Dust & soul II: Dearest & nearest Here
'Soul' is one of those madly polysemous and unconstrained
words, that has been claimed in many contexts for many purposes and yet
seems to retain a feel of something close to home, something we sometimes
are, something we want to be. In part II of Dust & soul we will
look at this dearest and nearest something and ask what we ourselves can
know of it and make of it. What is it? What does it give? What does it need?
What is its relation to our physical places - to body, to Earth and even
to the vast cosmos beyond?
Outline:
- 1. Intro: dust and soul
- 2. Two old, satisfactory four-letter words
- 3. Soul: constellation of associations
- 4. Soul's meeting with dust: some instances
- 5. Soul as world-presence: some instances
- 6. Soul work, soulmaking
- 7. Conversation with larger self about soul
- 8. Afterword: soul images and dust
- 9. Bibliography
Dust & soul II: Dearest &
nearest Here
1. Introduction
In the session yesterday we saw ravishing images of cosmic
dust.
I have been looking at these images feeling a kind of dilated
love.
In love with them, I set out after the science, but I could
tell there was another approach I'd also need. I didn't know how to think
about that, exactly, and still don't. I remembered Bachelard's phrase about
keeping our two consciences clear: the scientific and the imaginal, the
metaphoric, poetic, mythic, subjective. (Gaston Bachelard, French philosopher
of science and of poetry, 1884-1962.)
It seemed these images I loved were also something to do
with soul.
'Soul' is something about essential value in oneself and
in life, and maybe ideas about it can't or shouldn't be nailed down. Maybe
they need to stay a bit nebular, maybe there's just a sort of cloud of feelings
and sensings that can be evoked and expanded a bit, focused a bit.
Approached personally rather than scientifically, theologically
or philosophically.
So the question in this workshop is something like this:
what is the soul value of these cosmic images, and of contact with cosmos.
-
An assumption I begin with is that soul is something a
body can do; that soul is a state of body. This sentient body with which
we are centered somewhere in particular - somewhere on the real, present
earth - and able to see beyond ourselves into depths upon depths of space
and time.
Body is our most local here, our ultimate here.
The vast cosmos is its ultimate furthest there.
There it is, the vast ancient god Kosmos.
Here it is, the presence that can know it: an arrangement
of dust that can stand in interest and awe: soul.
Something like that.
2. Two old, satisfactory four-letter
words
Online etymological dictionary
Dust etymology
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return
(Genesis 3:19)
What is the sound and feel of the word?
OE dust
from Proto Germanic dunstaz (cf. Old High German
tunst "storm, breath," German Dunst "mist, vapor,"
Danish dyst "milldust," Dutch duist)
From the Proto-Indo-European root dheu- "dust,
smoke, vapor," "to fly about (like dust), to rise in a cloud".
(cf. Sanskrit dhu- "shake," Latin fumus "smoke").
Proto-Indo-European, the hypothetical
reconstructed ancestral language of the Indo-European family. The time scale
is much debated, but the most recent date proposed for it is about 5,500
years ago.
- grain and lightness of motion and hence openness of space
Similar words - powder, meal, grit - are related
to grinding of seeds and grains, mill dust.
Soul etymology
Our English word - what does it feel like - the open O
at the center - like lonely.
Old English sawol "spiritual and emotional
part of a person, animate existence."
From the Proto-Germanic, hypothetical prehistoric ancestor
of all Germanic languages, including English, saiwalo. (cf. O.Fris.
sele, M.Du. siele, Du. ziel, O.H.G. seula, German
Seele, Gothic saiwala, Old High German sêula, sêla,
Old Saxon sêola, Old Low Franconian sêla, sîla,
Old Norse sála, Lithuanian siela).
Sometimes said to mean originally "coming from or
belonging to the sea," because that was supposed to be the stopping
place of the soul before birth or after death. Hence, from Proto Germanic
saiwaz. (In German der See and die Seele.)
Old English sæ "sheet of water, sea, lake,"
from Proto Germanic saiwaz (cf. O.S. seo, O.Fris. se, M.Du.
see).
- There we have a connection of soul with prebirth, vastness
Similar words are Greek psyche, "life, spirit,
consciousness," or Latin anima and Hebrew nephesh, both
related to breath and aliveness.
- Again a relation to vapor, lightness of movement and
openness of space
3. A constellation of associations
How do you feel the word 'soul'?
What are some moments of being that you would consider
soul?
What was it about them?
