Carol Tulpar, Simon Fraser University

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Our time at the close of the millennium is marked by many signs and symptoms indicating that the late twentieth century glass through which we view our lives is too limiting. As it has done so many times in the past, our paradigm needs to shift once again in order to accommodate our experience more effectively. As James Hollis says, “Our culture has lost the mythic road-map that helps locate a person in a larger context.”[i] The rapidly fragmenting post-modern societies of the West appear blind to some basic necessities: those of individual humans and those of the planet that supports us. While our “ecological footprints” grow ever larger, and the signs multiply that the environment cannot take much more, we remain alienated, disconnected, unintegrated, both within our society, and among societies. More and faster environmental exploitation in favour of more and fancier products does not offer any satisfying answers to what we might term our millennial malaise. While the environment is taking a dreadful beating from our consumptive way of life, morality is also in disarray. At the same time, while people are behaving more irresponsibly than ever, they seem to perceive themselves as helpless to change themselves or anything else. What are some of the origins of this lack of integration? And how do we need to see ourselves and our world differently in order to achieve renewal and health?

One place we may seek answers is in our history. In the West, history has until recently been viewed exclusively as a developmental process through time. Although recent descriptions of history are moving away from this simple metaphor, we may conveniently borrow this glass to regard it once again. What do we see? During the Classical Age, citizens experienced commitment to a community as well as faith in ideal forms, and the potential of reason as a tool for helping them live better lives. If we consider this our ancestral heritage, we may say that our intellectual, cultural and spiritual ancestors left us a balanced way of experiencing the world, with no essential elements missing. During our cultural development, we focused exclusively on one area at a time. First the Age of Faith was expressed by the rise of Christianity. This may be viewed as the childhood of our Western philosophy. Helpless as children ourselves, we were obedient to powerful social and religious authorities whom we must needs trust and obey, as we knew we depended on them for life and protection. Then came the Age of Reason. During the Enlightenment, the maturing adolescent society began to question the power and authority of the societal and religious figures who stood in loco parentis. Morality required some practical tie to everyday life. What would be the effects on daily decision making if we adopted this or that as a moral stance, asked the utilitarians. Eventually morality had to be expanded beyond the confines of our small homogeneous groups. Now, as a culture, we are middle-aged, and as James Hollis says, “the capacity for self-deception is exhausted.”[ii] Shall we then join with Jean Baudrillard in his position of jaded helplessness and conclude that

The glorious march of modernity has not led to the transformation of all values, as we once dreamed it would, but instead to a dispersal and involution of value whose upshot for us is total confusion – the impossibility [italics mine] of apprehending any determining principle, whether of an aesthetic, a sexual or a political kind.?[iii]

I think not. Although the metaphor we have employed above is too simple, too limited, too rational, we may carry it one more step. While it is true that middle age is the time when illusion fails, to use Virginia Woolf’s phrase, it is also a time of choice. If as a species, or as a society, we are in middle age, we still have important choices to make, important developmental stages to accomplish. We are not obliged to accept the bitter conclusion that life is fragmented and meaningless, and that our species is doomed to a long slide to a senseless death, in which we will take our planet with us.

On the contrary, as we begin to see through “the implicit premise of our culture, that through materialsim, narcissism and hedonism, we would be happy,”[iv] we may imagine making another choice, taking another view. We may entertain the burning question posed by Hollis, the question asked by the middle-aged of themselves: Who am I apart from my roles? The way will then be open for us to discover what we have each been called to do. In this way it becomes possible to pass in a healthy and positive manner to the next stage. Old age need not be a time of decay and loss, as is currently assumed by our secular-scientific culture. Indeed, in many traditional societies, age is venerated, associated with wisdom and given the important task of being the repository of cultural learnings and a source of guidance for the young.

Following the Enlightenment, something went underground. During the twentieth century, western society has increasingly repressed our soul material. Although Freud can be credited with the “discovery” of the unconscious, and talked extensively of repressed parts of ourselves, for him the unconscious was the locus of the anti-social, the indecent and the uncivilized. The ego and superego were necessary layers to hold society together against the unrestrained animal appetites of unconscious sexual and aggressive impulses. Freud was the first to give credence to the material in dreams, “the royal road to the unconscious,” but attributed to all of them the same limited function of fantasized yet disguised wish fulfillment.

Jung was also convinced of the significance of dreams, and he went on to develop his theories of archetypes in mythology, as well as in dreams, and to expand the notion of the individual unconscious to that of a collective unconscious.

The writings of both of these important modern thinkers, whose theories opened up avenues of connection to our mysterious soul stuff, are sources of guidance and wisdom for each individual. In the same way that it requires more than thoughtless adherence to a religious or moral code, the daily struggle to live well and make right decisions requires more than rationality. Although it does not speak through the intellect, the wisdom of our culturally and familially repressed and unexpressed parts does speak to us through myths and dreams. Both of these provide doors into our soul place, where we may still find the mysterious and invisible parts of our selves, even though they have been dramatically marginalized by the society of our time.

When I was in my mid-thirties, after my mother had died, I had a dream that left a lingering yet indefinable impression. I dreamed that I was searching for her wedding ring, which was lost in the middle of a dark gymnasium. My friend, a fan of Fritz Perls and quite newly returned from Big Sur, instructed me in how to Gestalt the dream. “Close your eyes and speak as the ring,” she instructed me. I closed my eyes, and to my astonishment, heard my own voice intoning, “I am the circle of gold; everything is contained in me.” Mysteriously, without my conscious volition, my voice had spoken symbolic words which brought inexpressible comfort. I felt immediately that had tapped into a source of internal wisdom and guidance that assuaged the confusion and directionlessness I had been feeling in the outer world.

Jung and his intellectual descendants view dreams as highly symbolic. By paying attention to them, we can observe and work through our stages of development. The currency of this idea is accepted by many contemporary thinkers. An example is the book Dreams and Spiritual Growth: a Judeo-Christian Way of Dreamwork, by Savary, Berne, and Williams.[v] This book lays out ten techniques for using dreams to identify and work through issues the dreamer is currently experiencing. One of the techniques involves trying to pose the question of what the dream may be asking of the dreamer, or what the dream is trying to make the dreamer conscious of. James Hollis, among others, says that dreams mark stages of spiritual development. He accepts the view that some dream symbols are common, and share a common significance for many people. For instance, he says the bridge dream symbolizes the transition from external to internal authority.[vi]

During my forties, I had a series of bridge dreams. Some bridges were watery, low, treacherous, and could sink in the mud, taking me with them. One was only half-built, and I drove out onto it before I realized it was unfinished, and had to back carefully off, away from the danger of falling down the abyss. The dream of the completed one was unforgettable. This bridge was ineffably beautiful, a high curved span of shimmering silver, which I regarded with a feeling of wonderment.

Roy Baumeister, in speaking of the “burden of the self”, has perhaps put his finger on the problem in a way he did not intend; perhaps, ironically, the place where the real work needs to begin is on our too-limited conception of the self. If we allow that ancient part of ourselves that is mysterious and given to enrich and guide us with its instinctual wisdom, some of the burden of modern selfhood may be lifted. As during the enlightenment we had to throw off the hegemony of narrow religion, now we must needs throw off the hegemony of science, which in the 20^th century has invisibly inherited the religious faith it is no longer fashionable to express in church. Yet if we are now to disconnect our blind faith from the religion of science, then where are we to put it? According to Rollo May, every human experiences a thirsty “cry for myth”, and we need to create new myths to replace the old ones that have been discredited as our society has changed. Like Hollis and May, James Hillman has described the dangerous narrowness of our current paradigm, saying we must open ourselves to the search for character and calling, to the mysterious communications of our individual daimons. Going beyond the rickety Cartesian dualism, we must mend the stool we are sitting on by strengthening the third leg: that of instinctual soul.

James Hollis, James Hillman, and Thomas Moore[vii] are part of the rising soul chorus, and so are Jean Shinoda Bolen and Clarissa Pinkola Estes, cantadora, cuentista, curandera extraordinaire. Her book Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, has stymied the members of “separate” disciplines who do not know where to file it. In bookshops, this “spiritual document” has been filed in Religious Studies, Psychology, Poetry and Women’s Studies.[viii]

Myth, like dreams, is a source of guidance into the inner, instinctual soul material that constitutes the mysterious aspect of the self. The recent “soul writers” are breaking the 20^th century societal taboo against talking about the experiences of the deep and mysterious self, the inner part of a person where a life’s purpose unfolds mysteriously and tirelessly towards its own fulfillment. Both Bolen and Estes use examples of myths from all over the world to illuminate the psychic tasks that go into soul building. For instance, in Eros and Psyche, the symbolic task of sorting seeds that is assigned to the mortal Psyche after her irresistable curiosity awakens her sleeping God-lover Eros, is the same task which must be carried out by the heroine of Vasilisa the Wise when she visits Baba Yaga, the Wild Woman who represents the Life/Death/Life nature that must be brought to consciousness and fruition.

“…Western Society has all but lost its myths;”[ix] we are in a sorry state, a state of both erosion and transition. Yet we need not despair: such states are necessary way stations along the path to new development. Estes explains how the only way to an authentic and satisfying life is to embrace the Life/Death/Life cycle in all its ancient mystery.

Much of our knowledge of the Life/Death/Life nature is contaminated by our fear of death. Therefore our abilities to move with the cycles of this nature are quite frail… the Life/Death/Life forces are part of our own nature, part of an inner authority that knows the steps, knows the dance of Life and Death.[x]

It is the denial of, the movement away from our innate knowledge of this cycle of life and death that gives rise to our other denials, our other cultural myths such as the lopsided worship of youth and slim beauty, which is often at the same time self-starvation and anoxexia, and the concomitant fear of old age and death, which is, ironically, always the harbinger of new life. The poet Wallace Stevens tells us that

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfillment of our dreams

And our desires.[xi]

It is not our nature, physically or psychically, to live unchanged or to live forever. Indeed, it is the transitory and uncertain nature of life that gives it sweetness. Yet daily, we forget the Buddhist exhortation to be constantly mindful that every moment is a precious gift to be cherished, as we become caught up in unimportant details, far removed from the wonder of simply living. Often, it takes something dramatic to awaken us: the shocking miracle of a birth, or the shocking loss of the death of someone dear to us may bring us back from wandering off our true paths.

I was thirty years old before I had to attend the funeral of anyone I had known. I was living alone in a small house in East side of Vancouver when I heard of my friend Tom’s death from a heart attack. It was not the first heart attack; I had visited him in the hospital already, seen the receding colour and warmth, the shrinking life force of this large, powerful, grey-bearded man who lay, shaken and diminished, beneath an incongruous pink hospital coverlet. In spite of his past strength, of surviving the war, and getting two degrees in Anthropology as an adult student afterward, while working. In spite of his involvement in establishing the National Museum of Tanzania, his mastery of the Swahili language, his wide knowledge of and interest in the world, his seemingly eternal presence in Central Africa Imports on Fourth Avenue, I understood during that hospital visit that he was going to die soon.

On the day of his memorial service, I sat at home eating crackers with marmalade till the last possible moment, trying, I suppose, to insulate my belly against the dread of the unknown. What would it be like, I asked myself, to see his widow Alvina see in her loss? In the shop, she was always busy with the necessary routine tasks. She seemed, in spite of her calm, warm vibration, to by overshadowed by Tom’s assumption that it was his right to be the conversationalist, wit, wag, teller of yarns and jokes.

Entering the memorial gathering that day, I did not know how death could bring increase, how it caused the living bereaved to pause and consider their lives, to circle the wagons, and gaze momentarily upon life’s mystery. That day, I found myself within the circle of the many people who had known and loved Tom, and to my surprise, they were not weeping, but laughing, eating, drinking, telling stories: remembering what he had given to their lives. I looked at Alvina, gave her the red rose I had brought for her grief at the loss of her husband of thirty-five years. Mysteriously, in that moment, with Tom’s life ended, we both sensed a new beginning, which over time led to the deepening of our fruitful and soulful friendship which lasted another twenty years, until her death.

We inhabit our times and places, and as such, they are largely invisible to us. Yet there are signs and indicators: we are self-conscious beings, with the capacity to perceive and understand much. I have said that society shows signs of a powerful need for human renewal. What are these signs? Clearly, the weakened state of the planet that supports us is a matter of the most grave concern. Yet accompanying the accelerating rape of our physical environment, instead of a growing concern for our future, and that of our children, we observe instead an unrelenting growth of the mental metropolis of Denial. How can this be? The post-modernist writer Jean Baudrillard clearly expresses how we have lost touch with reality, indeed, he himself joins the hapless multitudes in the metropolis where people believe themselves helpless victims. Baudrillard talks to himself about possible external dangers, of a political, social, ecological nature:

…is real catastrophe to be expected in the future? Answer: there cannot be a real catastrophe because we live under the sign of a virtual catastrophe.[xii]

The astonishing scope of the denial implicit in this statement is terrifying. Have we truly lost sight of what we are doing to the planet, as well as to one another? Have we lost all control and all responsibility? How can we have got to such a state? Alasdair MacIntyre offers one possible explanation, which he calls “a disquieting suggestion.” Like Baudrillard’s scheme, it speaks of simulacra.

The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in …[a] state of grave disorder…What we possess…are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality…

History by now in our culture means academic history, and academic history is less than two centuries old. Suppose it were the case that the catastrophe of which my hypothesis speaks had occurred before, or largely before, the founding of academic history, so that the moral and other evaluative propositions of academic history derived from the forms of the disorder which brought it about. Suppose…that the standpoint of academic history is such that from its value-neutral viewpoint moral disorder must remain largely invisible. All that the historian – and what is true of the historian is characteristically also true of the social scientist – will be allowed to perceive by the canons and categories of his discipline will be one morality succeeding another…For the forms of the academic curriculum would turn out to be among the symptoms of the disaster whose occurrence the curriculum does not acknowledge.

…if the hypothesis is true, it will necessarily appear implausible, since one way of stating part of the hypothesis is precisely to assert that we are in a condition which almost nobody recognizes and which perhaps nobody at all can recognize fully…For the modern radical is as confident in the moral expression of his stances and consequently in the assertive uses of the rhetoric of morality as any conservative has ever been. Whatever he denounces in our culture he is certain that he still possesses the moral resources which he requires in order to denounce it. Everything else may be, in his eyes, in disorder; but the language of morality is in order, just as it is. That he too may be being betrayed by the very language he uses is not a thought available to him. [xiii]

This explains in part the widespread denial about the state of our planet. Awareness of the vast and far-reaching effects of human exploitation of the planet is a thought “not available” to many people. MacIntyre’s “modern radical” does not realize the futility of continuing to argue the morality of rapidly, knowingly depleting the planet’s resources to a dangerous low, or any other issue. From the standpoint of emotivism, it is simply not possible to settle any question beyond opinion and personal preference.

Another way to look at the environment is to view the state of the planet as a metaphor for the state of the human psyche: Earth’s plight is the victim of our neglect and our denial of our instinctual selves. We are not doing the necessary work of initiation through delving into our darker seasons to tap into the mysterious, timeless mythical realm that supports us.

Either way, it is small wonder that even as the already severely threatened East Coast fishery is further eroded, federal and provincial governments, and commercial and native fishers argue vociferously, emotionally trying to outshrill each other and speak the more loudly for their respective positions of smug self-righteousness. The argument is between the natives, who are fishing illegally (because they have always done so and it’s therefore their right) and the commercial fishermen, who are deliberately cutting loose the native fishers’ traps (because it is not fair that the others should fish when they cannot.) Evidently, both sides agree that the shortage of fish is the fault of years of bad policy making on the part of the provincial and federal governments.

Well, they seem to agree, now that the blame has been properly allocated, we can get on with our interminable argument. This is a convenient way to avoid looking at the drastic nature of the problem, which all of us have had a part in creating, and which all of us have to become involved in solving. One “benefit” of this kind of argument is that it provides very long-term distractions from very worrying problems.

