soul
by baja · updated 6d ago
soul
by baja · updated 6d ago
The acorn theory proposes and I will bring evidence for the claim that you and I and every single person is born with a defining image. Individuality resides in a formal cause—to use old philosophical language going back to Aristotle. We each embody our own idea, in the language of Plato and Plotinus.
baja added 11d ago
Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkenings and despairings that the soul requires to deepen into life.
baja added 6d ago
Life as images does not ask for family dynamics or genetic dispositions. Even before there are life stories, lives display themselves as images. They ask first to be seen. Even if each image is indeed pregnant with meanings and subject to dissecting analysis, should we jump to the meanings without appreciating the image, we have lost a pleasure tha
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To uncover the innate image we must set aside the psychological frames that are usually used, and mostly used up. They do not reveal enough. They trim a life to fit the frame: developmental growth, step by step, from infancy, through troubled youth, to midlife crisis and aging, to death. Plodding your way through an already planned map, you are on
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Of all psychology’s sins, the most mortal is its neglect of beauty. There is, after all, something quite beautiful about a life. But you would not think so from reading psychology books.
baja added 6d ago
Since ancient psychology usually located the soul around or with the heart, your heart holds the image of your destiny and calls you to it.
baja added 6d ago
Organic images of growth follow the favorite symbol for human life, the tree, but I am turning that tree upside down. My model of growth has its roots in heaven and imagines a gradual descent downward toward human affairs. This is the Tree of the Kabbalah in the Jewish and also Christian mystical tradition.
baja added 6d ago
For centuries we have searched for the right term for this “call.” The Romans named it your genius; the Greeks, your daimon; and the Christians your guardian angel. The Romantics, like Keats, said the call came from the heart, and Michelangelo’s intuitive eye saw an image in the heart of the person he was sculpting. The Neoplatonists referred to an
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In fact, the Buddha had begun the process of growing down early in his life, when he left his protected palace gardens to enter the street. There the sick, the dead, the poor, and the old drew his soul down into the question of how to live life in the world.
baja added 6d ago