Depth, beauty, fullness, longing, early love, death, openness,
feeling, vulnerability, significance, myth, heart-presence, silence, music,
journey, peril, responsibility, disembodiment, femininity, expansion, invisibility,
subjectivity, privacy/hiddenness, strong feeling, loving courageous connection
to life, pain, adoration, awe, joy, realness, real self, magic, ordeal,
The Jungian psychologist James Hillman wants to say soul
is a moth, a girl, moonlight, death, lunacy, suffering, drugs, fantasy,
a cauldron, memory, dreaming, sex, fear, the bottom of the sea, the sea
itself.
- James Hillman 1926-2011 in The dream and the underworld.
4. Souls' meeting with dust - some instances
Soul has something to do with yearning and awe and love
and vulnerability, with mortality, with creaturely naked realness. Presence.
I looked for examples of personal meetings with cosmos
that had those qualities:
One of mine:
Lying on my back under the stars from
one moment to another I suddenly felt I was looking OUT not up. It was
as if I were not lying down but upright, my back glued to the Earth by
gravity, looking into a space that was beside me - in front of me - not
above me. I saw it was daylight out there, not night, and I felt I could
step forward into that vast place space reverberant with light.
-
- I saw Eternity the other night,
- Like a great ring of pure and endless
light,
- Henry Vaughan 1621-1695 Welsh physician and metaphysical
poet, poem called "The world".
the lumeniferous ether that animates
our souls
- Philip K Dick in The divine invasion
On every side, above, below, before,
beyond, blaze steady fires of amethyst, topaz, ruby, emerald and diamond,
ultramarine - drift upon drift of them, burning against blackness or veiled
in filaments and gauzes of hypnotic allure.
They are, she realizes slowly, stars.
For the first time she grasps it. Each
star is really a sun like her own. The other exists.
- James Tiptree, who was really Alice Sheldon, science
fiction novelist 1915-1987, in Up the walls of the world, 1974
Sirius, the magnificent, the great
white-cold diamond blazing in cold space, the brightest star we see. I
thought, pinpoints, we call them. And I thought of the reality of the stars,
of Sirius, an inconceivable fountain of energy, greater than six of our
sun, pulsing, beating, boiling, flinging continuously on every side this
expanding turmoil of force, unknowable billions of miles away, for unimaginable
billions of years past and to come; and this fantastic rush of energy was
descending on me, and out of that tremendous cascade, those particular
minute electrons which my eyes could focus on passed through my lenses
and made 'pinpoints' on my retinas; but meanwhile the flood swept past
my eyes, past my head, and rained against the earth. And I looked at the
other stars, the whole sky dense with suns beyond suns, each one pulsing
out these great shells of energy. And I stood amongst this like flotsam
which for a second holds itself upright amid a torrent of ocean, myself
minutely upright on a spinning ball of rock, caroming through this universe
of suns.
- Alice Sheldon 1956 letter to her husband, quoted in Julie
Phillips 2006 James Tiptree, Jr: the double life of Alice B. Sheldon
St Martins Press
Many of the stars you can see on a
clear winter's night are younger than the planet beneath your feet.
An unending spate of pure luminous
energy pours from the Sun in all directions. Eight minutes downstream at
the speed of light, part of this extraordinary flux crashes down on the
Earth in a 170,000-trillion-watt torrent. Most is absorbed; this is the
energy that drives the winds, makes the waves and currents flow, heats
the rocks and warms the sky. A very small fraction of this energy is caught,
not by rock and wind and water, but by life. It is this sunlight, endlessly
refreshed, that flows through your coffee, your veins.
The Earth is open to the sky. Energy
from elsewhere floods through it shot through with the light of a continuous
creation.
- Oliver Morton NY Times "Not-so-lonely planet"
A young visionary describing her cosmological vision in
Ursula Le Guin's Always coming home:
I stood in a tremendous place of light
and wind. Under my feet was only light and wind. I fell. I was like a feather.
There was no need to fear.
As I began to feel this and understand
it, I began to know the greatness of the wind, the brightness of the light,
and joy.
It was the universe of power. It was
the network, field, and lines of the energies of all beings, stars and
galaxies of stars, worlds, animals, minds, nerves, dust. The lace and foam
of vibration that is being itself, all interconnected, every part part
of another part and the whole part of each part, and so comprehensible
to itself only as a whole, boundless and unclosed.
Foam, and the scintillation of mica
in rock, the flicker and sparkle of waves and sun, the working of the great
broadcloth looms, and all dancing, have reflected the hawk's vision for
a moment to my mind; and indeed everything would do so, if my mind were
clear and strong enough.
The house stands. You can live in a
corner of it, or all of it, or go outside it, as you choose. I was in my
vision. It was not in me.
-
I would step out of the dark farmhouse
where I was lodged and walk a way into the dry stubble to look up at the
stars, flaring like far cities in the windy autumn dark.