Another such environmental problem also signals the increasingly loud rattling of the food chain. In the Sun on November 25, it was reported that in the tiny coastal village of Owakeeno, 400 kilometres northwest of Vancouver, nine starving grizzlies were shot dead. It seems a mother bear and her two cubs were so hungry that they were breaking into people’s houses looking for food, because the salmon upon which grizzlies live has dwindled to a dramatic low in recent years, and the bears couldn’t find enough of the fish to support them. Environmentalists are “outraged.” This is exactly the sort of thing that MacIntyre is talking about: arguments made from one moral stance use such words as “outraged,” railing at the government for failing to prevent the deaths of the bears. Environmentalists from the Suzuki Foundation revile the government as responsible for the bears’ deaths. The article clearly states that the major cause of the starving bears is the dwindling in recent years of British Columbia’s stocks of various species of salmon “due to overfishing, environmental changes and the destruction of their river breeding grounds.”[xiv] Yet strangely, this imminent threat to the food chain at a level affecting large mammals is featured less in the article than the loud chorus of blame. Once again, the opportunity to address the obvious problem is hijacked by a series of necessarily interminable arguments.

This is an example of emotivism, defined by MacIntyre as “the doctrine that all evaluative judgments, and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” [xv] He characterises emotivism as a theory “which professes to give an account of all value judgments whatsoever,” which, if it is true, means that “all moral argument is interminably rational.”[xvi] This sounds sadly familiar. Everyone is outraged by the blameworthiness of a wrongheaded or immoral other, preferably something nebulous, like the government or the bureaucratic organization they work for. Yet since people on opposite sides are not arguing from shared premises in many of the current classical arguments, one of which is seen above, no progress toward agreement is possible through discussion. MacIntyre explains this using some current debates, including that around abortion, showing how “each premise employs some quite different normative or evaluative concept from the others, so that the claims made upon us are of quite different kinds.”[xvii]

Meanwhile, around the world, other large mammals who are, like humans, at the top of the food chain, are severely endangered as a direct result of human activity: tigers, elephants, whales, and many others.

There are bird marshes, protected habitat for waterfowl, adjoining the Serpentine River in Surrey, and I often walk there, turning away from the main trail, and crossing the small footbridge into the relative solitude of the bird sanctuary. When I entered today, on the first pond a band of fluffy black-headed coots, flustered even by my quiet tread, swam fussily away. A little further along the grassy trail, I saw a dead, disembowelled bird. A little further on still, a brown hawk rose lazily from a tree, mewled once and wheeled away, stiff-winged. I know that coyotes shelter in the hedgerows; more than once I have seen the evidence: piles of feathers, along with other scant remains of eaten birds. Other spoor indicates that something large that feeds here must also eat the plentiful blackberries, which I too harvest in their season. Blue herons live here too: they do not retreat far from me, but stand watching from the other side of the ditch. They know I will not disturb them. Last week I watched one sitting on the pond, making a valiant effort to swallow a rather large fish. It reminded me of a cartoon I saw once, with a frog being swallowed by a large bird. “Never give up,” says the voice balloon coming from the frog.

By choosing not to expend the effort required to become more conscious of the third leg of our stool, the natural and instinctual soul force, we are also colluding with the destruction that results when we fail to make that effort. In our part of the world, the grizzlies are starving because the salmon populations are so low: unarguably, this is a direct result of human exploitation of the stock. In other areas of the world the wild tiger is by now perhaps entirely extinct; the panda, certain kinds of whales and the elephant are increasingly endangered, and the list goes on.

Right here in British Columbia, it was a member of a government department which is supposed to exist for the protection of wildlife who actually ended up shooting the starving grizzlies. A few months ago, it was the same story with hungry black bears. A few years ago it was wolves, which were both trapped by poison baits and shot from helicopters, because, with their habitat constantly decreasing, they were coming onto to ranches and killing cattle. Their competition for the few remaining wild animals was also interfering with the lucrative big game business, in which wealthy tourists pay big dollars ($U.S. dollars) to be taken out in the bush to shoot moose or deer. The wolves, natural predators of these large ungulates, were spoiling this little game by carrying out their age-old environmental task of keeping such limited herds as are still in existence healthy, by culling out the weakest individual animals and using them as food.

Such events are clear indicators that we are not in tune with the larger nature that surrounds us and of which we are a part. Why should we think we can lose so many creatures, so high up the food chain, and remain immune ourselves from the human depradation of the planet?

Estes relates this alienation from the wild world to our acculturated alienation from our own natures.

It’s not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades. It is not so difficult to comprehend why old forests and old women are viewed as not very important resources…It is not so coincidental that wolves and coyotes, bears and wildish women have similar reputations. They all share related instinctual archetypes, and as such, both are erroneously reputed to be ingracious, wholly and innately dangerous, and ravenous.[xviii]

The analysis of Estes ties our current untenable ecological attitudes to untenable moral ones, providing us with another clue to current cultural thinking which may go some way toward explaining why continuing to indulge in interminable shrill blaming contests from incommensurable premises seems to be preferred to actually addressing the environmental problem. I am talking about cultural assumptions, part of which is cultural blindness to such unfortunate attitudes as misogyny and what David Suzuki has called “speciesism,” the mistaken and demonstrably non-viable assumption that our species is better, more important and takes precedence over all other species. Just as Canadian society before the 1920’s “women are persons” case was blind to the rights and needs of women, just as Southern American society were blind to the fact that slavery was incommensurable with morality, our current cultures have their blind and correspondingly dark sides too.[xix] Probably the most obvious and important of the cultural invisibles of today is the soul. Estes talks about this by describing what is broken and lost, or at least temporarily mislaid, in western myth:

In much of western culture, the original character of the Death nature has been covered over by various dogmas and doctrines until it is split off from its other half, Life. We have erroneously been trained to accept a broken form of one of the most profound and basic aspects of the wild nature. We have been taught that death is always followed by more death. It is simply not so, death is always in the process of incubating new life, even when one’s existence has been cut down to the bones.[xx]

But beyond the obviously eroded state of the environment, which is being ignored while we argue interminably from incommensurable premises, let us take an honest look and see if there is further evidence of our millennial malaise. What further hallmarks of our malaise can be seen? Perhaps the most dramatic sign is the pervasiveness of a victim mentality. Nobody feels responsible. Said another way, people no longer feel able to respond, except by trying to outshrill the other victims, who are also clamouring for “justice” and “compensation” for another kind of victimhood. Yet the ultimately unsatisfactory nature of the victim identities so fashionable in our times is painfully clear. Embracing it for identity causes endless and meaningless suffering, which produces nothing, certainly not good character. Instead, the “victim” high-handedly refuses to endure and outgrow the inner pain that is a useful part of human experience, a natural dormant season and a harbinger of growth. Victimism militates against the building of character.

There’s a saying the kids have coined recently: “Get over it!” This advice has a similar flavour to the related expression, “Get a life!” (as the computer reputedly said to its addicted owner.) Adults have picked these expressions up, and are using them, because they express something new, perhaps…Could they be small signs of spirit rising? Soul work is intimately related to such simple daily words and acts. A walk in the park, a day spent cooking and filling the house with the fragrance of delicious foods – so simple and accessible are the ways of soul.

