Making soul
Acorn. Niche. Nature. Mesh
Introduction
In 2014, I published a book of short essays, Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy. It was described as a series of small ‘manifestos and meditations we might need for the future’, and had three ideas or contexts woven through:
- The ecological and social crises we face in our times
- A secular idea of soul as a lifelong force within each one of us
- The power of imagination in telling new stories of our being.
In the book, I explored the experience of joy and the inherent individuality of soul. Though the book is about joy, it was explicitly not about personal development or thinking ourselves happy. I wrote: “if these pieces in this book are about self help at all, it is the kind that takes a lifetime”.
I was writing about a life well lived — engaged, open and in connection — but I was also, crucially, writing about how on earth to live in the world that humans have created. In such a context, I wrote:
“Happiness…is hardly an appropriate response to a crumbling world. My sense is that we need to draw upon a wider, more nuanced, emotional repertoire to engage more fully with the human and non-human ecosystems we live within”.
I identified these three ideas, and expanded them further in my writing and teaching, but since then have not returned to that idea of the ‘secular soul’ that had so captured me. Back then, it seemed to me that ‘soulmaking’ — the art of becoming a human — was going to be the key task of our age, one that would bring each authentic individual into relationship with their world, to “work together to integrate such small wisdoms into a practical activism of the future”.
Now I am wondering about a different question:
Is it possible to talk and write about ‘soul’, whilst seeing the human conditions and contexts we live in as essentially secular, animist and materialist?
This question has emerged because, in the last few years, having gone deep into spiritual practice for a while and finding nothing there that I could engage with and relate to, I veered back away from ideas and practices of ‘spirit’, and terms like ‘sacred’ and ‘divine’, towards more grounded, materialist explanations and relational, animist ecological inquiry.
I am, however, still intrigued about how people experience ‘soul’, and how they might conceptualise it — whether this be as an acorn myth (like James Hillman) or something like Epicurus’s idea of a ‘mortal soul’, that Irvin Yalom discusses in his book, Staring at the Sun. Yalom draws on this metaphor as a way of seeing and thinking about death in our times, and sees the acceptance of the ‘mortal soul’ as an essential step in overcoming the existential terror of death:
“…Epicurus posits that death is nothing to us, because the soul is mortal and dispersed at death. What is dispersed does not perceive, and anything not perceived is nothing to us.”
Some people (including friends and colleagues of mine) regard the use of the word ‘soul’ as archaic and imbued with so many assumptions that it is not longer worth using. The metaphor is so aligned with the religious, they say, that we must find other ways of talking about how human beings can be authentic, grounded and joyful. And I agree with them, though the idea still tugs at me.
Clearly, neuroscience tells us that there is no ‘seat of the soul’ in our brain or body — and recent inter-disciplinary research (from Anil Seth and others) indicates that (human) consciousness (whatever this might be!) is emergent from the complex network of a (human) animal’s brain that is constantly ‘best-guessing’ the complex systems of the world around us, using the relational information that comes to it from the body’s sensory organs to guide it. This, in itself, is a fascinating perspective on being human — so why not just let go of ‘soul’, and embrace this complexity?
I admit that I have been so taken with the experiential reality of this metaphor for our deep sense of self, that I find it difficult to let go! So, for this piece, I wondered what would it be like to go back to first principles and explore how the ideas and practice of soulmaking had first emerged for me? Perhaps this might still be important, and ‘soul’ might still have something to say?
Initially, I had wanted (following Yalom and James Hillman) to reclaim ‘soul’ as an experiential and therapeutic idea, not just for those with a religious or spiritual faith and practice. I wanted to expand the ways we experience ‘soul’ in ourselves and others, so that it might be of practical use in the world.
This might seem grandiose, but it is deeply prosaic. I am with Elizabeth Slade in her 2017 Dark Mountain essay, ‘God Shaped Hole’ in which she writes of the ‘pragmatism of the soul’: “I want to live in a society that takes the full needs of the human soul and psyche seriously. At the moment, when there isn’t even proper investment in basic support of peoples’ mental health, this may seem naively idealistic, but until we do it, I believe we are suffocating ourselves. Out of the suffocation, problems are born”.
