The daimon part is easy enough, for we have already accepted the translation of daimon as genius (Latin) and then transposed it into more modern terms such as “angel,” “soul,” “paradigm,” “image,” “fate,” “inner twin,” “acorn,” “life companion,” “guardian,” “heart’s calling.” This multiplicity and ambiguity inhere in the daimon itself as a

Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods. We are, this book shall maintain, less damaged by the traumas of childhood than by the traumatic way we remember childhood as a time of unnecessary and externally caused calamities that wrongly shaped us.

Common expressions make this quite clear. A soul is said to be old, or wise, or sweet. We speak of someone having a beautiful soul, a wounded soul, a deep soul, a large soul, or one that is simple, childlike, naive. We might say, “She’s a good soul”—but terms like “middle-class,” “average,” “usual,” “regular,” “mediocre” do not adhere to “soul.”

Perception bestows blessing—as the stories sketched in this chapter attempt to demonstrate. Perception brings into being and maintains the being of whatever is perceived; and when perception sees in “the holiness of the Heart’s affections,” again as these stories say, things are revealed that prove the Truth of the Imagination.

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.

The invisibility at the heart of things was traditionally named the deus absconditus, the “concealed god,” that could be spoken of only in images, metaphors, and paradoxical conundrums, gems of immense worth buried within giant mountains, sparks that contain the flammable force of wildfire. The most important, said this tradition, is always the

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,

The daimon’s “reminders” work in many ways. The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when it is neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but cannot abide innocence. It can

What you do in your life affects your heart, alters your soul, and concerns the daimon. We make soul with our behavior, for soul doesn’t come already made in heaven. It is only imaged there, an unfulfilled project trying to grow down.