Preserving the soul, as the poet David Whyte writes, requires an attitude that is the polar opposite of victimism. Instead of demanding and expecting our “rights,” and being bitter when we think we have not gotten our “just desserts,” we must keep an open attitude toward what life is about to bring us: “Preservation of the soul means giving up our wish…for immunity from the unscheduled meeting with sorrow and hardship. It means learning the price of happiness.[xxi] He explains further his concept of the soul, which is markedly similar to descriptions by Hillman and Estes:

The soul of a person lies outside of time and belongs to the unknown; it is the sacred otherness of existence…the soul is owned by no one, not even by the personality formed around it.[xxii]

Furthermore, says Whyte, the soul is a powerful force in a human life, which sometimes faces us with the “terrifying necessity…to break, if necessary, every taboo, and wend its vital way onward, irrespective of family, corporation, deadline, or career.”[xxiii] Modern life, he adds, is alienated “from many of the ancient cycles of life that allow the silence and the time in which true experience can take place.”[xxiv] Nevertheless, “at midlife a man or woman feels an inner siren call like an old memory,”[xxv] and we intuit that this is not something that we can resist. “For every man and woman, midlife is a pivotal time of internal rebirth…into a new kind of usefulness…the sacredness and soulfulness of belonging once again.”[xxvi]

Unfortunately, people today seem unwilling or unable to endure suffering with patience, or to understand or believe it can contribute to growth. Modern people have been acculturated to fear silence and solitude, as well as pain of any kind, and this is a major and visible part of our malaise. “Without the fiery embrace of everything from which we demand immunity, including depression and failure, the personality continues to seek power over life rather than power through the experience of life.[xxvii]The number of people taking drugs for every real or imagined pain or ill is staggering; this is irrefutable evidence that we are trying desperately to run away from ourselves. The repressed returns as fate, says Carl Jung. James Hollis says the ego knows little, whereas the mystery of the Self invites us to become whole.[xxviii] Whyte says we need “a vision of life that helps us remember we are human souls, living at the centre of a troubled and ultimately unfathomable world.”[xxix]

Yes, our malaise is real. The Enlightenment project failed to provide a universalizable basis for moral action – modernity did not answer, and current post-modern explanations, though perhaps enjoying a certain transitory vogue, are far from satisfactory. First, they do not jibe with life as it is experienced by most people, and secondly, they offer no viable way out of the very real dangers facing our species and our planet.

Hollis talks about the “significant symptoms of experience” which… “represent the ineluctable movement of life towards its own unknown fulfillment, a teleological process which serves nature and its mysteries and cares little for the wishes of a nervous ego.” He does not see the way to authenticity as the path of deconstructing and reconstructing oneself, as the post-moderns would have us do. He explains the psychological struggle and conflict involved in letting the self bring meaning and depth to our lives:

The self, that mysterious process within each of us which summons us to ourselves, often expresses itself through symptoms: loss of energy, depression, sudden fits of rage, or over-consumption, but the power of the projections is such that one may keep the larger questions of the journey at bay…as long as the projections work, the individual has managed to forestall the appointment with the inherent self.[xxx]

According to James Hillman, telos means aim, end or fulfillment.[xxxi] He differentiates it from teleology, a belief that life is “pulled by a purpose toward a definite end.”[xxxii] Like Hillman, I prefer to think of life as influenced by telos rather than determined by teleology. The promptings of telos come, he says, “as a troubling, unclear urge, coupled with a sense of indubitable importance.”[xxxiii]

This forested trail in Bear Creek Park is a soulful place, I think, entering the park in the late afternoon that already shows hints of the oncoming dusk. But today my quiet trail has been invaded by the world of externals. I meet two men, one talking on a cell phone: “No problem, I’ll have it there for you later this evening. What was your name again?” And further on, the sound of hammers and power tools. Preparations are underway for the Christmas train ride. I had forgotten. The park is being readied by the perpetrators of the less-than-spiritual aspects of Christmas. A siren rises in the distance. Is there no place of silence left where thought can take place undisturbed?

When I reach the far end of the park loop, I am irresistably drawn off the wide path. Though now it is really coming on dusk, I feel compelled to follow the dank muddy path, overhung with tall yellowed grass, to the creek’s edge. The mud stinks down here, but I press forward, wanting to see the dark waters flowing. Tracks. Footsteps have preceded me here, and there is a bicycle on the sand below the bank. Yes, of course. Children are also drawn to this place, like me, in search of soul stuff. I remember vividly my own childhood play places by the creek, the many quiet dusks spent beside it. We are surrounded and guided by the unseen.

Choosing not to disturb the child who owns the bicycle, to remain unseen myself, I return to the main trail, and walk on. The path is wide, flat and smooth, and I am alone upon it. Darkness is closing in. As it does so, my senses become more and more alert. When I come to another path that leads to the creek, I am again unable to resist the temptation, and I go down once more to the edge of the water, where 2 winters ago, the footbridge washed away in a November flood. Before that, this part of the trail was part of my regular route, cycling or walking.

I see something new here today. Upstream a bit from the wrecked footings of the old bridge, some trees have been cut, and some clearing done. It also appears that on the far side of the creek, some foundations have been laid for a new bridge, in a spot where it is less likely to be washed away. The cement pilings, slightly concave on top, hold a shallow layer of water in which shimmers a reflection of the last light in the pale evening sky. For a while I stand rapt, losing myself in the flowing water, and when I turn from its subtle sound and raise my head skyward, I am greeted by the first star, an incredibly brilliant one in the east. Pausing, I regard it through the black lacy branches of the leafless cottonwoods.

As I did in childhood, I focus on this first evening star to make a wish. What shall I wish for, Star Bright, Star Light? As always, I wish for the continued blessing of love, for safety and happiness for those I love. And I wish for wisdom, in finding my own right path, my telos. In a week, I will be half a century old, and though I have seen many things, I have reached this age without attaining wisdom. As I grow older, I hope ever more fervently for wisdom, though I am increasingly unsure of what constitutes it.

On my return journey, I decide to make the longer circuit on the far side of the formal garden, track and field, so that I can walk through all possible forested trails. But I remember that the gate to the parking lot is supposed to close at dusk. For fear my car should be locked in the park overnight, regretfully, I take the right fork rather than the left one. As I return silently along the trail, it is now completely dark. The only light in the gloom is a dim reflection of the sky in the water that runs along beside me in the ditch.

I hear coyotes on my right hand, the staccato bark rising to a mournful howl which is answered from the small pocket of woods on the other side of the formal garden. By this sound I am stirred, reassured, assuaged. The wild life is all around us, living out its own rhythms, carrying on its own communications. All is well. My footsteps are absolutely soundless on the wide paved path. In the depths of my memory, something stirs, fragments a poem I wrote when I was ten or eleven years old:

Silent down the path I go

Indian feet, I make no sound (sic)

Miss a branch above, below

Softly tread the ground.

We are not abandoned, or lost. The unseen is all around us, ready to guide and protect us.

In Mad Travellers — Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness, Ian Hacking explains his fascinating theory of mental illnesses appearing for temporary periods in response to opportunities provided by “ecological niches.” He deliberately uses fugue, an outdated kind of mental illness which in the past was restricted to a few years in France and Germany, to illustrate his point, which is that many of the current “mental illnesses” of our time, as well as previous times, may be temporary aberrations which fit into the ecological niches of today. While he is careful to explain that he is not accusing either doctors or patients of faking, Hacking also sharply dismisses the whole current notion of social construction as an explanation for the phenomena he is describing, saying:

I have deliberately avoided the lazy terminology of social construction…If we use the construction metaphor literally, as having to do with building or assembling from parts, then hysterical fugue was definitely not constructed. Nobody built it or assembled it. What if we use construction talk more metaphorically? Then we are merely mouthing a popular phrase, a vogue word, which tells us almost nothing. Someone might wish to say that the dissociative disorders were constructed, almost step-by-step, by dissociation lobbyists in the late 1970s. Such literal talk is seldom what social constructionists intend. Even if one did make that argument, the dedicated building up of the diagnosis and the patients was incomplete. There had to be an ecological niche in which the construction could thrive. It did, until dissociation theorists ate their own nest, multiplying personalities beyond necessity, teaching fantasies to the innocent and escapes to the guilty. It is the fault of the dissociation theorists that they have been attacked by a mob of pretenders as insensitive as themselves. Their assailants are as ignorant of humility, as indifferent to morality, [italics mine] and as ruthless with facts as they themselves once were. Serves them right.[xxxiv]

Ian Hacking is concerned with the morality of promoting certain fashionable diagnoses for one’s own ends, as the quotation refuting the reality of dissociative disorders, above, indicates. In discussing his theory of ecological niches that support transient mental illnesses, he explains that as well as fitting into an existing taxonomy of illnesses, as well as being visible and observable as a real cause of suffering, as well as being able, despite being painful, “to provide some release that is not available elsewhere in the culture in which it thrives.”[xxxv] And finally, what Hacking considers the “most interesting vector,”

