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From the Introduction:
It is notoriously difficult to
talk about the soul. If we believe that we have a soul, we tend to
picture it vaguely – as some essence of ourselves, some core of our being
which constitutes our ‘real’ selves or our ‘higher selves’. Even if we
are not specifically religious – Christians, for instance – we can all
still resonate with the notion that there is some part of us which should
not be sold, betrayed or lost at any cost. We can understand the idea
that we can ‘lose our souls’ and still go on living, just as we can lose
our lives but retain our souls. We still use the word ‘soul’ to mean
something real or authentic. Whenever music, dance, architecture, food –
anything, really – is said to have soul, we mean that it is the real
thing, that it speaks to the deepest part of ourselves. It is not a
tangible reality, of course, but it is felt to be more real than ordinary
life. So the first attribute of soul is as a symbol of depth and
authenticity. Wherever it slips in it stirs in us a sense that there is
more to this world than meets the eye, something more than human behind
mundane events. It stirs, in other words, a religious feeling, regardless
of any religious denomination.
The notion of soul
is also oriented towards death. If we believe that some part of ourselves
lives on after death, that part is the soul. Despite what modern
materialists tell us – that we are only our bodies – we persist in feeling
that, in fact, we inhabit our bodies. We persist in feeling that the most
real moments of our lives occur when we – perhaps our souls – temporarily
leave our bodies, whether in joyful or agonised passion. For example, we
are ‘outside’ of ourselves when we are deeply engaged with a landscape or
a lover, when we are ‘lost’ in a piece of music or dance. Conversely,
when we are in heightened states of rage or fear, we spontaneously say: ‘I
was beside myself! I wasn’t myself!’, ‘I was out of my
head!’. The Greek root of the word ‘ecstasy’ means to ‘stand outside
(oneself)’. Such feelings enable us to experience the reality of what
most, if not all, cultures have always asserted: that when we step outside
ourselves for the last time, at death, the body rots – but this essential,
detachable part of ourselves, our soul, goes on.
While the soul is obviously
connected with our sense of depth, of religion and of death –it is also
connected with the question of life, and of life’s purpose. ‘Where am I?
Who am I? How did I come to be here..?’ asked the philosopher and ‘father
of existentialism’, Søren Kierkegaard. ‘How did I come into the world?
Why was I not consulted?… And if I am compelled to take part in it, where
is the manager? I would like to see him.’ There are times when we have
all echoed Kierkegaard’s indignation with our own questions to the manager
– ‘What is my purpose in life? What am I for? Where do I go when I die?’
Whoever is lucky
enough to have found their purpose on Earth knows that they have done so
because they feel fulfilled. They may have found their purpose in some
job or in some person – a ‘soul-mate’ – but they are convinced that it is
‘meant’. Their lives are not necessarily free of suffering, but they are
full of meaning. Those of us who are not so lucky nevertheless
feel that we should search for a purpose, as if for our own souls. It
might be that the search itself is our purpose.
The poet
John Keats considered such questions too, suggesting that although people
have ‘sparks of divinity’ in them, they are not ‘souls’ till they acquire
an identity – ‘till each one is personally itself’. ‘Call the world if you
please "The vale of Soul-making,"’ he wrote in a letter to his siblings.
‘Then you will find out the use of the world.’ The question of our
paradoxical condition – that we are born with souls yet also, in another
sense, have to ‘make’ them – is at the centre of this book about the soul,
its nature and destiny.
This book is therefore for
people who are wondering what we consist of – what our essential nature is
– and what happens to us when we die. It is for people who are sceptical
of materialistic claims that we consist only of our bodies; sceptical of
rationalist claims that the only reality is one that is subject to narrow
empirical definitions. It is also for people who are disenchanted with
the major religions – and especially Christianity – for squabbling over
liturgy, gender issues, and so forth, and neglecting the one thing
religion is founded on: knowledge of the individual soul and its
relationship with God. It is for people whose supernatural longing leads
them to the East – to Buddhism and Taoism, for instance – only to be
downcast by the difficulty of entering whole-heartedly into an alien
culture and language. It is a book, too, for people who are drawn to New
Age-style 'spirituality' – only to find that this is at best abstract and
diffuse; at worst, woolly and embarrassing. In short, our souls long for
meaning and belief just as much as they ever have; yet they can find no
lasting nourishment in modern-day offerings of philosophy and science. We
are like starving people who are given cook books instead of food.
Fortunately, help
and sustenance lie to hand – not from some outlandish belief system or
foreign land, but from a secret tradition within our own culture. It is a
kind of 'perennial philosophy' which remains true no matter how radically
times appear to change. Why then do we not all embrace it today? Because
it is difficult and demanding. However, it is not difficult because it
is, for example, in German or in academic jargon. It is difficult because
it is subtle and elusive, more an imaginative vision of how things are
than a system of thought. Nor is it demanding because it requires
tremendous effort, will-power and work; it is demanding because it wants
us to turn our whole world-view upside down, forbidding us to fall back on
those ideologies, whether of religious dogma or scientistic literalism,
that we use simplistically to try to settle the matter of reality once and
for all.
Instead, we are talking about
a tradition of thinking or, better, imagining, which asks us to see
through our own suppositions about the world, to dissolve our certainties,
to read many levels into the world as if it were a great poem, and, in
changing our perception, to transform our lives.