- Le Guin in The telling
On the last day we will not ascend
from the place of this world, but will remain as in our own country, and
go home into another world, into another principle of another quality this
earth will be like a crystalline sea, where all the wonders of the world
will be seen, all entirely transparent, and the radiance of god will be
the light within it.
- Jacob Boehme, German Christian mystic 1575-1624 in
Forty questions of the soul
- Ah, not to be cut off,
- not through the slightest partition
- shut out from the law of the stars.
- The inner - what is it?
- If not intensified sky,
- hurled through with birds and deep
- with the winds of homecoming.
- Rilke, "Ah, not to be cut off.
-
Here's my wish, to work truly and deeply
in something new and significant for the rest of my life. To drop what's
irrelevant and still have the resources to do that. To keep focus in it.
It's scientific and mythic. Cosmological
and sweet.
Begin with the gigantic blooms of space.
They are blooms made of dust.
- EE
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt
thou return
- Genesis 3:19
earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust
to dust
- 1662 version of the English Book of common prayer
What are your own instances?
5. Soul as world-presence: some instances
I was in love with the long-stemmed
grasses. In the early morning they glistened and softened my eyes. In the
late afternoon they gathered and reflected low warm light, softening my
body. ... they were the ground of my entire world, filling each day with
brilliant shades of chartreuse and deep green, then shifting with the season
to peach tones, to salmon and pink; then to many shades of rose, burgundy,
mauve, purple, and plum; then to yellow and shiny golden tones. All day
long, every day, they gathered up my attention, swaying and teasing me,
tugging me into a widening gyre of color, and of the world ... I remember
shifting my gaze to the grasses and noticing the color changes from the
day before - and then it came.
I could say I was consumed, washed
over by waves of rightness, is-ness and nothing more, but these words fall
short of my experience. I had no doubt, no question, no thought until after
the fact. I simply felt yes, entirely this, totally as it should be, without
words or the thoughts to think them, bliss, rapture, unity, sudden, swift,
easy, like sway ... . In the aftermath, I knew that light had streamed
through my eyes, that I had been gathering light for many months, and that
beauty had become deeply embedded in my brain, sinking into my body and
resurfacing as bliss .... My eyes continually stretched to and rested on
the distant blue horizon, continually scanning, looking and watching, as
if busy in the act of gathering beauty - although it seemed to seep through
every pore and sometimes simply slice through me. I had surrendered myself.
I was coming to see that we are embedded
in light and beauty
It becomes apparent that in a moment
of deepened awareness, we are breezed into and shuddered by sight. 112
- Sewall Laura 1999 Sight and sensibility: the ecopsychology
of perception Jeremy P.Tarcher/Putnam
At one point that night I had to let
go of her because the force of seeing was so strong, I had to look out
and up at the trees and the moon. And it began again, the oh oh. I was shaking and the sounds I was making
were the same as when I'm close to coming. And I suddenly understood that
knowledge and love really are the same.
Receiving the world was knowing the
world, but not in the sense of coming back to old knowledge or an old friend,
no it was intensely new and exciting, on the edge of discovery like writing
a poem or a story where suddenly connections are made and sparks fly. And
it had such an intensely sexual charge to it, like the moments before climax,
receiving knowledge that is never the same yet always the same, that never
loses wonder and awe.
Oh oh, it is not simply the approach
of pleasure, it is knowledge of self in its most intense concentration
on joy, it is testing our capacity for pleasure as if to say so this
is what I am capable of. Self discovering an ability to tune itself
to so intense a pitch. Living on the edge, in the sense of living in my
senses at their sharpest, every nerve and cell turned inside out to receive
the world. This is the way the world enters us - a tree, another body.
We can know through our senses if we receive with this kind of absolute
attention. And love. This new way of knowing is the way I am getting to
know Mary. Knowledge is love. Knowing is loving - yes that's better, it
is in actions, in movement, that they are the same.
- Lise Weil, journal
6. Soul work, soulmaking
she had lost the loving courageous
connection to life we can and do lose our souls
There's a long tradition of thinking of soul as something
that has qualities, that may be imperiled or saved, that needs care and
work, and can be built.
Religious teachers who talk about soul often use the idea
to evoke anxieties about death and enforce authority, but also to talk about
aspiration.
Jungian psychologists who talk about soul work tend to
mean personal emotional work with dreams, art and myths, etc. For instance
Jung imagines soul as a female figure one has a dialogues with. He writes,
The spirit of the depths pressed me
to speak to my Soul, to call upon it as a living and independent being
whose re-discovery means good fortune for me. I had to become aware that
I had lost my soul, or rather that I had lost myself from my soul, for
many years.
