Five lives of soul and shadow (beginning of post)

[Steve Thorp]

For  some time I have thought that we need a new and poetic integration for our troubled times. There are projects out there  of course- notably Ken Wilber’s Integral Life, the recent field of Positive Psychology, the Human Givens Institute, among others. All these have something important to offer but none seem to me to really grasp the existential need to locate distress and joy within the context of the ecological and social crises we are facing. And the most comprehensive of these – Wilber’s Integral project – for all its many strengths, has become hopelessly hierarchal and obsessed with ‘spirit’. 

My sense is that such an integration must be more grounded – essentially of the earth – and must recognise our essential kinship to our fellow lifeforms and connection to the earth on which we have evolved. The nearest I have found to a incubator for the idea that we may have to turn upside down our assumptions about life, psychology and everything is Dark Mountain and in a sense, my sketching of this new integration is inspired by the idea of uncivilisation (I might call it unpsychology!). This post is a tentative beginning of my exploration of the twenty-first century soul:

 

"If we go back to first principles, a life of soul and shadow is humanly possible. This life is not a pursuit of ‘self’ or ‘spirit’, however, rather a mindful joining together of streams of ‘soul’; a distillation of deep and turbulent waters into five plain measures. Each cup holds enough of us to fill up over a lifetime – hopefully not to overspill.

If each of these dimensions of soul is approached humbly and without assumption then it is possible for us to move deeply, and find ourselves in the realms that some call spirit, but which might equally well be recognised intuitively as the vast, unexplored spaces of our internal mental world.

Here are five lives. They are entwined; plaited together; inextricable; interdependent...."

Find the full post at my blog: www.lifescape.me.uk and let me know what you think...

[Tim Fox]

Thanks for this! It reminded me of the Sendivogius quote: “The greater part of the soul is outside the body.” Richard Reese conveyed this understanding in his book "What is Sustainable" when he cited an essay about condors in which the author concluded “that condorness consisted of 10% condor and 90% place… The same thing is true for humans, too.” The more you actively compose your memories in and of healthy places and enhance those places through attentiveness to, and participation in, them, the more those places become meaningful aspects of your identity, your selfhood, your en-soulment.

[Steve Thorp]

Thanks Tim that's really helpful - I love the idea of my me-ness being 90% place - it makes it important to be in the right one if I can possibly have any control over it! 

[Tim Fox]

Hi Steve,

I keep thinking about your “Five Lives of Soul and Shadow” piece. After letting it percolate for a couple days, I sat down at my keyboard and this is what came out. I thought you might be interested.

It started with your reference to Ken Wilber. Though I have not delved deeply into his copious writings, I share your feeling about his overemphasis on hierarchy. It’s unfortunate, because he imbeds a very important concept within his hierarchic structure that I feel is actually a much needed contrast to the concept of hierarchy. That contrasting concept is holarchy. I found the word in Arthur Koestler’s book The Ghost in the Machine, where he coined it along with its root word holon (defined as a whole that is at the same time part of a greater whole that is at the same time part of a greater whole etc.). Wilber uses both holon and holarchy in his work, but as I understand it, he sees a holarchy as a kind of hierarchy. To my way of thinking, hierarchies are stacked, top down social constructs that can be composed of separate pieces capable of being dismantled and reassembled. Bottom pieces and top pieces are essentially interchangeable. And there is a qualitative ranking built in.

I conceive of holarchic relationships differently, in a synergistic way that is not simply a hierarchic variation because it equalizes the significance of each level and acknowledges that the nested whole/parts of which holarchies are composed are not interchangeable, nor even separable. In my view, the levels of a holarchy are related more like watersheds than say, pyramids. In the Cascades where I live, my house sits in the Horse Creek watershed which is a mappable, discrete whole, but also a part of the McKenzie River watershed (equally mappable and discrete), which is a part of the Willamette River watershed, which is a part of the Columbia River watershed, which is a part of the Pacific Ocean watershed. Thus, if we stand on my front porch and I ask you what watershed we are in, you can offer five different answers and they will all be right. Reading your piece, I started to think of your five lives of the soul (particularly #4: life of connection) in the same light, a holonic light; each as a whole part of the soul of the River of Life that flows through the existential landscape through which we flow as individuals.

In fact, our individual bodies are holarchically self-organized. The whole heart, for example, is a part of the whole individual. Remove the heart and the individual expires, and visa versa. They are inseparable.

What the condor quote in my previous comment suggests is that bodily inseparability does not end with our skin encapsulated form, but extends through us into the landscape at large. And to take this awareness in the opposite direction, I recently read that our bodies consist of ten times more bacterial cells than human cells. If we combine the two ideas —that the body we’ve learned to identify as the 100% self is actually 90% place and, at the same time, only 1/10^th human — the nature of self-identity suddenly becomes very gray (our self-identity is only 1% what we have been taught to believe it is), to say nothing of the familiar view of the soul as a quality of the individual self. In this light, holonic language seems essential for articulating both the notions of the self and soul in a reality that appears to be far less autonomous than we’ve long imagined.

Instead, we might use another variant of holon (offered by Elisabet Sahtouris in her book, Earthdance) to see that we are predominantly holonomous beings. And a holonomous (vs. autonomous) understanding of the soul is what I saw in your piece when you wrote of the five lives as a “mindful joining together of streams of ‘soul.’” Reading this, I envisioned soul as the water that runs through the hearts of (and in so doing shapes) the multiple ‘watersheds of meaningful self,’ from the level of subatomic particles, through the elemental, molecular, organ systemic, individual, familial, communal, societal, cultural, species, ecosystemic, bioregional, planetary etc. all the way to the Universal. Seeing soul in this way reveals why all the attempts to locate it within the human body have failed. Individuals no more possess an isolated separate soul than the McKenzie River is in singular possession of the water flowing through it. The water is in constant circulation within the entire body of the land, one soul shared by all the distinct watersheds of the earth, each of which expresses it in a unique way. I can’t imagine a more fully integrated and grounded sense of soul and self than that.

The broader implications of what this conceptualization of self/soul means seem vast, and now that I have a clearer sense of it, I’m excited to explore further. I thought you might find it useful as well. Thanks for the inspiration.

 

Best regards from the mountains named for the way water likes to flow through them,

Tim Fox, Oregon Cascades

[Steve Thorp]

Tim, this is a wonderful response. Like you I'm going to let your piece percolate for a few days before respionding more fully - as there's some rich connections between your wonderful landscape metaphors and the five lives. I nearly called it five souls so that bit really helps me to get the flow of the piece! I also don't want to throw out the quadrants and holons baby with the wilber bathwater - so that is also really helpful to me.

All best wishes from me too - from the really wet Autumn hills of the Preselis in West Wales. Here the water is cascading down the roadsides and verges at the moment - just a normal Welsh October!!

[Steve Thorp]

Tim, I've flat out with 'civilised' work for the past couple of weeks and no space in my head for creative stuff and the moment. However I found your piece - Mountain lion - on the web and loved it. Just wanted to say...