Soul, the Living Mirror

This investigation begins with the question: What is the Soul?

(A great debt is owed to James Hillman for the following ideas.)

In some conceptions the Soul is seen almost as a spiritual organ. Although intangible it is connected in some fashion to the body. It is not like an accessory because it exists somewhere inside the human body. It remains well within the body during life, only departing at death.

Here I will present a different take on the Soul. I am calling this idea, the Living Mirror.

The idea of the Soul as an object given at birth has always seemed flawed. The biggest flaw in this idea is its inability to explain this quality: different people had different Souls. This has nothing to do with the idea that everyone has a unique and personal Soul. No, it was more that different people had different kinds of Souls. What causes this difference in kind?

I could not readily see everything that made a difference but one of the factors that I could identify was direct cultivation. In other words, those people who made an effort to cultivate their Souls had a different kind of Soul that people who did not.

How does one cultivate the Soul? A person develops his or her Soul through the act of reflection. Now the inclination to reflect is part of a person’s temperament. Yet at the same time anyone can develop the skill of reflection. This is the idea behind the Living Mirror. It is called the Living Mirror to emphasis its dynamism. Soul is not static. It is called Living because it must be nurtured to develop and grow.

It is not just the action of reflecting, but the ability to reflect that is the key to the Soul. The power of reflection is the origin of Soul.

Xander,

Did you read his “Suicide and the Soul”, or another book?

Dunamis

Great post Xander.

Nature as teacher. The soul is like a still lake reflecting the birds, the sky, the clouds, the sun, the moon, the whole world. When all these things are no longer reflected, the lake remains reflecting nothing. Why does the lake reflect the world? Because it contains the world within it. The world is the soul’s reflection. The reason: To cultivate soul.

A

I am reading Re-Visioning Psychology
(Actually your earlier mention of his name here on ILP brought him to my attention.)

I like the concept that the soul is more formed than inherited. Reflection and contemplation and life experiences actually influence the soul.

I don’t know if this question is addressed or if the definition of soul is so separate that this is an irrelevant question.

How does this interact with things such as past lives or reincarnation? Such ideas imply that the soul is something else which can carry with them things that they have experienced before. However, it could be that the soul and consciousness are separate and consciousness is what actually carries these things. Then would we use consciousness instead of soul in most of the cases we use soul now?

Questions from the mind of an infant, but sometimes children ask the important questions and sometimes they ask drivel. You be the judge.

Hi Xanderman

Now you’re touching on some ancient ideas essential to esoteric Christianity. Where Christendom asserts a ready made soul, as I understand it, a soul is our potential and in christianity is called “re-birth”. We are born with an essence, a seed of the soul, that through cultivation could become a soul. The how of it and the nature of reflection is another matter.

This is an Image of Soul from a decidedly Western viewpoint. It does not address the idea of linear progression like Hindu reincarnation. It may connect with a more Buddhist idea of reincarnation. There is a question in some Buddhist traditions, “Where did the [historic] Buddha go after he died?” The answer is, “Underneath your feet.” There meaning that Buddha became the World. There is nothing that is not Buddha.

This idea of the Living Mirror is born from the tradition of Depth Psychology. Which has its most famous proponent in Carl Jung, but which as Hillman point out, goes back all the way to Heraclitus and his fragment, “You could not discover the limits of the soul, even if you traveled by every path in order to do so; such is the depth of its meaning.”

The Image of the Living Mirror is meant to enliven a polycentic approach. It is different from what Jung called the “monotheism of consciousness”.

The blending of the terms “consciousness” and “soul” can be a disservice to Soul.

Okay, so the soul continues to change or evolve as life continues. Over the course of a life, the soul continues to reflect and change based on an individual basis.

However, what happens when the mirror has nothing to reflect? What happens to it at that point? Does the soul become its own, or does it take on the qualities of the nothing it reflects?

Again, overall I like this viewpoint of the soul, but how does it interact with all the other questions we’ve brought up about soul. If taken from a western viewpoint, where reincarnation and the like don’t really come into play, then some of those questions become a bit easier, but still many remain.

What happens when the soul stagnates? It would be difficult to do, but I’m sure its possible, that a person could cease to reflect upon themselves, at least for a short time. Does the soul motivate this to change? If it is developed and nurtured, can in be injured as well, if the reflecting is harmful?

Well I’ll stop for now. Work calls!

Xanderman

Does Hillman distinguish between the unified “I” state of the soul and the multiplicty of our diverse essence as many “i’s” which is its “seed”?

As he later goes out to say “we can be saved from this literalism.”

This idea you present sounds much like the spiritual organ that I pointed out before. Soul is the power to reflect that can be strengthen through acts of reflection. One does not just act, one can also reflect on his or her actions. This enriches the Soul.

Soul gives us perspective. Perspective encompasses the diversity of perspective, not just between people but also within them as well. Perspective is inherently unorthodox.

There are also more radical implications here that are decidedly non-Christian. If Soul is the power to reflect then human beings are not the exclusive Soul bearers.

Xanderman

Yes, in esoteric Christianity, this is called impartial consciousness of oneself or self awareness while in the process of reacting to life’s impressions. This is not self consciousness which forces a restrictive distorted perceptions but impartial consciousness of self which is expansive.

If we were to acquire a soul, it would retain perspective since its function is to reconcile and connect the higher with the lower which is perspective itself. The soul in potential experiences this in flashes or in short moments since its pluralism is in opposition to a unified perspective so rather than experiencing the forest, we battle ourselves within its trees.

