Ancient Tower Press

Returning Soul to its Rightful Place Within the Web of Life

 

 

This is Part 9 of a 12-Part Series

Excerpted from Chapter One of The Seven Gates of Soul

 

The entire Introduction can be read

as a prelude to this series here.

 

Previous posts in this series include:

 

Toward a Working Definition of Soul

Distinguishing the Embodied Soul from the Postmortem Soul

Distinguishing the Embodied Soul From Disembodied Spirits

 Distinguishing Between the Embodied Soul and the Subtle Body

The Roots of the Embodied Soul in Spiritual Tradition

The Association of the Embodied Soul With Breath

Embracing the Earth as the Larger Body of the Soul

 Embracing the Mystical Worldview

 

Any true language of soul must recognize the connection between human beings and the larger body of the Earth, which sustains and nourishes human activity.  The embodied soul is in relationship to everything that exists within the embodied world.  How consciously we are able to maintain and nurture this relationship will determine the quality of our experience here on earth.  When the relationship is conscious and vital, we will experience joy, abundance, and well-being.  When it becomes weakened or strained, or goes unconscious, we will experience pain, impoverishment, and disease.  An awareness of our place as souls, within the web of life on this planet, must become central to our understanding of who we are, before we can speak in a meaningful way about the spiritual nature of the soul’s journey.  The pathway to this awareness is a stronger sense of connection to our own bodies, and a conceptual framework that facilitates an understanding of the soul’s experience within the context of the body – both literal and figurative – that we inhabit.

Instead of seeking a religious form of spiritual transcendence that takes the soul beyond the body and the physical realm, the soul must be empowered to enter more deeply and more consciously into the life it is living.   The will to live in the body, with intention, with passion for, and commitment to the life that one has chosen, knowing full well that the body is a temporary home for Spirit, is to follow what Yaqui brujo, Don Juan called “a path of heart” (Carlos Castenada, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations With Don Juan, pp. 105-107), and what I would call a life conducive to the cultivation of soul.  A language of soul is one that makes it possible to articulate a path of heart, through a conscious embrace of the physical body, the embodied world, and the experience of embodiment.

Astrology provides a foundation for a language of the embodied soul by systematically observing a correlation between heaven (the realm of Spirit) and earth (the realm of the body).  The guiding principle behind most astro-logical thinking is the Hermetic axiom “As above, so below; as without, so within.” This catch phrase is a pithy expression of a rather elaborate system of symbolic correspondences between the cosmos and all things terrestrial.  In exploring these correspondences, one cannot help but recognize that the process of liberation from earthly existence pursued by religion is paradoxically a matter of entering into the embodied life with greater clarity of intention, and availing oneself of the opportunity for deepening of soul that it – and only it – provides.  From this perspective, the life of the body is not separate or antithetical to the life of Spirit.  Quite the contrary.  It is the sacred vehicle through which Spirit evolves to more consciously recognize and express itself in space and time.

 

If you like what you are reading,

and don't want to wait for the rest of the book to appear

on this blog, you can order your copy here.

Embracing the Mystical Worldview

 

This is Part 8 of a 12-Part Series

Excerpted from Chapter One of The Seven Gates of Soul

 

The entire Introduction can be read

as a prelude to this series here.

 

Previous posts in this series include:

Toward a Working Definition of Soul

Distinguishing the Embodied Soul from the Postmortem Soul

Distinguishing the Embodied Soul From Disembodied Spirits

 Distinguishing Between the Embodied Soul and the Subtle Body

The Roots of the Embodied Soul in Spiritual Tradition

The Association of the Embodied Soul With Breath

Embracing the Earth as the Larger Body of the Soul

 

Mystics are often treated as the bastard progeny of conventional religion.  Most serve as a source of embarrassment to the traditions to which they belong, teetering on the edge of heresy while alive, then quietly canonized and tucked away in reliquaries after they are safely dead.  Meanwhile, the mystery embraced by mystics in their identification with the body of the Earth is the only true gateway to soul that most conventional religions provide.  It is a gateway that few of its practitioners are encouraged to enter.  Instead we are admonished to reach toward the sky, while leaving the worldly roots that would nourish soul neglected and abused.  Obviously, this is an attitude with serious, even fatal consequences, not just for the individual soul, but for the entire web of souls that binds us to each other, to all of life, and to the Earth itself.  In discussing this crisis of neglect in modern Western religious tradition, Matthew Fox pulls no punches when he says, “The denial of mysticism by churches and synagogues is a deep and enduring scandal that is no longer tolerable...  A civilization that denies the mystic is no civilization at all” (The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 43).

