feeling altogether. Dominant thinking and sensation types test and validate the world with logic and empirical evidence. Because rigorous logic and empiricism lead inevitably to sound science and effective action, dominance in these functions has made this type very powerful in transforming and controlling the material world. But this power has been won at the cost of feeling itself, which is the way the soul experiences and evaluates the world. The human types who have engineered an electronic world-wide web of instantaneous communications, who have launched men and equipment through space into other worlds, who have perfected the means to annihilate humankind and all it has produced, who stand at the brink of being able to replicate genetically any living organism – these prodigies of material transformation are by their very strengths pitifully unequipped to know how to feel about their creations. In his memoir, Balancing Heaven and Earth, Robert Johnson contrasts the lot of thinking-dominant westerners to that of feeling-dominant Indians:

America pays an enormous price for its high specialization in thinking and sensation. In the United States the telephones work, computers are easily available, the aircraft are safe and reliable. But the opposite faculty of feeling lies in disrepair. India specializes in feeling and intuition and pays a terrible price in its opposite faculties. Love and devotion and a wonderful feeling quality pervade the Indian atmosphere, but poverty is endemic and the physical structure of India is in a state of perpetual emergency. (BHE, p.252)

At the personal level, Johnson recounts the unforgettable experience of soulfully interacting with Indian people. He tells of how one might stand waiting to cross a street and exchange eye contact with a fellow pedestrian. For a soulful, feeling type, even this brief communion – looking openly into one another’s eyes – is a kind of mutual possession. The soulful observer takes away something deep and substantial from the transaction, provided it is not suppressed by embarrassment or reflexive propriety. In such exchanges feeling observers become soulfully related, however briefly and impracticably. It is easy to contrast the typical western response to similar situations. One steps into an elevator occupied by others and, suddenly confined in such intimate proximity, reflexively casts his eyes down to the floor. What exactly is achieved by this? A sense that one has maintained anonymity and isolation – perhaps the feeling that one has been unintrusive, courteous. In this way, habitually, daily, we confine and suppress feeling, feeling for other souls, for soulful places, for what might open up and carry us away from practical and familiar concerns.

The loss or under-development of feeling is catastrophic for human realization. Without full feeling, the soul is stunted and sick. Rationality and practicality can make material wonders, but those faculties cannot integrate their achievements into a satisfying scheme of meaning. Without feeling, we might, literally, “know what we are doing,” but we cannot begin to know the value or meaning of what we are doing.

Some penetrating educational theorists in the west are now starting to ground thinking and feeling functions in the physical structure of the brain. Julia Atkin, drawing on the brain studies of Ned Hermann, suggests that the different types of psychological processing described by Jung may reside in a kind of dramatic tension between the two opposing hemispheres of the brain and also between the limbic system of the brain’s interior and the cerebral cortex which encases it. In her attempts to illustrate the progress of a child’s learning, Atkin suggests that the first human experiences are processed and “known” in an interior, feeling sense. In her words, the first world we know is “the world inside our skins.” All experiences of the world without – our first relationships, experiences of place, matter, situations – are understood and validated by this prior inner feeling. Feeling is both our first and our ultimate understanding. Beyond the world of our immediate, sensory knowing are more distant realms, realms we will “know about,” but possibly never know. We can “know about” vast and elegant and complex things, but they cannot be known except by reference to feeling. * (Atkin 1998)

This elemental fact is very important to educators because if schools and the culture at large equate intelligence and effectiveness only with the thinking function and its demonstrable “knowing about,” we will produce learners who will dedicate themselves to determining what is right and best on the basis of what follows most readily from logic and evidence. Such people, like my friend in the throes of his cancer, spend lifetimes making rational, “right” decisions about which they feel terrible. Quite reasonably we teach and otherwise encourage children to discern and decide on the basis of logic and evidence, applauding and rewarding them as they make their ever-more alienated, abstracted, and unhappy way through the world. But what does it profit a man, Christ asked his disciples, to gain the whole world if he loses his soul?