Perspective appears unorthodox simply because we seek to understand the nature of the soul without a soul.

I agree. This power of conscious reflection is open to all conscious beings. It is consciousness that can reflect on the technicality of life on earth in relation to itself. Man’s dilemma is that he believes he is conscious where in reality it is something that must be acquired and exists in us intermittently and for short spans of time.

Where the outer man or the body works in unison or as one, the inner man is in chaos. It is the soul that reconciles the chaos offering man his potential.

Solomon is like Socrates describes. The inner man does not match the outer man. The lily has a fully evolved essence that manifests on earth as we see it. Its outer nature matches reflects the fullness and uniqueness of its being. Solomon lacks this since he lacks the soul that could reconcile the inner with the outer man.

Where the soul of the lily is tied to the earth and complete in its evolution, man’s evolution is beyond the confines of the earth and its expansiveness is the domain of the soul where at this level, it can reconcile the higher with the earth for the purpose of the earth’s spiritualization or working the garden… The task is to acquire it or re-birth which is the goal of esoteric Christianity.

Doesn’t this fit in with your radical implications?

You keep confusing Soul with Spirit.
Souls are all Identical, Spirits are all Different, unless everything we say is truth.You can not control your Soul or your spirit, because they are not
Yours.In order for something to be truth, it is got to be 100% to exist as
truth.Your life (and everybody elses) was never your choice, and your flesh,( including brain ) is a matter that belongs to your parents, you are only Spirit that thanks to “your” soul reading this words right now.
Soul is distance between first and last breath, in “our” senses recognized
as Birth, Spirit is Creation, that carries" Your" signature.
When person Die, Soul is going back to where it came from, and Spirit is
going into dust with flesh.Your creation exist , as long as some other living
soul is feeling it.
Just like my Mixes over here it’s who I am forever, my words in the other hand, are not mine, because
I do not have Copyright on Truth :wink:

       much love and music !

The 5th Grand Master of Zen Buddhism when looking for his successor instructed any of his deciples who would understand the Essence of Mind to compose a verse. Shen-hsiu wrote:

The body is the tree of enlightenment,
The mind is like a clear mirror-stand.
Polish it diligently time and again,
Not letting it gather dust.

  • Shen-hsiu

The 5th Master instructed his deciples to practice this verse in order to see Essential nature.

Hui-Neng who was illiterate then composed the following verse and had a literate monk write it on a wall:

Enlightenment originally has no tree,
And a clear mirror is not a stand.
Originally there’s not a single thing -
Where can dust be attracted.

  • Hui Neng, 6th Grand Master of Zen Buddhism

The mandate was passed to Hui Neng. The qualites of the no-thing the soul reflects is in fact it’s original nature. No-thing is not simply nothing, it is in sanscrit called shunyata which means no thing and all things…void if you like.

A

How, exactly, is any of this measured?
What does ‘the soul’ explain?

Dr. Satanical

Lacking a soul we can only get a taste of the life of a soul. Experiencing this taste is the goal of those seeking satori or gnosis. It is an experiential moment that one doesn’t stand outside of and measure since what does the measuring is already corrupt… The measuring comes in the gradual development of inner taste which distinguishes the truth from the illusion within. It is not something one can do on their own which is why esoteric schools began to exist in ancient times to help the development of impartial inner taste.

The soul of man explains and clarifies man’s nothingness without its recognition.

The dangers of depth psychology are related to the normal misconceptions of cultivation. It is far easier to cultivate facets of a corrupt ego that one finds appealing and assume it to be cultivating a soul. In a sense it is but the results of this corrupt cultivation further serves to imprison the human essence and the seed of the soul it carries binding it to the earth. The result is that all this good intention only serves to turn demonic leaving a person in a far worse position than before dabbling in such things.

Thanks, that begins to piece it together better. So, what we are dealing with is more of a blend of the western concept of soul with the eastern philosophy towards it.

The void is all things, yet no-thing. So, with reflection the soul can be “sculpted” into reflecting certain things thus creating something unique and individual. Depending on the person reflecting you get different images and concepts in such soul. But, once the reflecting stops, the mirror returns to reflecting everything and no-thing simultaneously. It becomes that which it began as. Completing the cycle or journey that it experienced. Another very eastern concept.

I like. Thanks LA that helped a lot.

Skydaemon,

The stagnation of the Soul ties into Hillman’s larger project: the importance of the imagination.

Now we come to a crucial point. A schism that divides two worlds.

   (emphasis in original)

Do we acknowledge the autonomy, the self-moving power of the non-human? There are genuine consequnces if we don’t. We have to re-examine the reality of the imagination. Imagination has a power to see what cannot be seen any other way. Imagination can see what is metaphoric and nebulous.

The contemporary perspective places great weight upon the rational way of seeing. This is a literal viewpoint. If we accept Hillman’s idea concering the literal then this is also an egocentric viewpoint. We divide the world. We consider the literal way of seing to be real, and hence important. While the seeing with the imagination is considered unreal, and unimportant. Only madmen, poets and artists (who can be considered different kinds of madmen) give the imagination any importance.

Yet mental illness or psychopathology as Hillman calls it, is the cost of our exclusive emphasis on the literal view.

Xanderman, how does Hillman define imagination? For the purposes of the soul I accept its definition in two ways: It as a function that takes the place of a necessary function and also the result of the excess of desire over ability. I’m curious if there is any similarity.

Hmmm, and I never looked at it quite like that before. Nice. I think your question on reincarnation has answered itself. If the journey is not complete at death, what must the soul do?

A