A Complete Guide to The Soul is a
far-reaching account of our shifting perceptions and attitudes towards the soul
throughout history. Patrick Harpur paints a stunning portrait drawing from Plato,
comparative religion, alchemy, the Renaissance magi, the Romantic poets,
shamanism, folklore and the anthropology of myth…
The descriptions of the human experience
of the soul and spirit can only be approximations or metaphorical, since “to
have” such an experience the self implicitly disappears or merges with
something beyond the realm of the senses. The Romantic poets and the world’s mystical
traditions provide the best examples.
Here are a few modern
descriptions of the experience of spirit:
Thomas Merton (Zen and the Birds
of Appetite) speaks of the ground of being: "The spark which is my true self
is the flash of the Absolute recognizing itself in me. This realization at the
apex is a coincidence of all opposites... a fusion of freedom and unfreedom,
being and unbeing, life and death, self and non-self, man and God. The spark is
not so much an entity which one finds but an event, an explosion which happens
as all opposites clash within oneself. Then it is seen that the ego is not. It
vanishes in its non-seeing when the flash of the spark alone is....The purpose
of all learning is to dispose us for this kind of event. The purpose of various
disciplines is to provide ways or paths which lead to this capacity for
ignition."
Ken Wilber (One Taste):
“In the heart of Emptiness there
is a mysterious impulse, mysterious because there is actually nothing in the
heart of Emptiness (for there is nothing in Emptiness, period). Yet there it
is, this mysterious impulse, the impulse to…create. To sing, to shine, to
radiate; to send forth, reach out and celebrate; to sing and shout and walk
about; to effervesce and bubble over, this mysterious exuberance in the heart
of Emptiness.”
David Richo (Shadow Dance) has
another vision: “The True Self is the farthest reach of our potential, i.e.,
God, the complete articulation of the best of our humanity, the actualization
of every potential for human love, wisdom, and healing. This is not a person
above us as traditional theism teaches. God is the climax of human powers that
made an appearance in Christ and keeps appearing in many other saints. It makes
an appearance in us every time we love. God’s presence is that moment of love
made human in any here and now.”
In A Complete Guide to The Soul Harpur
suggests a threefold division of ‘body, soul & spirit’.
Here’s an excerpt from an
interview with him:
“Soul in relation to body likes
to personify itself as Jung’s anima, or as the personal daimon whom Plato
describes in his myth of Er who returns from the dead at the end of The
Republic. It’s different from soul in relation to spirit, which is where I
prefer to use the word as the Neoplatonists used it. For them, soul was a whole
realm intermediate between the spiritual or intelligible world (nous) and our
own familiar sensory, material world. It was Anima Mundi, the Soul of the
World, wherein dwell the daimons who link us, as Socrates remarked, to the
gods.
…But, in another sense, soul and
spirit can be thought of as symbols of the two main perspectives through which
we view the world—the two perspectives which create the world we see. We
experience them as a tension within ourselves between the spiritual longing for
Oneness, unity, purity, light, transcendence etc. and the imaginative need to
recognize Manyness, multiplicity, labyrinthine entanglement, darkness,
immanence etc. …The great ascents of the spirit into rarified mountain realms
where the One dwells in blinding light can be read as a disastrous neglect,
even repression, of … the underworld journey of the soul whose course is
tortuous and mazy, moving towards darkness and death…. the painful initiatory
dismembering of the shaman, to the rather unsexed and anodyne rebirth system of
‘spiritual’ paths.
I prefer, as Jung says, wholeness
to perfection.”
For the full interview check out:
