The Soul's Code

Our perceptions of people are mostly intuitive. We take them in as a whole—accent, clothes, build, expression, complexion, voice, stance, gestures, the regional, social, and class cues—all delivers itself at once, as a full gestalt, to intuition.

A Scandinavian tale in Jacob Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology expresses this idea in the language of myth. The big old giant Skrymir went to sleep under a big old oak. Thor came and hit him on the head with his hammer. Skrymir woke up wondering if a leaf had fallen on him. He went back to sleep and snored outlandishly. Thor hit him again, harder; the gia

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.” Th

The greatest of all followers along the Platonic line, Plotinus sums up the myth in a few lines: “Being born, coming into this particular body, these particular parents, and in such a place, and what we call external circumstances … form a unity and are as it were spun together.”6 Each of our souls is guided by a daimon to that particular body and

The concept of this individualized soul-image has a long, complicated history; its appearance in cultures is diverse and widespread and the names for it are legion. Only our contemporary psychology and psychiatry omit it from their textbooks. The study and therapy of the psyche in our society ignore this factor, which other cultures regard as the k

Let me put in a nutshell what we may so far cautiously attribute to the acorn theory. It claims that each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.

Calling becomes a calling to life, rather than imagined in conflict with life. Calling to honesty rather than to success, to caring and mating, to service and struggle for the sake of living. This view offers a revision of vocation not only in the lives of women or as viewed by women; it offers another idea of calling altogether, in which life is t

When the daimon speaks it says: The stories I tell about tinkering with watches (Ford) or about rising from poverty all on my own (Bernstein) are the facts. The fables I tell more truly tell who I am. I am telling the story that gives backing to what has happened. I am reading life backward. I am telling the story of genius, not of little Lyndon, l

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.