It’s often the case that in the bodies of several friends we see one soul. – Marsilio Ficino, Letter to Almanno Donati.
It isn’t comfortable to discover her place and her necessity. And yet what she has to offer is nothing less than the entire deep spiritual realm of the soul, the invisible, unchanging core.
A philosophy of life is a bundle of wisdom you have gathered from your reading and experience. It is not a rigid ideology that allows no development and complexity. It’s a living thing, a developing idea about life that belongs to you alone.
Faith is a gift of spirit that allows the soul to remain attached to its own unfolding. When faith is soulful, it is always planted in the soil of wonder and questioning. It isn’t a defensive and anxious holding on to certain objects of belief, because doubt, as its shadow, can be brought into a faith that is fully mature. Imagine.
J. B. Jackson, a historian of landscapes, makes a crucial point about such things in his essay “The Necessity for Ruins.” Things in decay, he says, express a theology of birth, death, and redemption.
A small amount of good literature can often teach more about the inner life than volumes of psychology.
Anger is often like an inverted lotus: On the surface lie muddy, not-so-beautiful roots. Under water lie beautiful blossoms. You need to develop an amphibious eye to appreciate the full meaning of such an unusual flower.
What if we thought of the family less as the determining influence by which we are formed and more the raw material from which we can make a life?
The point is not merely to succeed but to become a deeper, more complex, more mature person through your struggle. You allow the alchemy of your challenging journey to etch itself into your character, making you into a rich personality. Then whatever work you do will have the quality of your experience and your capacity to be ripened by it. Doing.
All illness is meaningful, although its meaning may never be translatable into entirely rational terms. The point is not to understand the cause of the disease and then solve the problem, but to get close enough to the disease to restore the particular religious connection with life at which it hints.
A calling is the sense that you are on this earth for a reason, that you have a destiny, no matter how great or small.
Jung called this process I’m describing individualism, becoming an individual, a real person not continually swept away by his passions of influenced by his culture. Each person has a unique opus, a soul work, because each has a particular makeup and history. For Jung the opus was a process of getting to know yourself deeply, not only a psychological process of painful advance in self-knowledge; but a religious initiation involving spiritual ideals and the search for meaning.
Aging brings out the flavors of a personality. The individual emerges over time, the way fruit matures and ripens. In the Renaissance view, depression, aging, and individuality all go together: the sadness of growing old is part of becoming an individual. Melancholy thoughts carve out an interior space where wisdom can take up residence. Saturn.
Part of finding your soul is to wake up to this habit of thinking like others and go your own way. It may be painful to separate from those people who have given you a sense of belonging and purpose, but your soul is at stake. A.
But real virtue can’t be bought with repression; real virtue is the rare innocence that comes from taking life on and owning your passions.
If you take Christmas to heart and get past the anxieties in arranging for gifts and parties, you will rediscover yourself every year at this time and experience a birth in yourself, just like the one so beautifully described in the Gospel stories. It will be a celebration of both the birth of Jesus and the birth of your soul.
You have to make your own world, instead of succumbing to the one that presses on you. You have to turn the tables on what appears to be fate or the full weight of society. Against the greatest odds, you have to keep your wits about you and refuse to surrender to anyone or anything less than divine.
If you are highly neurotic, or worse, you don’t have to become normal and healthy to live a creative and loving life. You can learn to transform your insanity into eccentricity.
Part of the pain of love is that no person, however suitable and satisfying, completes the desire for love. There is always a remainder, because love takes us beyond the human sphere. It puts you in touch with the ultimate object of desire. It invites you to transcend yourself, to be more than you ever have been.
Every day you have choices. You can do things that wound your soul, like being dominated by the work ethic or compulsively seeking more money and possessions, or you can be around people who give you pleasure and do things that satisfy a desire deep inside you. Make this soul care a way of life, and you may discover what the Greeks called eudaimonia – a good spirit, or, in the deepest sense, happiness.