We have reached the point where it is once again important, even urgent, to acknowledge the soul and what it wants to tell us. Again, a number of popular books and emergent “experts” have helped to remind us that the soul is real, that it needs care or tending. While it is no doubt valuable to have reintroduced soulfulness into public discourse, the version of the soul held up for consideration tends to be a bit of a hot house flower. Restoring it or, in the parlance of the day, “honoring” it amounts to recognizing and, within the bounds of social safety, venting previously suppressed desires. Soulfulness thus becomes merely good psychotherapy, and not surprisingly the new apostles of the soul are typically therapists.

But the soul, more fully understood, cannot be contained or tamed by therapy. The soul seeks to be felt and expressed, not to be shaped, honored, or even understood. The soul’s aim is to connect – with certain other souls, with certain places and settings, with certain, story-like patterns of experience. The soul cannot be understood in isolation, out of relationship to others and to otherness. Wonderfully, if often inconveniently, the soul, if we let it, carries us to the people and places that remind us that we are really alive.

Glimpses of this transporting, soul affirming reality are certainly given to all of us. Robert Johnson calls such experiences the “golden world.” By golden world, he means a periodically accessible paradise which is real. Maddeningly, the golden world overwhelms us and, too quickly, disappears altogether, rather like Brigadoon or Shangri-la. In fact Brigadoon, Shangri-la and every other fictional secret garden are nothing more than artistic gestures in the direction of the golden world. For most of our practical progress through life, the golden world feels far away, but, as Robert Johnson reminds us, we are given “slender threads” to connect us. If we are able to cultivate a certain kind of humility and honesty, if we can free ourselves of the constricting clutches of fear, we can hold fast to the slender threads that bind us to that soulful condition which, as the sacred texts say, surpasses all understanding.

The good news here is that no exacting discipline or therapy is required to restore our souls. Since the soul makes itself known to us only in relationship, we must simply let it. We must open ourselves to soulful relatedness. But what does this mean? We are thrust by circumstance and culture into all kinds of relationships. We are children of parents, parents of children, spouses, friends, bosses, employees, doctors, patients, masters, apprentices. Are we to be soulfully “open” to all of these? Of course we are not. We are spared having to know which relationships will or should be soulful – because the soul will tell us. The soul will tell us in the strongest, most stirring, most nuanced expressions of feeling. The soul will let each Romeo know that, yes, that is his Juliet. The soul will let each disciple know that, yes, this is my master. But when the soul is lost, when its very existence is doubted, Romeos seek Juliets through computer dating services, disciples find their master by engaging a consultant. When the soul is lost, people look to culturally constructed protocols to tell them such basic things as who is my mother? Who is my teacher? Who is my leader? What kind of world should I live in? When the soul is lost, and when the compensatory protocols produce so little satisfaction, one wonders, like Hamlet, how the world has grown spoiled, despairing of finding a way back to the golden world.

But there need not be such despair, for there is a way back, and it’s not really “back,” or regressive, at all. The way out of soul-less malaise is to recover the spiritual condition prior to one’s submission to the learned protocols. One must, as Christ told his bewildered followers “become as little children.” (Matt. 18:1-4)

This scriptural teaching does not ask that one become childlike in the sense of being simpler or more primitive; it asks, rather, that we recover the soulful condition all children know before they are hurt or educated to forsake it. Achieving this prior, soulful condition requires no more than honest, sustained memory.

It is sometimes a helpful exercise really to consider, really to remember one’s first grade or third grade class. Photographs can help bring the faces, then the gestures, quirks of dress, even sounds and smells back to vivid consciousness. Imagine the class is assembled before the mind’s eye. Invariably there will emerge out of that variegated garden of bobbing heads one or two which call up special feeling. For me it is the great bristly orb of Cyrus Best’s head. Cyrus is dressed in enormous, faded, over-the-shoulder farmer’s overalls, deeply melancholy, almost silenced by the weight of school tasks. Somehow he was known to be “poor,” but I didn’t know what poor meant. I did know that his house had a heavy, wet, musty smell inside, that its dark dampness cohered somehow with Cyrus’s deep melancholy. Cyrus had access to his brother’s .22 caliber rifle, and we could “hunt” rats in the dark caverns of his cellar. This thrilled me, took me back to more ancient realms. At home, alone in my bed before sleep or on first waking, my head and heart were full of Cyrus Best. I can remember only one or two things he said to me – actually just one: “Are you saved?”

