“…the human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul. Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul” (Hillman, 1975, p. xv).
And this changes everything. If the purpose of our life is to make soul of it; not a career, nor legacy, nor reputation, nor any of the myriad of tasks we set ourselves to – all of the dangling carrots – but to make soul.
Soul.
How different would our orientation be?
It is an adventure. A wandering. Not a mission from one end of the vale to the other. Not a five day hike for the sake of team building. We can no longer match our whereabouts with “how well we are doing”. There is no more conative striving. No more proscriptive procedure. Yet passion; Eros, is central. Getting lost is part of the adventure. Through the vale of the world. We are not ascending to new heights. We are investigating the murky depths. We are getting mud on our hands. And we do this for love.
“and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it” (Hillman, 1975, p. xv). To make soul. Like an alchemical procedure, we feed our life through a perspective that turns our raw experiences, our prima materia into soul. We make something of it. Not a thing that happens to us but a thing we participate in the co-creation of. Not in an egocentric way. In an erotic way.
A fundamentally artistic, perceptive-love-making.
Greeting the world as you would a lover.
Get naked and sweaty and loud.
Re-Visioning Psychology is a “book about soul-making” (Hillman, 1975, xv). A re-visioning of psychology away from medical, moral or biological models towards a psychology from the point of view of soul. It’s needs and wants. So often radically different from what the ego aims at. From the egoic perspective it is almost a psychology from the point of view of the contradistinction. Our aim is not to dissect or cure; to be hygienic, to shame, punish, judge or to explain ourselves.
The challenge of this cannot be overestimated. It is essentially asking you to all but abandon every common-place idea that we have to be replaced with ideas that – from our swollen egocentric and hyper-rational perspective – seem utterly absurd and probably more to the point – exceedingly dangerous.
To, in a sense, forget yourself to the chaos. To let the wild and unblemished through.
So why do this?
Because what we are currently doing does not work. We are destroying ourselves and the capacity of the earth to support us. We insist on our rationality and on our capacity to be moral and yet we kill the very thing that sustains our lives. The very thing you are reading this on has undoubtedly caused many people untold hardship not much different in scope or barbarism then to enjoying some sugar in your tea in the 18th century. Our entire western existence is based on the exploitation of everything, including ourselves.
So let’s cut the bullshit. We’re not rational. Or if we are, we’re rational the way a sociopath is rational. And we are not moral. Were we moral our lives would not be able to exist the way they currently do. We are anethnatized consumers who plod along ignoring the actual rape and murder that happen on our behalf so that we can have conveniences that slowly erode our well-being or outright kill us.
And we’re fucking miserable doing it.
We exist in a dream world of untended consequences and moral amnesia. We live in a fiction already. We should at the very least make it a more interesting one.
A policy initiative is not going to do the trick. A diet or a one hour commitment once a year to respect the fucking planet is not going to do it.
What we need is a radical shift in the very way we perceive the world.