Jung recorded his experience in over
1000 handwritten pages and illustrations, many of which he later bound
together in a volume that he called The Red Book [its words] record his
realization that the soul is an independent living entity or dimension
of reality, something whose immense range we cannot grasp, whose voice
is "the Spirit of the Depths."
His soul, a female figure who surfaces
periodically throughout the book, tells him not to fear madness but to
accept it, even to tap into it as a source of creativity. "If you
want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up
such a great part of your nature."
-
I want to suggest that we could understand soul work also
in a broader way, both as the personal work we do to become more present
to the universe around us, and as the cultural work we do to make others
more able to be present too.
minds getting richer, more subtle,
more surprising as they gained experience with the world
- Donald Hebb, Canadian neuropsychologist (1904-1985)
There was pain and fear of course but
it does not come out pain in the end. He has not forgotten or repressed
it but it is all changed, by his love for his parents and his sister and
for music and for the shape and weight and fit of things and his memory
of the lights and weathers of days long past and his mind always working
quietly, reaching out, reaching out to be whole.
- Ursula Le Guin 1982 The diary of the rose, in The
compass rose: short stories Harper & Row
... people to whom the highest spiritual
attainment was to speak the world truly.
the sweetness of ordinary life lived
mindfully
She had come to understand their descriptions
of natural phenomena, the maps of the stars, the lists of ores and minerals,
as litanies of praise. By naming the names they rejoiced in the complexity
and specificity, the wealth and beauty of the world, they participated
in the fullness of being.
We're not outside the world, Yoz. You
know? We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You
see?
Nobody made the world, ruled the world,
told the world to be. It was. It did. And human beings made it be, made
it be a human world, by saying it? By telling what was in it and what happened
in it?
We're here, and we have to learn how
to be here, how to do things, how to keep things going the way they need
to go ... all we know is how to learn. How to study, how to listen, how
to talk, how to tell. If we don't tell the world, we don't know the world.
We are lost in it, we die. But we have to tell it right, tell it truly.
Eh? Take care and tell it truly.
- Le Guin in The telling
We're an early civilization. It's only a couple of thousand
years since the Greeks, and there have been some dark ages in the meantime,
and may be again. But our few centuries since the Renaissance have gradually
given us very beautiful kinds of knowledge of where we are. If things go
well those kinds of contact and understanding can expand beyond what we
will be able to imagine in our lifetimes.
Soul work would thus include science because it gives us
ways to see and understand more, the way the Hubble images have let us see
and understand more.
What sort of culture can we want to work toward, where
scientific cosmology and soul are not felt as at odds? Where science can
be felt as supporting loving attachment to place and the universe as a whole.
What sorts of social conditions can we want to work toward,
to give everyone the luxuries of time and comfort that let them be soul
in relation to cosmos?
What stops us personally from being soul in relation to
cosmos? What sorts of integration work can we do to make ourselves less
preoccupied with horizontal concerns, more free and sensitive and energized
to be interested in where we are?
What I want for us is to live in love with the universe.
It is not a simple thing be: Universe makes us but it also
unmakes us. Forms and deforms us. In the end undoes us, dissolves us, and
not before it cripples and deranges us.
So it's not about sentimentality, it has to be about the
broadest deepest bravest apprehension of mortal aliveness - a large task.
-
Soul enterprise:
We ask for permission all the time and pretend we don't.
We present our plan to someone we respect. We're asking for a blessing,
permission begins the mission. We can ask it of those we don't know. Authors.
The dead. They can do it. Biographies give permission. We use their authority
to get going. We don't tell people we're making them King or Queen. We
do this when we want to do something the soul wants. Permission is a requirement
of the soul. We're asking for our effort, risk and vulnerability to be
blessed. The more the soul is involved the more we need permission.
- Michael Meade in Men and the water of life: initiation
and the tempering of men
7. Conversations with larger self
about soul
- How is it that I both see and don't see?
- It's because you see without feeling and feel without
seeing.
- What is your name for this structure?
- Stupidity. Deadened in feeling, frail and drained in
initiative. Wipes out instinctual powers. Desires superiority and power.
Is lonely, hateful and envious. We are taught to submit to it.
- Is there a sign by which I can know that has happened?
- Fantasy.
- Is my enemy resignation?
- No, repression.
- Is it my father.
- Yes, who forbade energy.
-
- This journey is kind of soulless isn't it.
- No.
- Will you say something about the soul in it?
- Processing.
- Is there anything more you want to say?
- Yes, you think soul is early love, but it's not.
- Soul is hardship?
- No.
- Are you going to tell me what it is?