Although this way of imagining
is concealed, coursing through Western culture like an underground stream
for the last eighteen hundred years, it occasionally wells up into the
mainstream at times of crisis and transition; times, in fact, like our
own. I have documented the extraordinary and fertility-bearing floods
which inaugurated those great flowerings of culture amongst the
Renaissance magi, the Romantic poets and the depth psychologists, in my
book The Philosophers' Secret Fire. Now I want to describe the
personal implications of this secret tradition for us as individuals.
More, I want to initiate the reader into this brilliant and creative
world-view in a language no longer alchemical and arcane but as
straightforward as possible. For we all have to re-discover the ancient
truths and re-tell the old myths in a way that speaks to our own
generation.
Although its shape constantly
changes to suit the age, the central tenets of the tradition remain the
same. The idea, for example, that psyche, soul, constitutes the
very fabric of reality; that humans are individual manifestations of a
collective Soul of the World which interconnects all things; that
imagination, not reason, is the chief faculty of the soul – though not the
pale imitation of imagination as we now know it; that there is another
world whence the soul comes at birth and where it goes to at death; and
that the idea of gnosis, of a personal and transforming experience
of divinity, is of the essence.
These are the sorts of notions
I hope to unpack in the course of this book. Together they add up to a
world-view very different from the one to which we in 21st
century Western culture are accustomed. It is a sacred outlook, so to
speak, which is rich in meaning but neither dogmatic nor agnostic. Nor is
it against other systems of thought, such as science, but simply gives us
the perceptual tools to look through science's assumptions and to relate
its hypotheses back to their mythic origins. Nor is it against religion.
It merely enables us to dissolve the sclerotic ideologies which have
hardened the heart of religion, letting it beat again. It particularly
does not require new-fangled ideas or jargon, but tries to apply new
insight to old ideas in order to present them afresh.
To this end, I begin with a
survey of the way the soul is understood in tribal cultures very different
from ours. I contrast their ideas with the sophisticated notion of soul
developed by the Greek founders of our culture, and especially its
apotheosis among the Neoplatonists. They best expounded the traditional
view that soul is the flagstone of reality, underlying both us and the
world, and forming a bond between the two which modern dualism has
mistakenly severed. By re-introducing soul to the world we re-enchant the
environment and re-connect with our own experiences of the divine which we
have been encouraged to ignore or forget, just as Western culture has
suffered a collective loss of memory concerning soul itself.
I also re-introduce the soul's
traditional spokesman – that guide, guardian angel, Muse or daimon of
which Socrates spoke so eloquently – and show how it transforms chance to
fate, and fate to a Providence in which whatever randomly occurs is seen
to have been forever ordained.
I describe the strengths of
our historically recent and culturally unique consciousness, centred on an
indomitable ego – and also its weaknesses, not least our own fond belief
that it is the highest form of consciousness there is. Central to this
deconstruction is the role of initiation in dismantling our tendency to be
over-conscious, over-rational – and over-literal. And I shall stress the
necessity of reviving those rites of initiation which, though lost to us,
are still informally and unconsciously enacted, especially by teenagers,
in a desperate bid to keep us in touch with soul, our authentic selves and
the world at large.
Lastly, I describe what
happens to the soul when it leaves the body, both during life and after
death. For part of the impetus behind this book was provided by an
eminent English novelist who, in reviewing the book Everyman by the
eminent US novelist, Philip Roth, praises Roth's view of death as an
exchange of 'our fullness for that endless nothing.' He further
congratulates Roth on 'casting such a cold crystalline
eye on the unfairness of death, and concluding that there are no
answers: just the terror of nothingness that we all share.' But, on the
contrary, we do not all share such an impoverished view and, as exponents
of imagination, these novelists should know this – and know better.
Anyone with even a modicum of
initiatory experience knows that death is a portal into that greater
reality which can already be glimpsed in this world as an imaginative
experience of the Otherworld. Whatever physical pain members of
traditional cultures may suffer, they do not suffer the mental anguish of
eminent modern novelists because they know that they will pass seamlessly
into an afterlife where, gathered up by rejoicing ancestors, they will
live forever in an ideal version of their beloved homeland, free of
sickness and want. Many, perhaps most, people in Western culture –
particularly those who are uncontaminated by scientistic and existential
nihilism – believe much the same thing. As the Greeks maintained, death
is not the opposite of life but of birth – life is a continuous realm out
of which we are born; which (as Plato says) we can dimly remember during
our existence; and to which we return when we die – return to that
totality of life compared to which mortal existence seems but a dream-like
fragment.
At the same
time, there is no doubt the Afterlife can appear, at worst, as hellish
and, at best, as a Hades-like realm of shades which, according to old
Irish laments for example, are pale by comparison with the richness and
colour of life in this world. The Afterlife is paradoxical, in other
words; and I shall explain how it tends to mirror our own souls so that we
get the Afterlife we deserve – the Afterlife we already, in a sense,
inhabit without being aware of it.
It is a purely modern
affectation to claim that we can know nothing of life after death. It
means ignoring the accounts of mystics, poets, mediums, medicine-men,
shamans, prophets and so-called Near-Death Experiencers, to say nothing of
those who have crossed the narrow sword-bridge during moments of love or
rapture, during heightened states of illness or drug-taking, in visions or
dreams. Such experiences may last only moments, but they can out-weigh in
importance years of mundane existence. ‘Strange as it may seem,’ wrote
the most famous of all humanists, Erasmus, in 1519, ‘there are even men
among us who think, like Epicurus, that the soul dies with the body.
Mankind are great fools, and will believe anything.’
©
Copyright Patrick Harpur, May 2010 |
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