Concerning the Everyday Life of the Soul Robert Sardello Psychology must be founded anew out of the consciousness soul. This psychology is not to be a theory, but rather a spiritual activity. The task of this psychology is to work against the decline of the psychical in the world; that is its anthroposophic purpose. - Rudolf Steiner I like C. G. Jung's minimalist definition of the soul as a the imaginative possibilities of our nature; it suggests a good way to begin re-visioning psychology, a quite open attitude from which to begin. He does not try to tell us what soul is, but instead suggests we give attention to a particular kind of inner activity - the spontaneous, ever-present, coming into being and passing away of images. If you read Rudolf Steiner's remarkable lectures on soul life in The Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit, soon to be re-published, you will see that he also speaks of the centrality of image to the life of the soul. He too says in no uncertain terms that the soul must be approached by way of characterizing, that is, showing how soul functions, rather than by definition. Life lived in the absence of an awareness of this inner image activity of soul results in that most horrendous state of always thinking we know what we are doing and are in control of what happens, both to ourselves and to the world; and, alas, the even more atrocious result of such a notion consists of imposing hardened, fixed, dead, one-dimensional, literalized thoughts, feelings and actions onto others and, tragically, onto the world. Giving attention to the soul requires of me, first, a constant effort to undo myself, which includes undoing any notion of the soul that makes me feel I know what it is. Such ongoing labor seems a necessary prerequisite to avoid a new round of atrocities which would, I think, result from concocting a theory of soul. A second prerequisite in trying to maintain connection with the soul is refraining from thinking of the soul as my soul. The moment I appropriate to the familiarity of myself what is unfamiliar, impersonal, ineffable, and essentially unknowable, but nonetheless absolutely present, I turn a creating force within me and the world into a personal possession, as if it were a pet to be cared for. Rather than trying to give attention to the soul, I try to be available for it to get my attention. Images are not inner pictures to be looked at, but the inner process of picturing which is every moment forming and just as quickly dissolving. If we can really understand image as activity rather than content, then we have made a very large step in establishing an anthroposophical psychology. From such an understanding we can begin to develop methods for strengthening the now weakened soul forces and begin to become conscious in an ongoing way of soul life. What we usually think of as images are but a brief culmination of this ongoing process that can deceptively make us think of the region of the soul as a container of contents. The content of an inner image is but the outer clothing, the closing moment of the imaging process. Steiner, in the work referred to above, refers to this closing moment as mental images, and the activity that makes them having its origin first, in desire, and desire stemming from the will. Thus, I do not pay as much attention to the image content as to trying to get a feeling, an impression, a sense of the movement, the rhythm, the ups and downs, the musical quality, the dramatic action of the picturing process. An image grabs my attention, but, it seems to me to defile the soul to then go on and ask what the image means, or what it symbolizes, or even what this image tells me about myself. Whereas the soul psychologies of the past, the psychology of Freud and that of Jung, for example, have concentrated on interpreting the meaning of an image, an anthroposophical approach to psychology focuses on how to become present to the creating activity generating the image. No clairvoyant capacities are needed to be present to this activity. Suppose I wake in the morning with a dream, perhaps a dream image of flying, without wings, over a city, and suddenly, at the moment in the dream that I realize I am flying I start to fall; a small brown dog, standing on the street where I am about to land looks up, curious, but also with a look of recognition, like it knows this falling body; at that moment the fall stops, and I ascend again into the clouds. The dream, as image, grabs my attention when I awaken. Whatever I might say about what the dream means, symbolizes, or is telling me about myself constitutes a defense against the imaging activity, for the image-forming process has been bypassed in favor of an examination of the content. If I took this dream into psychotherapy, for example, I might well be told that I am too much caught by the spirit, symbolized by flying, which makes me act as if I need no solid ground and can float around willy- nilly; but as soon as I can connect my spirit with the animal in me, then my spirit is free in a new way. All interpretive nonsense, but of the kind commonly utilized by psychotherapists, even those with an anthroposophical view. On the other hand, if upon waking I work to hold an inner picture of the dream image as a whole, then I remain closer to the soul's own expression. Dreaming, as all image activity, does not follow linear logic, one event following after another. Putting a dream into narrative form invites interpretation, and in fact, is itself already a form of interpretation. If I can feel and sense every part of the dream occurring simultaneously rather than narratively, I nourish, honor, and support the soul in its own mode of action. The intention of gradually coming to sense the soul's own mode of activity, it seems to me, is to allow ourselves