A yearning exists within the human psyche that has not been acknowledged by modem psychology or supported or nourished by our culture. Plato called this yearning “eros.” We have limited this word mainly to the sexual side of life, but Plato emphasized it as a yearning to participate in the greatness of being, both in the universal order and within ourselves. The way he put it was “the human being is pregnant with the soul.”
Since the beginning of the century, modem psychology and psychiatry have tended to think of human beings mainly as animals with an especially complicated brain. The spiritual element in human nature tended to be regarded as secondary or reducible to sociobiological desires. This has led to a meta-physical repression far more deadly, more dangerous, and more destructive than sexual repression – the repression of the sacred impulse that is at least as essential to us as sexual desire and as much a part of us as the desire for food and shelter.
That need is now trying to reclaim its own in our culture. Many of the things we’re seeing today are signs that eros is bursting through again. People are turning to new religious movements and spiritual ideas of many kinds. There is a disillusionment with science. People are getting all the money and possessions they want and are still questioning how to have a meaningful life. Widespread signs throughout the world indicate that our modern culture has left something out. That “something” is the soul.
Some years ago, I taught a course in philosophy to high school students. These young people told me there was no place in their environment – with their families, their friends, psychologists, or their churches – where they could simply ask the questions of the heart: Who am I? Why are we here? What are we meant to serve? Does God exist? All the questions that are what I call the heart of philosophy. These are the real questions that come with the search for the soul. These students were enthralled to find a setting where they could ask these questions, instead of being ashamed of them. One student said to me, “If I had known about this sort of thing, I never would have tried drugs.” This made me realize that these essential needs have to be honored and nurtured.
The search for the soul is part of human nature. It’s as basic as wanting to eat or have clothes or marry and have children. The Koran tells extraordinary stories on this subject. So do Jewish folktales. One tells of God about to create mankind by mixing clay and spirit. The angels, who were watching, said, ‘”God, why are you creating such a being? You know what kind of trouble this is going to be?” The angels are pure spirits. They don’t understand what God is doing. God’s answer in the Koran is simply, “I know what you don’t know.” This is the unique creation that we are. We have an animal, earthly, worldly nature in us as well as a sacred possibility. We’re meant, as I see it, to live in relation to both aspects as long as we’re on earth, to give each aspect its due. It’s a very difficult thing, but until we’re able to at least approach that, we are never going to be happy or fulfilled. If we try to satisfy just the horizontal side of our nature, the sociobiological side, we’ll get a lot of desires satisfied and a lot of physical pleasure, but we’ll find no real happiness or meaning. A lot of anxiety will go with it. If we try to be just pure spiritual beings, we’ll be denying this other part of ourselves. That will not bring us meaning and fulfillment either.
So this search for the soul is just part of our natures. The question is, why is it happening now? We are coming to the end of decades and decades of a society that has been able to give us what we want in certain respects and discovering that it’s just not what we need. It may be more than happenstance that as we approach the year 2000, we are seeing that we’ve lost the meaning of the foundation of our Western civilization. That foundation needs to be rediscovered. Part of that foundation is the notion of the soul and the spirit within each of us. It’s happening in the ’90s in a dramatic way, because what’s gotten us through up until now is being shown to be inadequate.
How do we go about nurturing our soul on a day-to-day basis? A soul is an embryo in us that needs to be nurtured and nourished. The soul in its young and embryonic form – and in all of its stages – needs and desires something very different from what the sociobiological self needs. It has a different set of values. It doesn’t want the pleasures and satisfactions that we as an ego want. It wants something that the ego finds mysterious and incomprehensible. What it needs, at least partly, is experiences of truth.
The soul needs to take in, like food, experiences of truth about oneself and the world. When we allow in the experiences of ourselves and others as they really are, the soul is being nourished. One of the most important things is to find other people who have the same kind of aim and associate with them. I don’t think we can follow this path alone. The first thing to do is to find what I call a philosophical friend – someone who has these values too. Together, you support the search for nourishing the soul. Sooner or later, experiences of truth are inseparably connected with helping others. Truth always goes with love. You can’t experience the truth of another person without feeling love. Understanding and love go together. When we nourish the soul, we automatically nourish our capacity to love another person.
Another work for philosophical friend is soul mate, not in a sentimental way, but meaning another person whose main interest in the relationship is truth. That is sometimes hard- because we often turn to friends to support our illusions. If they don’t support our egotistic illusions, we get angry with them. Soul mates sometimes look like enemies. But they’re enemies of the false. Soul mates don’t always have to be people you like. They’re just people whose values are a search for truth and service.
Rightly conducted meditation is very good for the soul. Human beings are meditating animals. Everyone has to meditate in one way or another, but forms of meditation vary. Teachers vary. Like every spiritual practice, it helps to have support and guidance from people who know something.
Music and reading can greatly support the movement toward oneself. It’s a kind of silence the soul desperately needs in order to grow. The soul cannot grow unless there’s silence in some sense. For me, it’s very important to realize that it’s my attitude toward the life I’ve been given each day that really determines whether my soul will be nourished. All the books and music in the world are not going to do much if I don’t have an inner intention to receive the truth. And on the other hand, even a lot of distractions and unpleasantness won’t really hurt me if it is my intention that my relationship to my own mind be focused. It is possible to have a meditative life even in the midst of activity and distraction. We can’t get rid of distractions in order to get on with the living. These difficulties are living. They’re never going to go away. It is therefore important for our soul growth that we have some intentional relation to them.
Attitude is probably the most important thing, but it’s not easy. It’s difficult to have an attitude toward life that no matter what happens, all we experience is for our inner growth. But it’s the sine qua non – the most important thing to have. We can’t depend on external things to give what can only come from inside. It’s a form of idolatry in the ancient sense of the term to expect the outer to bring what only the inner can bring. Viktor Frankl managed to nourish his soul even under the hellish conditions of Nazi concentration camps. That’s a shining example of what’s possible in terms of inner attitude.
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