…the illness should be situated between two elements of contemporary culture, one romantic and virtuous, the other vicious and tending to crime. What counts as crime or as virtue is itself a characteristic of the larger society, and the virtues are not fixed for all time: prudence, a virtue for the Protestant bourgeoisie of early modern Europe, had been a mere weakness in the feudal era. [xxxvi]

Hacking explains society’s “profoundly moral attitude” toward disease in the following passage:

If something is a real disease, you are not responsible for it, or are responsible insofar as you engaged in vice that brought on the disease. Sex, drink, and idleness are typical vices. But if you need costly hip-replacement surgery because you continued playing boyhood games such as basketball into middle age, you are not blamed or held responsible; this is because in our world continued youthful activity is a virtue. In the case of mental illness, responsibility may be diminished or removed altogether if the illness is a real one. And the names for real illnesses have objective, individuated referents; scientific metaphysics and popular science alike demand that the referent is biochemical, neurological, organic, something localized in the body that could in principle be isolated in the laboratory.[xxxvii]

Yet even the iconoclastic Hacking, in spite of his engagingly no-nonsense style and his fearlessness of upsetting the currently fashionable psychiatric apple-cart, appear restricted in his thinking to the old nature vs. nurture controversy when it comes to explaining the causes of mental illness. We see this as he speculates thus on the future of the schizophrenia diagnosis:

In the case of schizophrenia,…I hope that within twenty years we shall have a grip on one or two or perhaps three fundamental types of schizophrenia. Possibly these will be completely distinct entities with distinct etiologies. One might be genetic in nature, one environmental. Or more complex stories may emerge. What I hope is that schizophrenia will emerge as one (or several) bodily dysfunctions, neurological, biological, biochemical, or whatever…[xxxviii]

It is unclear whether we should give Hacking full credit and assume he would include instinctual soul in his catchall category “whatever” above; in any case, his refreshing commentary on transient mental illnesses sheds a strong light on how the present popularity of multifarious victim identities has come about. Sufferers are not responsible. If the illness has a biological name, is localized in the body, the victims are not responsible.

Quite regularly, we hear of such things in the news. One recent case clearly illustrates the justice of Hacking’s claim that the person with the physically named and explainable “illness” is not responsible. At the U.S. border, a woman under the influence of diet drugs (slimness, of course is a virtue in our time and place, and emaciation is even becoming respectable; how else are we to understand the popularity of Ali McBeal?) Though our protagonist, a woman called Julia, who had been clearly warned by her doctor not to drive while taking this drug, was behind the wheel anyway. In the line-up, she smashed into a stationary car and killed two young women who were waiting their turn to cross the international boundary. Astonishingly, the judge let her off completely, blaming the drug and the aberrant behaviour it induced, rather than the woman (presumably endowed with free will, like the rest of us) who chose both to take the drug, and to drive under its influence, against strict medical orders. Similarly, a year or so ago, a man escaped being found guilty of serious criminal charges by claiming he was too drunk to know what he was doing. It was not remarked upon in court that it was his own choice to get drunk enough to forget himself and become violent and dangerous.

But as well as meaning not blameworthy, not being responsible can also mean incapable of responding. And that is the another part of the problem. Not only are victims culturally exonerated of blame, but they are hampered in their ability to respond to their illness by culturally induced numbness to soul promptings, and thus have a very limited ability to connect with the healing forces within to which your instinctual soul serve as guide.

On October 25, before I began this opus, I wrote the following notes. The I, the me, the self…it is amazingly complex, but it also touches closely, once again, my recent concerns, my experience in the post-modern world, which affects not only readers, intellectuals, students, but everyone in society. Multiple personality disorder, says Ian Hacking, is burgeoning as people lose their anchors. I remember modernity. It was still the dominant ethos when I was a child and when I was an undergraduate at U.B.C. Now we are in post-modernity, and the paradigm of modernity has been supplanted. My reading makes this crystal clear. I think about my own self, life, experience. The primary relationship, says Clarissa Pinkola Estes is with life itself.

On the first day of class, as our professor pointed out, I was the only person who defined self to include soul. Amazing. Indeed, connection with soul is certainly not considered virtuous in this culture. Consider Dorothy Holland, the ultra modern, ultra urbane, ultra careful anthropologist. Her story of the Korean woman who asked her how it felt to be soulless suggests that Holland herself is unsure whether she even has a soul. Blandly, she says

My friend’s question placed me as a person who lacked a soul. In writing this paper, I position her as someone whose self is constituted, in part, by her experiences with Korean talk about and practices of the soul.[xxxix]

If the best self-defence or self-affirmation or revenge Holland can manage when her friend calls her soulless is to “position her as…”, and if Holland cannot tell us that she had a passionately real response to her “friend’s” question, what does this suggest? (And by the way, is not this an abuse of the term “friend,” which implies honest contact? Are two anthropologists friends when one apparently doesn’t know whether the other one is taking a pot shot at her?) Why did Deborah Holland not jump up and affirm that she had a soul, why can she not even muster enough strength or irony to signal to her readers that she thinks she has a soul? Since she was not outraged at the suggestion that she is soulless, or thrown by the question into a nine-day funk of self-examination to check up on where her soul was and how it was doing, she is obviously deeply out of touch with it. But she is not alone. Writ large, that is society’s problem at the end of the 20^th century. I do not know Deborah Holland’s age, but perhaps she grew up at a time a few years back when women’s souls were heavily outlawed, and has not gone back to what Clarissa Pinkola Estes might call her Wolf Woman den, or her Baba Yaga house for soul supplies. Chillingly, Estes describes the misogynistic and soul-killing era of the fifties:

It was a time when parents who abused their children were simply called “strict,” when the spiritual lacerations of profoundly exploited women were referred to as “nervous breakdowns,” when girls and women who were tightly girdled, tightly reined and tightly muzzled were called “nice,” and those other females who managed to slip the collar for a moment or two of life were branded “bad.”[xl]

Forty years ago. I lived through it; I remember it. So quickly does one zeitgeist pass, that, looking back from the vantage point of a few years on, it seems bizarre, grotesque, barbaric even.

“There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow.”[xli] So opens The Soul’s Code, by James Hillman, who is, of course, not the first to say so. As I have already pointed out, many recent writers have revived the conversation about soul, largely neglected in the twentieth century. The idea that the unseen is always with us is not new, and has been expressed by poets and philosophers at different times in history. Three hundred fifty years ago, Shakespeare put a very similar sentence in the mouth of Hamlet, who had just seen his father’s ghost: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”[xlii]

In the late 1960s, R. D. Laing set abnormal psychology on its ear by attempting to deal rationally with the problem of achieving authenticity within society as presently constituted. Some of Laing’s work now seems dated, yet perhaps that is because many of his ideas were immediately absorbed and became mainstream. In any case, in Laing’s work, we can still find much that is relevant. Society, he says, systematically denies the genuine experiences of its members, and not satisfied with having them lie about what they feel, demands further, that they forget what they feel and forget that they have forgotten. Laing lays bare the outrageous layers of rules that, he says,

…govern the whole social field. Unless we can “see through” the rules, we only see through them. They make social science a peculiarly difficult subject, because the social scientist in one particular society does not simply dissolve the rules because he is a social scientist.[xliii]

Society, he explains, beginning with the family, can have a tendency to make people crazy, because what they experience inside is not what is “supposed to” have happened, according to the expectations of the outside world. To survive, it becomes necessary to disavow and then disallow one’s own experience, as follows:

The set of elements that comprise the structure of events as experienced, must then not only be privately disavowed, but must be excommunicated from the family dialogue. Disavowed, and excommunicated, it does not cease to exist; sometimes it erupts, inrupts, disrupting the cosy chat that has taken the place of genuine dialogue. Genuine dialogues cannot occur without disclosing ourselves to each other, and without according to the other, and finding from the other, recognition and acceptance of how we experience one another.[xliv]

After reading Laing, one is left with no doubt about the serious penalties society imposes on those who raise subjects that are considered taboo in their context. Laing finds the family’s contribution to the healthy self to be of critical importance, and explains the great contribution to genuine reciprocity a satisfying relationship between mother and infant can bring:

Gratifying and being gratified have their dawning origins in breast-feeding. This can be genuinely reciprocal. The baby’s need for the breast and the breast’s need for the baby coexist from the beginning. The mother receives from the baby, while the baby receives from the mother. The ‘good breast’ is a breast that can receive as well as give. To take will go along with to give, the act of taking will be simultaneously a giving, and giving will be simultaneously taking.