I began this inquiry with a piece published here in March 2023 entitled “On soul, therapy and transcontextuality”. This is a follow up and second inquiry. In writing it I may shed the skin of ‘soulwork’ altogether — or it may take a different direction…
Acorns
The first time I really came across the idea of ‘soul’ (apart from the culturally familiar religious version) was in the books of James Hillman, specifically The Soul’s Code. Here he set out his idea of the ‘acorn’: the image that carries our potential, our character, calling — even destiny. Hillman’s was a psychology of the individual, but embedded in the mythical and archetypal, but also crucially in material frames of inequality, ecology and the reality of a ‘broken world’. He placed his work firmly in the social, cultural political contexts of his time (which are also our time).
His work was derived from Jungian psychology, but veered from the pseudo-spiritual interpretations that have often bedevilled Jung’s legacy. Jung’s idea of ‘individuation’ — a powerful metaphor of becoming — has more recently been coopted by the cult of the individual that is now at the heart of 21st century spiritual and personal development.
Jung was writing during the mid 20th century and in the context of the second World War and the Holocaust. Hillman lived and worked in the late 20th century in the context of social and ecological breakdown and the rise of neo-liberalism. Context is always crucial, and in our cultural context, soul and the insights that Jung brought us have been absorbed into the New Age marketplace, co-opted by capitalism to the extent that there is a danger of losing any sense of the collective — any connection to relatedness, any acknowledgement of interdependence.
Self improvement, spiritual development, integral theory, spiral dynamics — all provide cultural metaphors of self and soul as personalised, upwardly moving, ever-opening. A ‘something’, in other words, to be reified — even worshipped. A ‘someone’ who can be transformed through the project of ‘becoming’ a sovereign self, consciously willing and manifesting happiness, health and riches as personal destiny. Or a ‘someone’ who is absorbed into a great non-dual, transpersonal transcendence, where all is one.
Conversely, the soul metaphor of Hillman is an acorn — something small and insignificant — an image of potential that holds within it everything that is needed for the tree to grow. An image of growing down (into the earth) before growing up. An image of being in community with a forest full of other trees, and being interdependent with them and the wider world in ongoing, changing relationship. A transcontextual image, in other words.
Perhaps, there is destiny in the acorn of a kind, but it is the shared destiny of the interdependent forest. And yes, in the idea of the ‘soul’s code’, there is a particular image of ‘you’ or ‘me’ — experienced as energetic, imaginal, relational, directional — but this experience is often tentative — an impulse or ‘tug’ to be followed but never controlled or ‘mastered’.
Hillman’s idea of calling and soul is individualistic AND relational AND societal AND ecological. In his 1997 interview with Scott London, he gives some revealing answers to London’s questions, which tell us that, at the very least, he has a complex approach to the ideas of psychological pathology and paradigm, calling and destiny, as well as issues of social and ecological breakdown:
London: You can’t fix the person without fixing the society.
Hillman: I don’t think so. But I don’t think anything changes until ideas change.
London: In The Soul’s Code, you talk about something called the “acorn theory.” What is that?
Hillman: Well, it’s more of a myth than a theory…The acorn theory says that there is an individual image that belongs to your soul.
London: What is the first step toward understanding one’s calling?
Hillman: It’s important to ask yourself, “How am I useful to others? What do people want from me?” That may very well reveal what you are here for.
London: What is the danger for a child who grows up never understanding his or her destiny?
Hillman: I think our entire civilization exemplifies that danger. People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help? They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture. They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has come with them into the world.
So, Hillman’s soul is explicitly collective, mythical and metaphorical. And ‘soul’, as a human experience of integrity and whole-ness, is also inherently ecological or, if you prefer, interdependent — embedded in an ongoing flow of mutual learning with other living systems (human and other-than), as well as the myriad frames within frames that Nora Bateson reminds us make up the living world.
Soul is not a ‘something’
Yet, as Chris Robertson reminded me the last time I was writing on this topic, soul is not a ‘something’. At best it might be a powerful metaphor for selfhood in the world, or maybe, as McKenzie Wark might put it (after Marx), a personal symbol of our species-being. That said, it still carries the implications of a sacred, mythical, religious ‘thing’.