Spirit as championed by non-mystical religion may be free to wander ethereal realms without looking back, but soul is inherently in relationship to the rest of manifest creation, and cannot do anything to the Earth without feeling its repercussions.  From the soul’s perspective, we are the Earth.  Or as the Navajo chant  (qtd. in  Fox, p. 12):

The Earth, its life am I,

The Earth, its feet are my feet,

The Earth, its legs are my legs,

The Earth, its body is my body,

The Earth, its thoughts are my thoughts,

The Earth, its speech is my speech.

If the embodied soul recognizes its identity with the Earth, the responsibility to care for the Earth becomes a matter of both physical and spiritual survival.  If we poison our water and our air, both the soul and the body will become sick.  For every species we allow to drift toward extinction, we diminish ourselves accordingly.  Every time we devastate an ecosystem in the name of progress, the soul becomes a refugee in its own backyard.  For a soul, intimately bound to the body and to the Earth out of which the body emerges, there is no escape to some future paradise in the hereafter.  Nor is there any metaphysical excuse to blithely trash this one.  From the soul’s perspective, the promise of liberation from this mortal coil held forth by most religions is at best a dangerous oxymoron, and at worst a recipe for self-annihilation, ecological disaster, and serious impoverishment of the human condition.

Though we take for granted the superiority of worldviews that place human beings at the pinnacle of the spiritual food chain, we have lost a sensibility critical to soul that was an intimate part of many so-called primitive belief systems, especially among plant-based cultures.  Anthropologists of the 19^th and early 20^th century observed that early man did not differentiate between humans, and plants and animals, whom they also endowed with souls (“Myth and Mythology,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Ed. Vol. 24. Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1997, Vol. 24, p. 731).  They arrogantly assumed this meant that our forbearers lacked the intelligence necessary to tell the difference.  This supposed deficiency or "hazy vision" as it was called, formed the conceptual basis for religious phenomena such as animism, totemism, nagualism, and other spiritual beliefs that postulated a soul-based relationship between humans, animals and other nonhuman entities.  If this is hazy vision, then it is nonetheless a vision that suits the soul, since it recognizes the interconnection of soul, body, and Earth, which is where its identity is most deeply rooted.

Albertus Christian Kruyt, a Dutch anthropologist, coined the term, “soul-stuff” to refer to a belief common among the rice cultivators of Indonesia, but also witnessed among plant-based cultures elsewhere (“Myth and Mythology,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Ed. Vol. 24. Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1997, Vol. 24, p. 731) that echoes this sensibility.  “Soul stuff” is an indestructible reservoir of life that perpetually circulates throughout existence.  It is eternally renewed, cycling through the Creator, who then sends it back out into creation to animate the full range of human, animal and plant forms in existence on this planet.  Whatever form it inhabits, the same "stuff" is common to all beings.  Within such an enlightened worldview, the concept of “body” is likewise extended to encompass not just this particular set of skin and bones that I personally happen to inhabit, but everything physical around me – the plants, the animals, the rocks, the stars, the very air I breathe.  Spirit inhabits it all, and it all is essential to the existence and well-being of soul.  Given the sad state of affairs our postmodern understanding of soul has produced as the exclusive property of humans, we might consider that the more primitive belief is the religious view of a soul in need of liberation from the body.

 

If you like what you are reading,

and don't want to wait for the rest of the book to appear

on this blog, you can order your copy here.

 

Embracing the Earth as the Larger Body of the Soul

 

This is Part 7 of a 12-Part Series

Excerpted from Chapter One of The Seven Gates of Soul

 

The entire Introduction can be read

as a prelude to this series here.