In these terms, emptiness is not due to an empty stomach…emptiness and futility can arise when a person has put himself into his acts, even when these acts seem to have some point to him, if he is accorded no recognition by the other, if he feels he is not able to make any difference to anyone.[xlv]

Without this reciprocity which is established in babyhood, a person cannot be fulfilled as a human being. Laing quotes Martin Buber, who explains as follows:

Men need, and it is granted to them, to confirm one another in their individual being by means of genuine meetings: but beyond this, they need, and it is granted to them, to see the truth, which the soul gains by its struggle, light up to the others, the brothers, in a different way, and so be confirmed.”[xlvi]

We may leave the poets and philosophers, and, borrowing a technique from R.D. Laing, turn to the habits of daily speech for more in the same vein. Soul-killing work, soulless city, a good soul, an old soul, good for the soul. She missed her calling. Or to look at a humorous aspect of the same thing, “The devil made me do it.” Part of the hilarity that arose from the original use of that line on Flip Wilson’s comedy show was the sense of recognition it aroused of our daily experience: the inability to resist doing something, the feeling of being compelled to do it. Our various human languages recognize the concept of fate: destin, destino, kismet, and all cultures have stories about them.

“You haven’t met your fate yet; you’ll know it when you do.” said my mother, astonishing me with her calm certainty. She who was mild, diffident almost, who had suffered silently with and for me as I bumbled through my teens and twenties, amazed me with this announcement when I intimated that I was considering marrying the wrong man. I know now, of course, that she was right.

Hillman convincingly argues that our present paradigm leaves out something radically important. He gives voice to the old-fashioned words “vision” and “calling,” exhorting that “we do not want to belittle something we do not understand.” … “You are born with a character; it is given, a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians upon your birth.”[xlvii]

His explanation of the shortcomings of our paradigm of the secular late 20^th century lays bare the inevitability of the recent wildfire-like spread of the religion of victimism, morally bankrupt and sociologically, psychologically inaccurate, incomplete as it is:

The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim.[xlviii]

Hillman posits that we are born not only with chromosomes, but with a character, a daimon that accompanies us throughout life: “Your person is not a process or a development. You are that essential image that develops, if it does…[italics mine][xlix] Development is always an option. Nor is the soul obliged to follow a strict and specific religious or moral code. The promptings of the soul do not deprive us of free will.

Hillman describes the character that accompanies every individual from birth as an image; his, however, is an internal image, and he places great significance and value upon it. Baudrillard also talks about images, deliberately created images that are merely empty, vacuous appearances. Hillman’s soulful, internal image, however, is the polar opposite of Baudrillard’s empty meaningless one:

Everyone seeks their look. Since it is no longer possible to base any claim on one’s own existence, there is nothing for it but to perform an appearing act without concerning oneself with being – or even with being seen. So it is not, I exist, I am here! but rather: I am visible, I am an image – look, look! This is not even narcissism, merely an extraversion without depth, a sort of self-promoting ingenuousness whereby everyone becomes the manager of their own appearance.[l]

To explain his concept of soul in more detail, Hillman returns to Plato and Plotinus: he paraphrases from The Republic:

The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world.[li]

A very similar idea was expressed by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth in the early 1800’s:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star

Has elsewhere had its setting

And cometh from afar.

Not in complete nakedness,

And not in entire forgetfulness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God who is our home.[lii]

Hillman goes on to describe how Plotinus explains that “we elected the body, the parent, the place and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belong to its necessity. This suggests that my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul’s own choice…”[liii]

The implication of this view is that “the myth has a redemptive psychological function,” and needs to be entertained accordingly. Putting to practical use the ideas it suggests means using the concepts of calling, daimon, fate, necessity, to understand one’s life. Practically speaking, says Hillman, everyone experiences the call of the daimon, and we would do best to answer it, and also to accept the fact that the more difficult life experiences are necessary, and may actually help the individual to “align” life to the daimon call.[liv]

Over history, the experience of being called by one’s soul has appeared in many guises, and been called by many names, but it is always there, and though it may be postponed or avoided, it will not abandon its claim on the individual it accompanies.

At different times in my life I have known unmistakeably that I was walking precisely guided by my daimon, as I am now. Here I sit, in a rainy city on the coast, far from my place of birth. Is self partly about place? This place chose me, and I chose it, beloved Vancouver.

All these years after my parents have both died, now I too wear a uniform of service, as my father did before me. I think these thoughts fleetingly, as I consider whether to pin my British Columbia pin on my Guiding uniform: I could have lived out my life in Edmonton, and then I would have had a different life, a different fate, a different family. Unthinkable! This is my family, this my fate. Is self about family? Tired of farming, my father brought us here to B.C., and my fate, tied to his, was changed by this.

Rain falls relentlessly today, as it did on soldiers entrenched in World War I, all that long time ago. These soldiers, like the soldiers of World War II, and the wars that followed, are with us still, in the aspects of society that were formed in response to their struggles, the issues of their day, which are regenerated on Remembrance Day. My face is wet with tears as I write these words, and I do not know why. Is it because it is just ten years since my father died at the age of 89 in the geriatric ward of the Kitimat General Hospital? I grieved for him, but much less then, when his body returned to the earth, than I had years before, when I realized he was lost to me. Much of that lostness that he carried, that we carried, that my mother carried, I now believe was brought about by the war. Do I still carry some of that lostness? Am I passing it on to my daughter? Is that social history part of self? We will remember our destiny, the places where we have been raised, our century. We will be flooded by memories of these.

Our society today is one that systematically denies and suppresses that wild soul call: this is one of our challenges as the 20^th century draws to a close. Much has been learned, but something is missing in our modern, scientific, secular lives: and that something is the satisfying sense of accompaniment that being on the right path brings. Yet it is not fashionable to speak of soul, calling, accompaniment; all is supposed to be explained by science. All human behaviour is supposed to be explainable by nature or nurture, heredity or environment. It is the old duality again, so deeply ingrained in the culture of the West.

A couple of weeks ago, instructor Bob Aiken gave a talk at King Edward Campus on new research into the functioning of the brain. Walking into the room, he said: “What’s the answer to the nature or nurture question? The answer is that this is the wrong question.”[lv] People in the audience laughed, but I felt an inner click of serious recognition: yes, how right Bob was. To stand, the stool must have three legs. In the case of the human, this third leg is a mystery: out of space, out of time, but unmistakably within each of us, and we have called it by many names, including the soul and the daimon.

“Did you come here under compulsion, or of your own free will?” asks the Witch-Wise Woman of the seeker after his love (I have loved you all my life; I will love you all your life) in the myth of the Maiden King. It is a trick question, and fortunately, the seeker answers well. “110% of my own free will,” he says, “and 200% under compulsion.”[lvi] There are realms where logic does not rule. The witch’s visitor needs to be alert, to answer spontaneously from instinct, in order to save her life and get what she needs from the witch.

After cogitating on and entertaining all the fascinating history of self through the Enlightenment to Post-modernism, I return after all to something close to my original understanding of self: it is deep, it is old, and it is central. After following the post-modernists on their fascinating discoveries of how powerfully societies fashion, even inhabit the selves that inhabit them, I find this irony: the modernists, the post-modernists, the social constructionists have left this aspect of human experience out of their explanations, as if it had been invisible to them. Their insistence on the “nothing buts” drastically limited their own understanding. But there are awakenings on every hand.

