Opus Day 11: Fly High

[Barque]

"The spirit is quite different from the soul, and it, too, should be in harmony with your life work. Spirit is the upper region of experience and includes your worldview, ethical sensitivities, ideas about life and death, religious beliefs and understandings, and intellectual development. It is growth, adventure, experiment, advance, and discovery.

When I use the word spirit in this context, I don’t restrict its meaning to “spirituality” in the modern sense. I mean spirit as a portion of who you are and how you live, in broad terms. Unlike the deeply embedded soul, spirit is high, up in the stratosphere of our thinking. If you have a philosophy of life, and a set of values, if you have a passionate vision and ambitions, these are largely expressions of your spirit.
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Spirit and soul are two dynamics moving in different directions: One reaches into the past for inspiration, the other moves steadily into the future. Soul thrives on memories and old attachments, while the spirit wants to move on.

Speaking as a representative of soul, I may unwittingly give the impression that soul is better. Not so. Spirit and soul are both essential and each is best when linked closely to the other or when they overlap so much that it’s difficult to sort out one from the other."

Today’s Work: In your journal, write down what excites you about the possibilities of “growth, adventure, experiment, advance, and discovery” in your work.

Share your responses with Barque readers, by replying to this discussion.

[Dr. Robert Klass]

To All Interested Parties, I have found myself thinking about this passage for much of the day, and I find that I have a number of questions...more questions than answers...about what was written. One of the things that I have been interested in for a long time is the nature of consciousness. This subject includes such things as what we are aware of when we perceive our lives, and I'm also fascinated by what and how we remember those things we remember. For much of my life, people have pointed out to me that I have a great memory of such things as names and faces. I used to think that my ability in this area was nothing unusual, but I have come to realize that I really do remember things better in certain parts of life than most people I know.

Please understand, I don't have this as any special talent. In fact, a lot of the stuff I remember seems to be useless trivia that has no apparent purpose. OK, I've been kind of rambling on, so let me get to my questions, and let's see if other people have some insights. First of all, is there a relationship between our consciousness and our spirit and our soul? Is the soul conscious of the spirit, and is the spirit conscious of the soul? Are our consciousness, our soul and our spirit separate entities, or do they communicate with each other? If I sound a bit confused at this moment, it's probably because I am confused at this moment from thinking about these things. Aloha1

[Barque]

Hi Bob,
Thank you for responding to these daily quotations and for sharing your insights. I appreciate your responses and they help me to think about these passages. My understanding of the model used by Thomas Moore and James Hillman and earlier writers shows a direct relationship among spirit, soul and consciousness, indeed, an overlapping relationship that exists at the individual level. I understand consciousness to be associated with the body and I think mind is also a feature of body. Soul mediates between spirit and body. I suppose answers to your questions would depend on a shared understanding of "entities" but I'll side-step that for now. If we see the relationship among spirit-soul-body as a vertical stack, I think Moore is suggesting that the channel(s) need to be enlarged, helping to create, clear, and convey the vis pillar of energy that is life. I appreciate that soul is deep so the spacial analogy may be unhelpful but there is a sense of the soul as mediator between spirit and body, and this is missing in our current culture. Communication may exist, needs to exist, and can be strengthened but such communication is helped by an environment and activities that aren't currently well supported in our lives. My reading of Moore includes a both/and approach to life, rather than an either/or approach. Such an approach, for me, embraces complexity, confusion, unknowing, faith, flexibility, mystery, time, discovery and revelation. This is my conscious approach, while acknowledging soul and spirit. It attempts to include the three realms.

Your talent for remembering names and faces suggests a strong sensing function on the scale for gathering information according to the MBTI [Myers-Briggs Type Indicator]. Many writers of fiction share this orientation. MBTI acknowledges that different people perceive the same experience differently. MBTI isn't meant to pigeon-hole or stereotype people - it is one tool that may help to explain why reactions differ among individuals.

Thank you again for your contributions to the forum.

[Ian]

These are good questions, Bob! My take on the connections between spirit, soul and consciousness is this: spirit and soul are parts of who we are, our selves or identities, where these are distributed in time and space, in our histories and our futures, in our bodies and in our worlds. Soul are those parts of self and the world that we put together to make us who we are, like the body, images, our stories; spirit is what we try to make of the world and who we are, like our ideas, our gods, and attempts to transcend self. Consciousness can be used to connect to the world and thus to make soul, but also to separate self from world and thus to make spirit. So I don't think these are different entities, just different aspects of self.

[Dr. Robert Klass]

Dear Ian, I thoroughly enjoyed your response. I agree with what you said, but I do find myself considering the entire concept of consciousness, and it does bring up other questions. For instance, why do we, apparently, go in and out of being conscious? Could it be that this is illusory, and we are, in fact, conscious all the time? Ever since Freud described the Id, Ego and Super Ego, there has been this idea that our brains are divided up into somewhat separate parts that, apparently, don't always communicate with the other parts. Although much of Freud has been discredited, there is still this very pervasive idea that our consciousness is divided into different parts. Although different versions of this model are widely accepted, I don't know of a single piece of evidence that prove that it is true.

While we are on this subject, how much of being conscious is a decision that we make, or is becoming more conscious something that just kind of happens to us out-of-the-blue (or the cosmos)? I am looking forward to hearing more from you and others on these topics. Aloha, Bob

[Dr. Robert Klass]

Thank you for your response. You mention that it is possible to see this as a both/and situation as opposed to either/or. This really struck a chord for me! I was fortunate enough to have known and studied with a very wise and knowing man who often talked about perceiving life and being able to hold two seemingly-opposed points of view. To the best of my knowledge, none of us are conflicted in believing that the chair we are sitting on is composed of tiny, sub-atomic particles, and it is also solid. Or, what we know to be true is that we have experiences "now," and our perceptions of the past, present and future can only be experienced from that point in time. That doesn't mean that the past and the future are not real; for each of us, they are very real, but on a certain metaphysical level, those other time periods only exist as we perceive them now.

For most of us, holding two points of view about parts of life and recognizing the correctness of both viewpoints is something that is not often considered. It really does seem that we are all "programmed" (for lack of a better word) to see situations as either/or, and it's easy to believe that something has to be one way or another. Seeing the rightness of other ideas and concepts is a sign of strength, rather than an indication of being indecisive. I find that if I can get my thinking to a "high" (Maybe, somewhere in this discussion, we can consider the whole concept of "high.") enough place, it is much easier to include seemingly-opposed concept. For me, it helps to remember my favorite line from Walt Whitman, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes." (I hope I got that quote right.)