Perhaps, then, we can do ‘soul-making’ with new frames? Bill Plotkin’s idea of ‘soul as eco-niche’ might be one such idea. His is a particular vision, developed through many years exploring ‘soul’ in the context of his work in wilderness settings in North America. In his 2021 book, The Journey of Soul Initiation, he claims a particular vision:
“I use the word soul in a way that diverges from and is sometimes irreconcilable with its more familiar uses. I have found this re-visioning of soul necessary to enable us in the Western world to once again understand ourselves, experience ourselves, and treat ourselves as native participants in our animate Earth. This re-visioning is equally necessary in order to make sense of the journey from psychological Adolescence to initiated Adulthood… Foundationally, Soul, for me, is an ecological concept, not a psychological one nor a spiritual or religious one. Specifically, by Soul I mean a person or thing’s unique ecological niche in the Earth community…. By this definition, all creatures have Souls, not just humans. And not just creatures, but every naturally occurring thing…”
However, we might also explore other places — like McKenzie Wark’s book Molecular Red, in which she explores a revolutionary archaeology of a ‘communist soul’, as found in the writings of Alexander Bogdanov and Andrey Platanov in early post-revolutionary Russia (before the tyrannical rot set in). Wark explores soul, not as a ‘thing’, but as a phenomenon of humanity. It is located in the novels, idealism and activism of these revolutionaries and, in her book, Wark also quotes contemporary theorist, Donna Haraway who wrote that: “Abundance…is essential to the full and historical possibility of human nature”.
Could this ‘full and historical possibility’ be what it is to be ‘soulful’? Or is ‘soul’ a symbol of something inherent and individual — born into us through our genetic inheritance — and manifested in our character and our experience of calling?
Then there’s the question of whether it’s ever possible to consider the idea of an individual ‘soul’ or self, without it being seen in relationship with other humans, other lifeforms and the world itself. Plotkin’s eco-niche is about our unique place in ‘our animate Earth’, and the developmental journey we make through this landscape from Adolescence to Adulthood. As we’ve seen, he regards this approach to ‘soul’ as distinct from other models and ideas, but does this definition simply fit the hierarchical trajectory of his particular developmental journey?
Wellbeing, soul and labour
So, might there there be other ways of describing what we often call ‘soul’? Could it be the experience of a kind of ‘deep wellbeing’, or an authentic belonging in and relationship to the wider web of life (or mesh, as Timothy Morton calls his version of an interdependent, ecological, more-than-human reality of Earth)?
One problem is that ‘wellbeing’ and ‘soul’ are both concepts characterised by their ambiguity — by uncertainty, lack of tangibility, cultural specificity and subjective individual experience. If soul can be said to be simply experiential — a subjective light cast on an objective world — then it is no ‘thing’ at all. And if wellbeing (or wellness) is something consciously striven for through the path of individual ‘soul’, sovereignty or spirit — or whatever word is used — then it becomes self-regarding and culture-bound.
Perhaps ‘soul’ can have meaning if we understand it to be the metaphorical energy that connects all humans to each other, other lifeforms and to the Earth? And while this does not define soul (it is not a something) we might argue that it is really only fully experienced (by humans) when material, relational and other human needs are met. Soulfulness is in the surplus. Again, this is not what soul is, rather it is what soulful living does — it fills the human being with the potential for beauty, love and individual fulfilment when labour is done and life can be something beyond work.
Such an approach must also acknowledge the effects of colonialism, genocide, ecocide and inequality on the development of the Western idea of soul that emerged from Christian norms of white supremacy, patriarchy and the ‘great chain of being’. These days, there is little room for indigenous, racialised, queer, feminist and other-than-human narratives in the individualised world of the ‘human soul’.
The individualistic myths of soul in Western culture lie alongside patriarchal myths of humans as masters of nature or, at the other polarity, children of nature nestled in the living bosom of Mother Earth. Yet, ‘Nature’ is another ambiguous word — like soul — a linguistic construct to describe a powerful metaphor or image that captures the values and beliefs of our culture exactly…
The ‘soul’ of perilous nature
McKenzie Wark and others regards the myth of ‘Mother Nature’ — the Gaia assumption — as positively dangerous — for humans, non-humans and the planet itself in the era of the Anthropocene (or as she terms it, the Capitalocene — the era in which human capitalism has come to dominate and effect the Earth and its inhabitants).
