THE MORTAL SOUL

The soul is corporeal and, like the foot, is part of the body. Montaigne.

With the recent success of the wholebody workshops in the South Island, led by Karen Whalen, perhaps it is timely to look at our foundations. I think it is true to say that the ‘spirit’ and the ‘body’ have had an antagonistic relationship; or perhaps we should say that our ideas about these two supposed entities have been antagonistic. The soul or spirit is immaterial and the antithesis of the material body. Or so the story has always gone.

In antiquity, philosophers of the Ionian school were materialists; but the Platonic School saw the world divided between matter and spirit – the body was not of the spirit and very much the inferior partner.

Two horses draw the chariot (of the personality). One of the horses is good and the other one is not. The good horse represents spirit, is noble, well formed, handsome, and tending to behave magnificently. The other horse, representing the appetites, is crooked, lumbering, ill-made, stiff-necked, short-throated, with bloodshot eyes.[1]

It was the Platonic School that decisively influenced later Christian theology. And this view has coloured our whole culture ever since. As Christianity gained ascendancy, ‘the flesh’ was viewed as the source of corruption, evil and temptation. The body has had a very bad press. Today, the body is OK in the gym, but its imperious desires can still lead to trouble.

This leaves us in a difficult position. In focusing we stress the body, but we don’t want to be labeled ‘materialist’. So, in saying that the body has its own mysterious wisdom we are tempted to use ‘spiritual’ language. Or we fall back on New Age Romanticism (the body’s association with Mother Earth). Sometimes we resort to meaningless scientific clichés (like the body has ‘universal quantum wave forms). This merely underlines our plight. Writers on focusing, like myself, have a hard time finding the language to describe what we are doing. There is no community of discourse to which we can refer, no common language on which we can draw, no tradition in which we can comfortably place ourselves.

We haven’t yet seen our place in the big picture. For there is a big picture, a struggle that began long ago with the effort to free ourselves from religion and mythology that would place the centre of our life elsewhere than in our corporeality, displacing our physical existence. When Christianity took over we had One God instead of many and the focus on spirituality got stronger, the demonising of our embodied life even worse.

A significant turning point in this sad history was the Renaissance discovery of physical beauty. It was a time when our flesh and blood was affirmed after this long period of desecration. The change in artistic styles illustrates this graphically. In the Christian age before the Renaissance the human figure was flat, emaciated and otherworldly; Michael Angelo’s ‘David’ signals the big change. This work celebrates complete physicality, as does the work of most masters of the Renaissance. There have been ghastly backslidings for sure, like when the Pope decreed that all male genitalia in the Vatican collection of classical art should be fig-leafed.

The Renaissance was a breakthrough and many thinkers, poets and artists turned to the classics that espoused atheism and materialism, as did the poet-philosopher Lucretius. Some Renaissance thinkers, like Giordano Bruno, who was influenced by Lucretius, were burned at the stake; Galileo, almost! But the artists and poets of the Renaissance got away with it because they used poetry and images – harder for the Inquisition to nail down. Essayists like Montaigne hid their affinity with Lucretius in private footnotes. Not that there was an all-out revolt against the teachings of the church; this would have been personally very disturbing and highly dangerous. But a new vision was on the horizon.

The discovery of the body’s importance in psychology has been slow. I’m not talking about experimental psychology, neurology and bio-chemistry, but the discovery of our own corporeality; I mean the discovery of soul as physical existence

Why is this history so important for us? Because without it we haven’t been able to name what is happening. We cannot see that we are part of a monumental historical struggle to give physical existence its due place in the scheme of things. When we look at philosophy, theology, the practice and teaching of all the religions over the years, and even our attempt to import Eastern practices – they all stress, in one way or another, that the desires of the flesh are the cause of suffering or sin; and that all our noble intuitions do not come from our blood and brains, but from a ‘higher source’; that our true self is something other than the physical. All this is a bum steer. It disembodies us. For 2000 years we have suffered the body’s systematic degradation in the scheme of things.

For me, the turning point was the incredible story of evolution and Darwin’s monumental discovery of ‘natural selection’ – which Daniel Dennett called ‘the greatest idea ever’. Dennett went on to say that the ‘immaterial immortal soul’ is a crutch, and that Darwin replaced that idea with that of a ‘material mortal soul’. Very much like Montaigne had said all those years before, ‘The soul is corporeal and, like the foot, is part of the body’.

