The Soul's Code

We cannot think of our biographies only as time-bound, as a progression along a line from birth to death. This is only one dimension, the temporal one, a linear one. The soul moves in circles, said Plotinus. Hence our lives are not moving straight ahead; instead, hovering, wavering, returning, renewing, repeating.

NEITHER NATURE NOR NURTURE—SOMETHING ELSE

By “styles of loving” I am referring to the models used in “love research.” The broad concept “love” is sorted into a variety of baskets, such as responsible altruistic caretaking (agape), practical partnership (pragma), erotic intimacy (eros), and so on.

But our task here is not to restore all the invisibles but to discriminate among them by attending to the one that once was called your daimon or genius, sometimes your soul or your fate, and now your acorn.

There is in each of us a longing to see beyond what our usual sight tells us.

The equations of math, the notations on a musical score, and the personifications of myth cross the limbo land between two worlds. They offer a seductive front that seems to present the unknown other side, a seduction that leads to the delusional conviction that math, music, and myths are the other side. We tend to believe that the real truth of th

Therapy promotes the great delusion of insight. It preaches and practices the blindness of Oedipus. He asked questions about who he really was, as if you could find the true acorn of your being by self-questioning reflection.13 This therapeutic fallacy builds upon another: that the acorn is out of sight, hidden, squirreled away in childhood, repres

The Platonic myth of growing down with which we began this chapter says the soul descends in four modes—via the body, the parents, place, and circumstances. These four ways can be instructions for completing the image you brought with you on arrival. First, your body: Growing down means going with the sag of gravity that accompanies aging. (Baker t

A “happy” child was never and nowhere the aim of parenting. An industrious, useful child; a malleable child; a healthy child; an obedient, mannerly child; a stay-out-of-trouble child; a God-fearing child; an entertaining child—all these varieties, yes. But the parental fallacy has trapped the parents also in providing happiness, along with shoes, s