Sometime later, I believe the next school year, my soul was drawn rapturously into the orbit of Diane LaCroix, a girl whose auburn and honey-colored hair shone like fire where the sunlight touched the part above her braids. Diane’s pale eyes were as fervid and attentive to school business as Cyrus’s were defeated and lost. Diane conveyed a pious novice’s passion for the rites of school that swept me up into it. I wanted to sit near, stand next to, work beside Diane LaCroix, and of course that meant reading carefully, composing neatly, helping to construct the little Navajo settlement. Diane, who spoke only in whispers, seemed to burn to do the school tasks perfectly, to be good. All I wanted was to stand near her, and I did every chance I could get, in order to be close to that goodness quality. I could feel it, hear it in her whispers.

Well before we became shrewd and discerning about who is smart or dumb, well-to-do or poor, appropriate or inappropriate to know, we are soulfully related. It has been a long time, but I still think with painful unease about my grade school friend Freddy Fried, a lively, engaging, but decidedly troubled soul. I had no words for it then, but Freddy was the first person I knew who spoke in bigoted terms about other races and faiths. In a way this was a peculiar thing to do in the third grade, in a homogenous mid-western town in the serene middle of the century. To my awareness, there were no “other” races or faiths in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Yet, for some reason, Freddy’s speech was insistently punctuated with references to “cheap Jews” and “dirty niggers.” I remember trying to envision some other kind of person, a Jew, as being anxious and cheap with money. I tried to picture the dark skinned Negroes I would occasionally see when my family and I went into Chicago, and I would try to picture them as especially dirty. But I had no real images to call up. Mainly, I felt the dangerous, upsetting malignity in the tone of Freddy’s voice.

It didn’t take me long to know where that voice came from. When I would go to Freddy’s house, I would hear his father, a volatile and physically dangerous man, carry on the same profane and bigoted patter Freddy echoed. Sadly, as I recall, Freddy’s echo became a full-blown conscious attitude as he grew into his teens. But I remember vividly a warm conversation with him in a wilderness of bramble behind his garage. We had each lived our first years in the city of Chicago before moving out into the suburbs. Freddy, as it turned out, had attended a nursery school in his city neighborhood. He was a great story-teller, and he fascinated me with his observations and anarchic anecdotes. His favorite friend in the nursery school was a boy named Elmer. Freddy was clearly crazy for Elmer, and his face was radiant with humor and pleasure as he recounted the fact that Elmer always wore a black derby hat. Freddy also remembered the beautiful, glass-smooth sheen of Elmer’s brown skin. As is always the case when soulful relatedness is honestly conveyed, I felt what Freddy felt. I could somehow see Elmer in his wonderful hat, and I longed to know him.

Should our own memories fail us, our children, if we take care to observe them closely, can help. I will never forget the day I was sitting beside my first grade daughter Jessie as she thumbed idly through a New York Times Sunday Magazine. Suddenly she stopped turning pages and was apparently lost in a picture of an elaborately swaddled Pakistani girl of about her age. I could feel the change in her, the charge of her intensity. “It’s Lakshmi,” she said reverently. Lakshmi, I learned was an Indian classmate of Jessie’s whom she adored. Jessie carefully cut the picture out of the magazine and kept it on the headboard of her bed for weeks, months. She would commune with this picture the last thing before sleep. Children know soulful relatedness. They know how to feel and to love that way before anyone teaches them otherwise.

When we learn to distinguish and to discern in the manner the culture tells us we should, when we feel ourselves going against the grain in that specific way, we lose our soulful relatedness. We learn that the child or the woman we long for is not appropriate for us. Soulful impulses are inconvenient, often unacceptable, sometimes illicit. We learn the profound business of knowing better, knowing the social ropes, and set about the dispiriting business of getting ahead.