For people who work in or are interested in depth psychology and are following the turn we have taken, it is important to understand these historical changes and to realise the long struggle these ideas have had to find expression.

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[1] The chariot allegory from Plato’s Phaedrus

Contact – stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

03 891 2264

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TENDENCIES.

It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way. Oscar Wilde

Many times I have poked fun at the modern obsession with making goals. It is particularly pernicious in some counselling and self-help books. According to these experts nothing is achieved in life without the careful constructions of one’s goals. But in truth, goals are ego-driven fantasies, often quite detached from the multifaceted nature of reality and, no matter how unrealistic they may be, we are encouraged to believe that the future is ours to fabricate as we wish. And to our detriment, the compulsion to make goals keeps us in our thinking-heads.

A more interesting question is to enquire about one’s ‘tendencies’. This is a much more delicate procedure and requires one to listen rather than dictate; and not merely to listen to the many voices within, but not to be too hasty in taking sides. Big questions are usually arrived at somewhat outside conscious awareness. Eventually, you find yourself going in this direction rather than that. Sometimes when you are agonizing over what to do, you are vaguely aware that something inside has already decided. You know what your inclination is and that it will win in the end – that is, unless some demon wipes out all your alternatives. Incidentally, I use the word ‘tendency’ in the same sense as ‘inclination’.

If you say to me, “Ah yes, but it’s not always wise to follow one’s inclinations, is it?” True, but not to follow a certain inclination is merely another inclination of a different kind. We have dozens of inclinations, all at cross purposes.

A tendency or inclination is quite different from a goal. A goal is idea you place in the future that is suppose to drag the present towards it. It is, as they say in philosophy, ‘teleological’ – what we call purposeful – like the complete design of a new car before the car is made. But a tendency does not create a future – it sniffs its way forward, feeling for openings. A tendency is opportunistic, staying close to what’s available, with a constant eye on what is going on. Sure, there are basic needs, but a tendency is governed by what is possible among the shifting sands of contingency.

A tendency has been described as a ‘seed, a sort of potentiality of the soul. Wherever you are destined to go, you will go. Whatever you are destined to be, you will be – like the acorn is destined to be an oak tree. But a tendency is more malleable than that, more adaptable. You can’t tell – an acorn might become a daffodil. There isn’t really an end goal. I definitely have a tendency to grow, but if the soil is more suitable to being a daffodil, that’s what I’ll be. I may have been an acorn to start with, but oak trees may not have been on the menu. In the natural world, of course, this cannot happen; an acorn cannot grow into anything else but oak tree. But we do not entirely live in the natural world. To a large extent we have built the world we live in. We have built lots of worlds to live in – they are called ‘cultures’.

If I had been unfortunate enough to have been born in Afghanistan the pressure of circumstances, the culture, might have made me a respectable paidup member of the Mujahidin.

There is no pre-programming in my soul to make me a typical westerner. They say there are a many ways to skin a cat – so too there are a many ways to survive – it depends where you wake up born.

It’s not that you come into the world as a blank slate upon which anything can be written, that your culture and family environment completely determine what you will become. You have a nature, but it is so malleable that it amounts to having a conglomerate of natures. I am quite aware that I would be just as fulfilled if I’d become a Master Plumber or an archivist in the Nature History Museum or a photographer for National Geographic Magazine. I’m sure I would have done reasonably well in any of these. As it happened, as a young man, I stumbled across a mentor who nudged me in the direction I have actually gone. But I can say with confidence that I was not born to be a therapist. I don’t mind that because I have become quite good at it.

Our tendencies are in conflict with each other, a perfectly natural competition. As we evolve as personalities only a few are picked out for survival. Those inclinations that survive the rough and tumble of our family and culture determine what we think are our ‘choices’. The truth is: we grope our way through life. And therapy, the person-centred way we do it, is a good way of groping. Just getting hold of that is a considerable relief. It means I can let go and relax a bit.

I can’t control what’s coming at me in the next minute, never mind next year. I cannot control life however I might want to.

Have you ever wondered why a drinker cannot stop drinking or a drug addict can’t stop using. We find this amazing. “But it’s killing you”, a friend might say, believing that such a reasonable point should make a difference. Both friend and the addict think this is true. It should make a difference, so neither can understand why the addict doesn’t stop. The friend feels impatient and the addict feels foolish and weak.

If the addict had enough confidence he might say to the friend, “Why don’t you stop living, it’s killing you!” – which is just as sensible.