Hillman’s metaphor for what I have called the third leg of the stool is an acorn, an organic metaphor, and one that has a venerable mythological history in Europe, where the cultures of the West originated. He calls his theory the acorn theory, and says that it “moves nimbly down the middle between the old contesting dogmas, barking at each other through the ages and which Western thought fondly keeps as pets.”[lvii]

I enjoy thinking about the possibility that we each carry our own mysterious acorn, to accompany us through life, to prod us from time to time in order to keep us on our path lays bare the lack of spiritual supports in our current culture, which is impoverished by the systematic denial of a whole rich vein of existence.

Climbing out of the car, I see that I must cross a thick pile of fallen oak leaves to get to the sidewalk. According to James Hillman, the oak tree is sacred, and has a longstanding relationship with the soul. These leaves form a thick cushion beneath my feet, and I feel that right now they correspond to the condition of the ideas in my mind. It is full of the myriad but separate leaves that have fallen from the venerable soul tree. How will I sort and sift them? I must wait with faith and patience, and mysteriously, I will be helped by my daimon.

In Self and Identity, Roy Baumeister puts his finger on a host of problems of the modern Western self. He describes how it is burdensome, saying that

only the modern West has expected its citizens to generate and validate their own standards, as well as constructing and maintaining a unique and autonomous self that can be socially validated through a constantly changing series of interpersonal relationships and transactions.[lviii]

He talks also about the elusive nature of the self as construed at this time in our cultural history, poignantly describing the great difficulty adolescents, especially, have with the nearly impossible task of “creating” self. Although Baumeister lays out the problematical nature of understanding the self here and now, he restricts himself to a quasi-scientific viewpoint. Thus, implicit in his statement is the cultural assumption that the self, although hidden, is not mysterious. Although admitting its complexity, he assumes it is made, not given:

The inner search may therefore sometimes become a quixotic quest for nonexistent realities, and the sometimes arbitrary creation of the self’s attributes must masquerade as discovery. [italics mine]…the notion that one can use reflexive consciousness to introspect in order to discover what one’s interpersonal traits are…seems ironic to the point of absurdity, though it is nonetheless popular.”[lix]

While Baumeister sees the current problems around the Self, and identifies the behaviour that attempts to respond to that, he focuses on traits, rather than soul or daimon. It is not in his cultural repertoire as a social scientist in North America at the end of the 20^th Century to consider that the reason people seek within themselves for basic realities is an ancient an natural one: the need to re-connect with one’s soul, to find one’s true path, rather than the more trivial focus on individual and arguably changeable “traits.” Baumeister stresses how elusive the self is for adolescents, in spite of the ability the culture has afforded them to postpone choices, saying that “The difficulty of self-discovery falls most heavily on adolescents, because in the present society that is the age at which identity must appear. [italics mine]”[lx] Although there is a reading of this sentence possible which allows for the appearance of the daimon, the context of the passage suggests that this is not what Baumeister means. It is not in his realm of suggested possibilities.

Yet interestingly, near the end of his essay, he does allude to the possibility of a divine spark, as he positions the moral role of the self as an important question for our time: “…the notion of a spark of divinity existing inside each person is an ancient religious doctrine, and perhaps there is some way to reconcile the moral glorification of self with the need to accommodate oneself so as to participate effectively in society. This will be one of the great social questions of the 21^st century.[lxi]

Baumeister goes on to describe with some care the problematic aspects of the culture’s current incarnation of self as value base, and some of the social problems arising from that. In a section entitled The Narcissistic Imperative, he says that

A large part of the burden of self derives from the social pressure to construct and maintain a highly attractive, competent, successful self that is worthy of admiration by self and others. A popular corollary of this belief is that people ought to end up with high self-esteem…Americans…are in love with self-esteem.[lxii]

Interestingly, it is the person who puts his self-esteem as his most important value who is described by one popular writer as evil. It is all right to put love of self as a first value, says M. Scott Peck, since the ability to love oneself is a requirement for the ability to love others. But the person who puts his self-esteem above his self-love as a value is by definition prepared to lie to himself and others to defend that centrally important measure of his worth. This behaviour is evil. More, the person who indulges in it is evil.[lxiii] Evil may be a socially unacceptable word in intellectual and academic circles, but interestingly, Peck’s books have had a phenomenal popularity, spending months and months on the best seller lists. Clearly, there are plenty of readers who are interested in the existence of evil.

Hillman has some interesting comments about Peck’s position on evil saying that he “uses the term as a diagnosis: evil basically consists in arrogant, selfish narcissism or supreme wilfulness.”[lxiv] Peck, he says, “although a psychiatrist, is definitely a moralist,”[lxv] and this limits his vision:

The rigid frame enclosing his vision does not allow Peck to see the daimon in the demonic. A deep-seated Manichaeism divides his world into saints and sinners, saved and damned, healthy and sick. “Evil is the ultimate disease…the evil are the most insane of all.” By means of a psychiatric diagnosis the moralist can place a patient among the damned.

A logic that so radically divides good and bad can offer only the same old standardized recommendations we’ve heard for centuries in the Christianized West: Fight the good fight. Peck calls it “combat.”[lxvi]

Peck then goes on to say that the only cure for evil is love, but Hillman rightly takes issue with this overly simplistic view, saying

Love is surely the most omnipotent word in current usage, since the Christian God himself is defined as love. It can do all things. I would insist, however, that it can do very little with “evil” unless this “love” first recognizes the soul’s call within the bad seed. Love…may be less an exercise of the will in an act of combat and more an act of intellectual comprehension of that daimonic necessity that calls above and beyond the world to the sinner as well as the saint.[lxvii]

Whatever his failings, Peck does point out the limits of self-esteem. Baumeister goes further in the same vein: his view is that the current unhealthy popularity of self-esteem, and the social encouragement of egotism actually contribute to violence in society. Baumeister sees that although

a long series of writers and psychological researchers…have expressed the belief that low self-esteem causes violence…empirical findings across a broad array of spheres (eg., murder, assault, rape, war, terrorism, torture, prejudice, oppression) repeatedly contradict that view. The actual cause of violence appears to be some highly favourable view of self that encounters an external, unfavourable evaluation—that is, threatened egotism is the main cause of violence…[lxviii]

Another social problem identified by Baumeister as resulting from the “cultural pressure to love oneself above all”[lxix] is erosion of self-control. Saying that “The majority of American’s social problems and individual pathologies reflect failures of self control,”[lxx] he points out that people who habitually behave in too egotistical a fashion will soon be disliked or rejected by friends, in spite of the original contradictory social imperative to work at making a strong positive impression on others, especially strangers one is meeting for the first time.

Each person’s egotism is…a potential threat to group stability and equity, which is why group norms may oppose and constrain egotism…evidence suggests that the long-range benefits of self-control to the self are immense, such as indicated by findings that link capacity to delay gratification in early childhood with success in high school and college.[lxxi]

He might be talking about Daniel Goleman’s “Marshmallow experiments,” described in his book Emotional Intelligence. Goleman describes a longitudinal study of a group of children, on whom the initial experiment went as follows: Young children of five were seated around a table and in front of each, a marshmallow was placed. It was explained to the children that if they wished, they could eat the marshmallow immediately, but that if they waited while the experimenter left the room for a few minutes and came back, those who had not eaten the first marshmallow would be given a second one. Periodic studies of the group of children in later years suggested that the motivation and ability to delay gratification in early life (as demonstrated by saving the first marshmallow in order to get a second one) was a predictor of success in many areas of life, including education, employment and personal relationships.[lxxii]

Lack of self-control brings us back to the culturally sanctioned but self-indulgent game of victimism, and many victims are stuffed to the gills with self-satisfied pride in what they consider their victim identities. With Baumeister’s findings about self-esteem in mind, it was with trepidation that I regarded the cover of The Canadian Guider, Vol 69, no, 3, Summer 1999, advertising an article with the phrase of “Self-Esteem,” and then with a mixture of relief and irony that I then read the contents of “Tiffany, Carolyn and I: An Adventure in Self-Esteem.” For this amateur personal description by a Guider of a challenging whitewater rafting trip she did with her Pathfinders is inappropriately titled. Though she uses the popular catch-phrase, the piece is actually about building self-confidence by facing challenges. The protagonists in this story are the ones who believe at first that they cannot do it, who realistically face their fear, and then courageously rise to the occasion. Flipping the page, however, I find an article entitled “Aggression and Girls.” Could the misplaced social faith in self-esteem (not necessarily backed by substance) really be a factor in the arguably increasing violence of our times? This article ends with the following:

Strategies aimed at empowering girls and young women and increasing feelings of self-worth are necessary, as are widespread policies of zero tolerance for both male and female perpetrators.”[lxxiii]

The article is current, the idea is mainstream, and the author is a professor of Counselling Psychology at the University of Toronto.