 

Previous posts in this series include:

Toward a Working Definition of Soul

Distinguishing the Embodied Soul from the Postmortem Soul

Distinguishing the Embodied Soul From Disembodied Spirits

 Distinguishing Between the Embodied Soul and the Subtle Body

The Roots of the Embodied Soul in Spiritual Tradition

The Association of the Embodied Soul With Breath

 

Within the context of the full range of experiences available to an embodied soul, it will be helpful to consider the body not just literally, but also in a larger metaphorical sense that both encompasses the actual physical body, and extends beyond it.  On this symbolic level, the body does not end with the skin, but includes the manifest world of nature, the environment that provides a living context for the entire range of experiences of the soul, and the circumstances through which the soul learns, grows and evolves toward fulfillment.  While Spirit – at least according to the dominant religious paradigm – seeks its fulfillment through the transcendence or liberation from physical plane reality, the embodied soul seeks its fulfillment through immersion and meaningful involvement in the embodied life.

The body makes possible any experience of meaning – of love, of creativity, of pleasure and pain, of suffering and of joy, of learning and growth that shape any life of meaning.  Without the body, such experiences, and the embodied life out of which meaning evolves, are not possible.  Metaphorically, all these experiences and the physical plane reality that make them possible can be considered to be part of the experience of embodiment.  Earth itself becomes a part of the extended body that allows Spirit to become embodied as the soul.

Within a religious mindset that divorces itself from the body, Earth becomes marginalized as a kind of way station for the soul, whose final destination is somewhere else, beyond the physical plane.  From such a perspective, It does not matter what happens to the Earth or its supposedly less sentient creatures, because we are leaving it all behind anyway.  It is merely a disposable nightmare, an elaborate seduction, or as a Hindu would put it, a lila, or cosmic play, which will evaporate in the vapors of illusion once the material veil of maya has been lifted.   One need not be a rocket scientist to see, nor am I the first to point out, where this attitude has led us (See for example: David Kinsley, David, Ecology and Religion: Ecological Spirituality in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995; or Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age, Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1987).

At this stage of our collective evolution, we are literally choking in the consequences of our refusal to embrace the larger body to which the soul is bound.   Not only have we added considerably to our own suffering, but as a global culture thoroughly infused with this attitude of religious conditioning, we are failing to take advantage of the only opportunity the soul will ever have.  It is only when the soul can actually inhabit this realm of substance in which it has landed, for better or worse, that the soul can live its life in a meaningful way.  This means not only learning to dwell more consciously within the body in which it is housed, but also finding its place within the larger web of embodied life to which it belongs. It means caring for the larger body of the Earth that hosts the evolutionary drama that shapes and nurtures the soul.  It is, in turn, the soul’s caring participation in this larger web of life that makes its education and its evolution possible.

This is a point of view cherished by most mystical traditions.  Unlike the more orthodox religious institutions with which they coexist, mystics understand that one cannot approach the experience of unity with Spirit without also recognizing Spirit to be everywhere, especially at the heart of the living pulse of manifest, embodied creation.  As Nobel Prize-winning mystical poet, Rabindranath Tagore observes (“Gitanjali,” Eulogos Project, Intratext Digital Library):

The same stream of life that runs through the world runs through my veins night and day and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth into numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that rocked in the ocean cradle of birth and death, in ebb and flow.

I feel my limbs and am made glorious by the touch of this world of life.

And my pride is from the life throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

 

If you like what you are reading,

and don't want to wait for the rest of the book to appear

on this blog, you can order your copy here.

The Association of the Embodied Soul With Breath

 

This is Part 6 of a 12-Part Series

Excerpted from Chapter One of The Seven Gates of Soul

 

The entire Introduction can be read

as a prelude to this series here.

 

Previous posts in this series include:

Toward a Working Definition of Soul

Distinguishing the Embodied Soul from the Postmortem Soul

Distinguishing the Embodied Soul From Disembodied Spirits

 Distinguishing Between the Embodied Soul and the Subtle Body

The Roots of the Embodied Soul in Spiritual Tradition

 

