A Complete Guide to the Soul

Imagination is the primary faculty of the soul and that imagination is a polytheist might be the shortest summation of Patrick Harpur's entertaining, erudite and image provoking book. We see the world through a soul's eye and what we see depends on which 'god(s)' or 'archetype(s)' we presently inhabit (or are inhabited by). That this configuring of the nature of things presents numerous challenges to we, the children of the Enlightenment, Harpur happily recognises as he invites us to consider alternative traditions, most notably neo-Platonism, Romanticism and the spiritualities of indigenous peoples. In passing, his account of neo-Platonism is one of the most lucid and engaging that I have read Living an ensouled, imaginative life has three principal obstacles. The first is familiar. It is our materialism that sees matter as primary and the given discourse of mainstream science as definitive. Harpur seeks skilfully to deconstruct this way of seeing by evoking different ways of perceiving the world; by a renewed empiricism that takes alternative accounts seriously, for example, near-death experiences; and, by showing that the language of science itself is inhabited by myth. He cites the example of the Large Hadron Collider searching for the 'Higgs Boson'- the elusive particle that gives the world mass and allows it to pass from the immaterial to the material, christened the 'God particle', and, thus, 'solving' the continuous enigma of how the 'two' worlds relate. But such enigmas may not, he suggests, be solvable and this leads us to the second scourge of imagination, namely, literalism. We think that something ought to be 'factual' or 'fictional'. It cannot be both. It cannot be 'myth' and yet, as Karl Popper reminds us, 'scientific discovery is akin to explanatory story-telling, to myth-making, and to the poetic imagination'. If we talk of 'multiple universes' that no one has 'seen', can we not equally talk of 'heavens and hells' that people claim definitively to have seen, indeed travelled through, even if their 'location' is strikingly fluid? Literalism, also, stalks religion wanting to turn the imaginative, lived speculations of soul that are at once embodied, ours, particular to places and traditions and lived without edges, or finite boundaries, comfortable with monotheism, with an indwelling unity, but polymorphous in image and practice into confining, hard edged, fundamentalisms. Literalism craves certainty but the imagination craves life that by its nature dissolves certainties. Literalism demands the 'facts', imagination imbues the world with felt meanings. One of the most thought provoking and original chapters of the book explores the relationship between 'soul' and 'spirit' for 'spirit' too can be an obstacle to a soulful life. 'To spiritual, hierarchical thinking, the daimons are at best the missing links between this world and the world 'above'. But to soul they are the very fabric of a single world which shifts shape – shows us many different aspects, including the spiritual and the material, according to whatever perspective, whatever god, we are looking through,' writes Harpur. This, he contends, is a necessary counterpoint to spirit's tendency to ascend, transcend and depart this world for a world 'above' that is clear, light and eternal. Soul takes us down, dark and dirty. Soul celebrates the complexity of real life, being suspicious of purity, preferring Jung's wholeness to holiness. If neglected or ignored, its occupants, deprived of attention, will return doubly distracting for, as Jung remarked, the gods neglected return as diseases. Both are necessary but either driven to exclude the other loses an important dimension of what it means to be human – a tri-partite reality of spirit, soul and body that inhabits an 'imaginal' space of which all three are an integral part. This habitation is both given by soul and emerges as we shape soul – the world is truly, as Keats wrote, a 'vale of soul-making' and in that making with Harpur we have a guide of sure touch, copious wisdom and a glimmering sense of humour.