- Tempering - feeling and intelligence.
- More?
- Soul is responsibility.
- But it is responsibility to feeling too?
- Yes.
- So soul is an act?
- No, a state.
- You want me to live in minute impeccability.
- Yes.
- Anything else?
- Yes, you're succeeding.
- Do you mean at something in particular?
- At moving in the world.
- That's what this is?
- Yes.
-
- What is needed for soul?
- The Work.
- So flow is only one kind of soul.
- No, where there is soul there's flow.
- Do you want to comment?
- When what is withdrawn comes through into action and
community creation.
8. Afterword: soul images and dust
Archetypes
If you begin to explore your feelings
and associations with an archetype it starts to take you beyond what you
personally have previously known and experienced.
An archetype is a "reservoir of enthusiasm."
Two ways cosmos evokes a reservoir of enthusiasm - two
archetypal aspects of outer space that link to the notion of soul:
a. stars
"What words should I use,"
he asks her when she appears to his inner eye and ear, "to tell you
on what twisted paths a good star has guided me to you? Give me your warm
hand again, my almost forgotten soul."
- Jung in The red book
In Tarot the Star is one of the major arcana, associated
with individuation, inspiration, and vision.
b. dark void - night, sea, night sea voyage, outer space
voyage
- Is overworld underworld?
Outer space. Space outside usual identity. Set sail into
the unknown.
It is possible, in deep space, to sail
on solar wind. Light has force: you can rig a giant sail and go. Hone and
spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent,
broadside to the merest puff.
- Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 1974
Beyond the conscious mind lies a vast
unexplored place, the unconscious, which he called the root and rhizome
of the soul.
In Jungian psychology a night-sea voyage is a journey everybody
has to take alone to face their fears and emptiness. It's a stage in the
hero's journey where one goes into a dangerous zone to retrieve something.
The dream is the small hidden door
in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that
primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego
and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.
- Jung in The meaning of
psychology for modern man (1934)
In his writings and his practice, Soul
becomes not so much something that belongs to us as something to which
we belong - a vast and unexplored dimension of reality. He knew that our
greatest need was for connection with the transcendent, not through belief
and faith, but through opening our minds to the existence of that unrecognized
dimension which is the ground of our familiar world.
- Somebody writing about Jung
- And one more possibility, cosmic nebulae as an image
of how it feels to be in expansive reception: nebulae as images of mind/brain
state, as felt in a body.
- Dust IS soul.
- Yes.
- Are dust clouds an image of soul?
- Yes.
- Shaped pink billows.
- Yes.
- Electromagnetic standing structure.
- YES.
- Would we call that archetypal?
- No, structure-metaphoric.
- But reservoir of enthusiasm.
- Yes.
- Translucent structure with visible grain.
- YES.
- The grain being points of effect.
- Yes.
- Is that about sentience, consciousness?
- No, aboutness.
-
the azure heaven of Boehme . The blue
firmament is an image of cosmological reason; it is a mythical place that
gives metaphorical support to metaphysical thinking.
-
a condition of the mind. Envision it
as a night sky filled with the airy bodies of the gods, those constellations
which are at once beasts and geometry
8. Soul bibliography
Soul's meeting with dust:
James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon) 1955 Up the walls of
the world Ace
James Tiptree 1956 letter to her husband, quoted in Julie
Phillips 2006 James Tiptree, Jr: the double life of Alice B. Sheldon
St Martins Press
Ursula Le Guin 2003 The telling Ace
Ursula Le Guin 1985 Always coming home Harper &
Row
Ursula Le Guin 1982 The diary of the rose, in The compass
rose: short stories Harper & Row
Useful to soul-making:
James Hillman 1979 The dream and the underworld
William Morrow
Sewall Laura 1999 Sight and sensibility: the ecopsychology
of perception Jeremy P.Tarcher/Putnam
Michael Meade 1994 Men and the water of life: initiation
and the tempering of men Harper San Francisco
Harvey Andrew 1991 Hidden journey: a spiritual awakening
Henry Holt
Eugene Gendlin 1978 Focusing Everest House
Julie Henderson 1986/1987 The lover within: opening
to energy in sexual practice, Station Hill Press.
Eva Pierrakos 1990 The pathwork of self-transformation
Bantam Books
Clarissa Pinkola Estes 1992 Women who run with the wolves:
myths and stories of the wild woman archetype Ballantine Books
Carol Gilligan 2002 The birth of pleasure: a new map
of love Vintage/Random
Gopi Krishna 1970 Kundalini: the evolutionary energy
in man Shambhala Books
Idries Shah 1964 The Sufis Octagon Press
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