We have discovered the panacea of stuffing everyone to the eyeballs with self-esteem. Yet recently, one alarming new social phenomenon has been a dramatic increase in physical violence among girls. This article mentions Reena Virk, a fourteen-year old who was murdered by a gang of boys and girls in Victoria a year or so ago. Dr. Gabor Mate of Vancouver has an intriguing explanation for her victimhood. Citing her near-final words to her aggressors, “I love you,” he said that was one of many indications that Reena was clearly suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder.[lxxiv] She and everybody else’s cousin, we might reply with Ian Hacking; ADD is certainly a popular explanation for a myriad of socially unacceptable behaviours, and one of many other occasions for prescribing drugs to control behaviour. Tragically, the hapless adolescent Reena was unable either to create or to find herself in a way that meshed her with her society: others, possibly with similar problems, murdered her. Perhaps in beating her, they were unconsciously punishing her for reminding them of their own similar lacks.

The chorus on ADD is standard: is it caused by nature or nurture? Gabor Mate’s take on ADD is unusual, and I think, not only intelligent and logical, but moves in the direction of appropriate soulfulness. The soul is intimately connected with healing, as Estes emphasizes in her discussions of the Wild Woman. Although Gabor Mate acknowledges the existence of a genetic component, he emphasizes the brain’s plasticity, which means it can respond to treatment [and ritalin is only a small part of that] and he emphasizes the social factors that feed into the epidemic of ADD: the fact of the distracted lifestyle makes it so difficult for children to get their basic needs for relationship met effectively. “It takes a village to raise a child,” says the old African proverb, but, says Mate, late 20^th century city life with its severely stressed working parents and fractured families is hopelessly unable to provide anything approximating the village atmosphere. Indeed, this crazy life we’re living is largely responsible for the frequent inability of parents to effectively engage in certain critical development-promoting behaviours that in calmer, less distracted times were carried out instinctually as a matter of course. He identifies repeated acts of bonding with a calm caregiver, who mirrors and accompanies the baby in its changing emotional states, as critical for early brain development. The child who does not get enough of this (because the parents are too busy, or have ADD themselves, for instance) does not develop attention regulation or the ability to retain control over strong emotions: a regulatory function is in effect “sleeping.” Ritalin wakes that part up, but it is not the only answer.

As a society, says Mate, we have lost connection with our children. To control the epidemic of ADD, we need to reconnect to one another, to our children, to parts of ourselves that have been buried under the information landslide of modernity. Ancestors and villagers are no longer caring for the young, and this is a social problem that needs serious attention.[lxxv]

Hillman also says we have lost connection with our true ancestors: “Ancestry” in our present culture implies chromosomal connection; ancestors are those human beings from whom I have inherited my body tissues. Bioenergetics replaces the spirit world.”[lxxvi]

But the spirit world will not be gainsaid. The soul of a person must have the opportunity to “grow down.” When the upward reaching culture does not allow this,

…drinks, drugs, and depression set in like the Furies. Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkenings and despairings that the soul requires to deepen into life.[lxxvii]

What the culture does, indeed, is quite the reverse of allowing people to grow down. In the shallow, noisy, materialistic, simulacra-ridden existence of the late 20^th century, all the cultural supports for growing down have been stripped away. Where is the silence, the solitude? Where is the permission to patiently feel one’s darker seasons and pain in order to win through to greater strength and new learning?

Even when we have a simple illness such as a cold, we are no longer allowed to take the time and solitude (the need for which the illness itself may be signalling), to endure even a few hours of the natural fever that the immune system provides. We learn the process on TV and in popular culture. Have a headache? It is your social duty to take an Anacin and carry on. Fever? Take an Advil. Feeling blue, wondering about the meaning of your life? Prozac should help. Feeling up-tight? Have a drink. Feeling tired? How about cocaine? Bored? There are plenty of “designer” drugs available, and lots of them are not only legal, but widely advertised; many are even recommended by doctors!

Just as in our homes we no longer feel the changing of the seasons, neither do we do so in our lives. Central heating and homogenized, sedated mind states. And when drugs fail, there’s still food. Obesity is staggeringly common, along, of course, with its ghostly sister, anorexia. These two diseases clearly have a social component, and fit admirably into Hacking’s description of transient mental illness, occupying as they do, opposite ends of the vicious – virtuous greed-asceticism polarity.

How then can the soul help us? “Without her, (the Wild Woman nature)” says Estes, “women are without ears to hear her soul talk or to register the chiming of their own inner rhythms.”[lxxviii] A girl who, instead of being fed a steady diet of processed instant self-esteem from the drugstore is encouraged to connect with and believe in her instinctual soul, and get her soul nurturance from the Wild Woman wellspring, will not suffer from bulimia or anorexia. A child who has been raised by calm caregivers who have mirrored and accompanied her emotional states through babyhood, allowing her brain and personality to develop according to its own natural rhythms, will not hang out with peers who are completely alienated from soul, responsibility, morality, and self-control. She will not say “I love you,” to her attackers, while they are beating her to death, as Reena Virk did.

So ravenous as we are for partners to project our needs on, consumer goods, twenty-four hour a day distractions, so may we measure the hunger we have for the neglected part of our nature, which cannot be filled in any of these ways, but must be filled only by going within, following the instinct, doing the psychic work of focusing on our dreams and other inner material, as well as following with faith and openness the doors that open unexpectedly, pointing us in the direction of buried treasure. As Estes reminds us,

the solution for malaise is always the opposite.

…Without the knowledge of this dance, [the rhythmic cycle of Life/Death/Life] a person is inclined, during certain still water times, to extrovert the new and personal action into spending too much money, doing danger, roping reckless choices, taking a new lover… It is the way of those who do not know.[lxxix]

Naomi Wolf suggests that children who were young in the early sixites were “perhaps the last generation of Americans who actually had a childhood…as a space distinct from the world of adults, oriented around children’s own needs and culture rather than the needs and culture of adults.”[lxxx] This must change. We must turn our focus away from the numbing habits of blame, self-pity and consumerism, and reinstate childhood nurturing. And the only way to do that is to change ourselves: in the end the only way out is in. The resources we need are always with us; indeed the pressure of soul, as we have all experienced to our chagrin, are powerful enough to consume a lot of distractions in the ultimately futile attempt to silence the voice of the instinctual soul.

There is something powerful that we haven’t been listening to. What does it mean to listen? Estes tells us that ancient dissectionists believed the ear was designed to hear at three levels: these would apprehend first, mundane conversation, second, learning and art and third, guidance for the soul.[lxxxi]

What shall we listen to? The myths, of course, the old, old stories. We have come full circle now and look back again to our ancestors, the ancient Greeks, with their soulful stories, and back through the annals of the layers of old mythologies of Europe where western thought began. These stories are very deep, very old, very rich. In today’s world, rich instructive, soul-laden stories from many other cultures are accessible as well. They are all soul food, food of intuition.

In the new millennium, we must cultivate soul-knowing, the rich, mysterious, mythical, instinctual vein of the Self, which is ours to tap into but not to create, which we need to experience, rather than intellectually figure out. Estes advises us how we may reconnect with the deep parts of ourselves:

…the doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.[lxxxii]