we are in soul
Psychologist Carl Jung defined the soul quite simply as the imaginative possibilities of our nature. What’s so appealing about his minimalist definition is that it doesn’t try to tell us what soul is. It suggests rather that we give our attention to a particular kind of inner activity–as the spontaneous, ever-present, coming into being and passing away of images. Therefore, it’s best, I think, to approach soul by way of characterizing, that is, by showing how soul functions rather than by definition.
Giving attention to the soul requires of me, first, a constant effort to undo myself, which includes undoing any notion of the soul that makes me feel I know what it is. This seems to me a necessary prerequisite for avoiding a new round of atrocities which inevitably result from concocting theories of soul. The second requirement in trying to maintain a connection with the activity of soul is to refrain from thinking of soul as “my” soul. For the moment that I appropriate to the familiarity of myself what is unfamiliar, impersonal, ineffable, essentially unknowable, mysterious, and yet nonetheless absolutely present as an ongoing activity, I turn a creating force within me into a personal possession, as if it were a pet to be cared for.
Rather than trying to give attention to the soul, I try to make myself available for it to get my attention. Images are the inner process of picturing which are forming at every moment and just as quickly dissolving. They are not inner pictures to be looked at. It’s better, therefore, to think of images as the ideas that shape and form life. If we can understand the image as an activity of the soul, regardless of its content, we can begin to develop capacities for becoming conscious of soul life in an ongoing way. I think of the content of an inner image as little more than its outer clothing. As such, I tend to pay less attention to the content of dreams and far more attention to the felt-sense of dream images. I try to get a sense of the dream’s movement, its rhythms, its ups and downs, lefts and rights, ins and outs and so forth—in other words, the dramatic action of the imaging process itself.
An image grabs my attention but it seems to me to defile the soul to then go on and ask what the image means, or what it symbolizes. And even though an image tells me a great deal about myself, to mistake this telling for the work of soul, reduces soul to something located only in me. Therefore, the work of soul as I advocate focuses on how to become present to the ongoing creative activity that is generating the images. An image grabs my attention because it wants something from me. What does it want? My attention, my contemplation. The word “con-template,” by the way, means “being within the temple,” so it helps to imagine that we enter the temple of images with them. Once inside the temple, we practice staying open and radically receptive, becoming actively present to the images without losing a sense of who we are.
The intention of gradually coming to sense the soul’s activity–on its terms rather than on ours—is to allow ourselves to be changed by the soul. Paying attention to dreams and allowing them to teach us image logic begins to effect a change of our waking life of fantasy, memory, thinking, and perception. This change does not simply involve knowing ourselves more fully, but more significantly, it changes the way we approach the world. It makes possible slowly coming to the point of sensing that the individual soul is but a drop in the soul of the world. Soul is not only in us, it is around us all the time. We are in soul.
blogger bio
Renée Coleman, Ph.D., earned her Mythological Studies doctorate (with an emphasis on Depth Psychology) at Pacifica Graduate Institutein Santa Barbara, CA in 2002. She makes her home in Santa Clarita, along with her husband, four children, their dog, two chickens, and a very noisy parrot. As a certified DreamTender, Dr. Coleman helps dreamers navigate through the many twists and turns of the dreamtime. Using a holistic, embodied approach to working with dreams, she mindfully guides souls from around the world in her private practice.
Contact Information for Renée:
661-288-1901
dreamtending@gmail.com
Fantastic! Loved it! Once again Dr. Coleman opens up our understanding of ourselves and our inner journey!