Wark points out that ‘Nature’ is a human construct — emerging from human labour set in and against it, and the economic frames in which these operate. So, it is folly to regard ourselves in relation to nature, or our ‘souls’ as part of this ecology. Timothy Morton, expands on this, pointing out that we cannot name Nature without being outside of Nature. In short, human ‘supremacy’ is implicit in ‘nature narratives’ — as it has been in most of our ‘soul stories’ over the centuries. And ‘human nature’ in these hierarchal stories is decidedly patriarchal, rational and normative, and definitely not divergent, mad or queer.
In reality, Earth is a dangerous, queer and perilous place. It is beautiful, florid and mysterious. It holds secrets, intelligences and consciousness that humans cannot understand within our current frames of knowing. Even science, which in its current iterations can explore the ways trees communicate, the wonders of the microbiome and the miracle of how consciousness might emerge from our best-guessing brain, finds it difficult to get inside the infinitely complex systems that these phenomena represent.
At other points in our species’ history, those with power and influence regarded humans (and only some humans at that) as the only living beings with consciousness, intelligence… and souls. Now many of us are excited that other lifeforms might have some of the attributes that humans do or (even more exciting!) forms of intelligence and consciousness that are weirdly and beautifully not like humans at all! Not just dolphins and primates and crows, but octopi, trees and even the ‘smalls’ — the billions of beings that inhabit our microbiome and — literally — make the world go round.
However, the nature of their internal experience — even animals near to us on the evolutionary tree — is almost unknowable. If nature carries other forms of ‘consciousness’ or ‘intelligence’ (the two things are different), this might be at the level of the organism or species — but the inner experience — or ‘soul’ — of the organism is hidden to us. Even if we accept Plotkin’s idea that ‘soul’ is an unique eco-niche of everything on Earth, this construction is still a human idea — it’s still a human saying this from inside a human mind — not from the experience of an octopus or crow or tree.
Evolution is infinitely complex, even as it drives the patterns of the natural world and the complex life systems (you, me, the crow, the octopus, the tree, the virus) that live within it.
Even if we were to accept a collective entity with intelligence and/or consciousness that we name as ‘Nature’ (or Gaia or ‘world soul’), then there is little evidence that this is benevolent. Nature — if we must call it this — is both fecund and dangerous and often works against the ‘labour’ and existence of humans and non-humans alike. Of course, humans have a place in this complex web of layered and infinitely contextual relationships. And we have created places — big, sophisticated, interconnected places called Cities — in which humans seem to hold agency and in which there is often great diversity, together with collective cultural and spiritual significance. However, when the humans leave these places, and there is no more human labour to keep the natural growth of non-human life in check, then ‘nature’ becomes wilderness once more.
Humans are not ourselves ‘wild’ — we are domesticated and domesticating creatures, labouring, loving, creating and imagining — sometimes fighting the true unknowable essence of the wild. If there is a soul of nature, it is is as likely to carry the metaphor of Jeff Vandermeer’s Area X — a growing, fertile, malevolent non-human consciousness that ultimately overgrows and destroys — as that of Gaia, the benevolent, holistic Mother of all.
Vandermeer offers us a literary metaphor (one of Morton’s ‘hyperobjects’ perhaps) that shows the folly of humans imagining we can control (or save) ‘nature’. In truth, as this inquiry might be showing, we humans cannot even pin down, define or control our own!
Isn’t soul just Warm Data?
Finding our way through all these pathways and niches might lead to a place where ‘soul’ can only be a shorthand we use to try to make sense of our subjective, experiential reality and place in the world (and, for many, beyond this world). Whatever words we use to describe this complicated and nuanced ‘soulfulness’, it (not a thing) is inherently relational, implicitly personal, undoubtedly collective, divergently non-rational and certainly more-than-human in its scope.
Perhaps it is about an identify and, yes, a niche. Perhaps it is about the conditions for survival, thriving and mutual learning. Perhaps it is about infinite mysteries and the intimately known. Soulful experiences can occur when we are replete with the needs of life and when we are suffering and in despair. Soulfulness is at the heart of creativity, and what we might call ‘happiness’.
So one final question to be posed, for the time being:
Might ‘soul’, then (this thing that is not a thing) essentially be a relational, experiential phenomenon available in what Nora Bateson calls the ‘Warm Data’ of interdependent, mutual learning — experienced in the spontaneous ‘coming into being’ of authentic potentiality in the Ecology of Mind that her father, Gregory Bateson described?
I’ll be thinking and maybe writing about this some more, but would welcome the thoughts of readers and fellow unpsychologists about this question.
To be continued/
