- Hildegarde of Bingen
These twelve seminars have grown out of my quest for a deeper meaning to life - a meaning deeper than that offered by either religion or science or by philosophy as it stands today. The general thrust of our culture is immensely exciting in some respects but it is also ruthless, brutal and predatory and these characteristics increasingly dominate political life, business concerns and the media, not to mention relationships between individuals. In these seminars I attempt to show how a deeper understanding of the psyche can offer insight into the reasons for our present difficulties and solutions to them, based on a different perspective on life. This perspective has evolved over the course of my own life which has seen immense changes, political and social, over the last fifty years.
It seems to me that we are living in a mythic time of choice and that this possibility of choice is focussed on bringing into being a new kind of understanding of what life is about. It could be said that theology, philosophy, psychology and science are converging at the point where each is seeking to answer the central questions of our existence: what is the purpose of our existence on this planet? What could explain us to ourselves? What is the true nature and potential of our consciousness? How could we develop a new morality related to a different understanding of life? Just as we are now discovering that consciousness is distributed through every cell of the body, soon we may discover that it is distributed in every photon or particle of light throughout the universe. As it dawned on the early Portuguese explorers that the world was not flat but round, so the realisation is dawning on us that the universe may not be dead, insentient matter but may be conscious in every part of itself. Our own human consciousness may be a manifestation, an epiphany of that greater consciousness: like fish in water, like birds in the air, we may be immersed in a sea of energy so inconceivably fine that as yet its existence can only be inferred by science. This sea embraces or perhaps connects all universes; it is beyond what Jung called the collective unconscious yet contains this within itself. It is paradoxically at once "greater than the great" and "smaller than the small," co-inherent with the great galaxies of space and with the tiniest particle of matter. Older traditions named it Spirit or Soul or Cosmic Consciousness - the greater psychic reality to which our own life belongs and of which, for the most part, we are tragically unaware.
This Course in twelve seminars is about:
What is the Soul?
The soul is the archetypal principle of
The root of the concept of soul as a feminine, containing entity is the Great Goddess or Great Mother of the Bronze Age (see Seminar 2). The soul in its widest sense is the underlying gossamer-fine invisible web of relationships which connect the life of the universe with the life of this planet. This web connects our human lives in ways which are not yet understood by science to the matrix of planetary life and beyond that, to the immensity of the life of the universe, perhaps to many universes or dimensions as yet undiscovered.
What connects us to this greater web? It is the instinct in all of us to seek relationship, to respond to the attraction of people, ideas, mythic images. It is the capacity to imagine, to feel, to make intuitive associations, bringing things together that are felt to be related. Creativity comes from the deepest recesses of instinct and feeling. It is through our longing to understand, our capacity to feel and to imagine that we are most closely connected to nature and the cosmos. Feeling and intuition make the connection with a reality initially beyond the reach of mind, acting like a plug connecting us to the socket of that deeper reality. Later, we can reflect and attempt to understand what we have been attracted to, what gives deep meaning to our lives. What part of the body do you touch when someone asks "Where is the seat of your feeling?" Most people instinctively touch their heart or the centre of their chest.
To the Greeks, the soul was the breath of life: they called it psyche. The Romans called the soul anima. Both of these nouns are feminine. The Oxford Dictionary defines the soul (old English sawol, sawl) as:
The word 'unconscious' was used by Jung in order to move towards a scientific understanding of aspects of consciousness not yet fully recognised or understood. It was not a new concept but had already appeared during the nineteenth century in the work of certain writers and philosophers. Today, however, it is often used in a limited, clinical sense, related to the personal psyche alone. Even in the Jungian sense, the word "unconscious" has lost the wider dimension of the meaning that the word 'soul' as anima-mundi or the soul of the world once had, as it was once used by poets, visionaries and philosophers.
The soul in the wider concept of a universal containing and connecting matrix needs to be placed in the context of the story of galactic and planetary evolution. To understand our relationship to this great matrix we have to go back to the beginning of evolution and follow the whole process of cosmic, planetary and human evolution coming into being over some 12-15 billion years. (this material is not included in this seminar. I would refer those interested to The Universe Story by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry). But I would say here that it is important to know that we have come from the stars, that we are, in our essence, even in the composition of our physical bodies, starry matter, stardust.
Source: 12 Seminars