In most religious traditions, the fusion of Spirit and body giving rise to embodiment takes place through the vehicle of the breath.  In many languages, the words for Spirit, soul, wind, and breath share the same etymology (Mircea Eliade, Ed. “Breath and Breathing,” Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 2, pp. 302-304).  The Latin, spiritus comes from the verb, spirare, which means “to breathe.” The Greeks used two words for soul – psyche and anima.  The first derives from the verb, psuchô, meaning “to breathe,” or “to blow;”  the second from the verb, animaô, meaning “to draw up” (Gregory Craig, Ed."Morphological Analytics for Inflected Greek Words," The Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University).  The Hebrew word, nefesh originally meant "neck" or "throat," but later came to mean the "vital spirit" or "anima" in the Latin sense.  The word, ruach originally meant "wind" but later came to refer to the whole range of a person's emotional, intellectual, and volitional life.  Both terms were widely used and often translated as "soul." The Akkadian word napashu was used to mean "the throat," "to breathe," and "life" itself.  The Egyptians believed in a dual soul, one part of which, the ka, was named by the word for breath.  The Arabic word, nafs, which is associated with individuality and will, is probably related to the word nafas (breath).  In Chinese, the word for vital energy or spirit, qi, also means breath.  In Sanskrit, the word for soul, atman, and the word for life force, prana, are both derived from the root word, an, meaning the ability to breathe.

In these languages, and the religious traditions that spoke them, the soul was identified with breath, and the act of breathing.  Creation of the physical universe, in many traditions, entails an act of breathing, while Spirit enters the body as breath, and life is construed as the ability to breathe.  According to the Song of Creation in the Rig Veda, which may date from 1500 BCE and is probably the earliest known book in the world, "Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal. The world was a total void, except for One Thing, breathless, yet breathed by its own nature” (Book X, Hymn CXXIX: 2 - Ralph T. H. Griffith, Trans. Sacred Writings: The Rig Veda, New York, NY: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1992).  In Genesis, the first book of both the Jewish and the Christian Bible, creation begins as “a wind from God sweeping over the water” (Genesis 1:3 - Jarsalav Pelikan, Ed. Sacred Writings, Vol.  1 - Judaism: The Tanakh, New York, NY: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1992, p. 3), and the human soul comes into existence as God blows into Adam’s nostrils, “the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7 - Pelikan, p. 5).  Likewise, according to the Koran, humanity was created from “fermented clay dried tingling hard” after Allah has “breathed into him of My spirit" (Al-Hijr 15:28-29 - Ahmed Ali, Tr.  Sacred Texts: The Qur’an, New York, NY: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993, p. 224).

If we take these etymological and scriptural clues seriously, then breath is understood to be the presence of the Spirit within the body, and the primary vehicle through which Spirit is known.   A spiritual life is one that is inspired by the breath of life, and that breathes in rhythm with Spirit dwelling in the body.  Breath, of course, is a vital bodily function, suggesting that a spiritual life - or the life of the human soul - is not possible outside the context of an embodied existence.  This may seem a radical statement to most of us, conditioned to think of soul and Spirit as one and the same, or who fail to make a distinction between the embodied soul and the postmortem soul.  But according to these ancient scriptures, the very origin of the soul demands the body as a vehicle through which Spirit can breathe the breath of life. 

Ironically, this understanding defies the current teachings of most religions identified with these scriptures.  Even so, it remains the basis of all spiritual disciplines, which promote a direct relationship between soul and Spirit.  Such practices include various forms of meditation and yoga based on pranayama (breath control), the circular breathing employed by Buddhist monks whlie chanting, moving meditation practices such as qigong, and t’ai ch’I, and certain Sufi dhikr practices that combine chanting, movement, and elaborate breathing practices (Mircea Eliade, Ed. Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 2, pp. 304-308).  Even Gregorian chants are at core a form of conscious breathing, accompanied by sound.  These practices and many others – including fasting, celibacy, and other ascetic exercises – designed to free the soul to more clearly identify with Spirit, paradoxically require that we enter more fully into a relationship with the body, for them to be effective.

Before we can move through the first gate on our way to a functional language of soul, we must  recognize the role of the body and the embodied existence and restore the body to its rightful place as the vehicle through which Spirit is most directly experienced by the soul in this life.  Spirit, immortal and eternal, enters the body and lives within it for awhile, but is not in any way bound by it.  The embodied soul, on the other hand, is the life of Spirit within the body, and is dependent upon the body for its existence.  To know the soul more intimately, we must first enter and learn to inhabit the body as a conscious act of choice.

 

If you like what you are reading,

and don't want to wait for the rest of the book to appear

on this blog, you can order your copy here.