to be changed by the soul. Paying attention to dreams, allowing them to teach us image logic, begins to effect a change in our waking life of fantasy, memory, thinking, and perception. This change does not simply involve knowing ourselves more fully, but more significantly, it involves an alteration of the capacities through which we approach the world; it makes possible slowly coming to the point of sensing that the individual soul is but a drop of the soul of the world. Soul is not only in us, it is all around us, all of the time. There is a world-side to the soul. This side can begin to be apparent by then working to strengthen the soul in waking life. Just as I try to be as open and as available as possible to be grabbed by a dream image, I try to be available to the immediate appearances of the world. In waking life the soul, Rudolf Steiner indicates, is the inner enjoyer of all that presents itself to us. To speak of the soul as the enjoyer does not mean to imply that it is interested only in what is experienced as pleasurable; soul enjoys everything, even things we might judge as reprehensible. Nourishing the soul by paying attention to its presence in everyday waking life, however, requires that I become ever more conscious of the world as image in the process of coming to be. Once I have a sense of how image activity works, soul consciousness in a fully waking state can be developed. I spend a few moments everyday consciously making an inner image of something that appeared to me in the world that day. I might, for example, have driven down the road from my house in the mountains after a snow storm, and saw the snow-covered trees lining the road, a very impressive, moving sight. It is not yet a soul experience if that sight was viewed, appreciated, and the next event allowed to take over. That night, I spend five minutes making an inner image of the scene I saw earlier. I do not just remember what I saw, and I do not just visualize it with the inner eye. Visualization, I have found is like looking at a inner picture before ones eyes, and is primarily a mental activity. Rather, what is required here is to make a very detailed, exact image, and then let this image pervade my whole being, so that it no longer appears as if in front of me, but rather I am become it. The work here is to then stabilize the image so that it does not quickly fade or turn into something else. The kinds of exercises suggested by Dennis Klocek, soon to be published in his book, Seeking Spirit Vision, follow this type of pattern, and can be appropriately called image-based meditations. This kind of exercise does not have to be confined to visual things either. I practice this imaging with music, with something someone has said, touch, smells, the full range of our senses. The same sort of exercise can be applied, not only to things perceived, but to thoughts, feelings, actions, the whole field of human experiences. Also, this exercise is not just carried out in relation to experiences I find myself liking. Say, for example, I am walking down the street in Boston and see a homeless person, ragged clothes, tattered hat, digging into a trash can, retrieving a piece of bread someone threw away and eating it; this experience too can be worked with in the manner described. What is essential in such work is that we do not allow our sympathies or antipathies to guide soul-strengthening. While I do not know what the soul is, I do have a strong sense that it is helpful to approach the soul as if it were an organ that can wither and die away unless it is strengthened. When strengthened, the world itself begins to appear as activity, as ever changing image activity. Suppose I look out my window at the landscape every day. Because of the constant change of light and shadow, of clouds and sun, of mist and wind, objects change shape, distance, and group themselves differently at different times. A tree that at one time may be the central figure, at another time is part of the background. Coloring may vary from bluish to silver-white to shades of indigo and purple. The world-as-imaging, is constantly coming into being in different ways; it is ever new. I may also begin to notice the plant world in new ways, noticing, for example how the blossom of one plant opens outward like a hand that turns outward with the inner surface below and the outer surface above; another blossom closes its petals above, like two hands folded, while the gesture of another blossom is like two opens hands greeting the sky. And I may begin to notice the animal world anew. Spenser, the dog who lives next door, sits out on the rolling lawn sunning in the cool autumn day. He chews on a bone. Suddenly, a fly lands on his back; his attention becomes completely riveted on that fly; then the wind blows a leaf, and he is totally engrossed in the leaf; he licks his behind, then he goes back to the bone. It is as if he becomes whatever strikes him at the moment. And the constructed world, built by human ingenuity, also presents itself as image activity; a sleek, glassy, towering skyscraper stands alone on a corner, isolated, closed in on itself, exceedingly fragile, like an anorectic body with superficial glitter, but with a vacuous inner life. The way this building is constructed does not allow any conversation, any back and forth relationship, between it and other buildings. No wonder, more and more, cities are cold, unfriendly, inhospitable. My heart goes out to this lonely building. And other human beings too; what wonder, to observe, for example, how strongly one person walks, feet firmly planted, as if at the next moment the weight of that person's leg may be far too much to lift and he may be frozen forever in that spot; how is it possible that he moves at all? And another person seems to fly through the air, barely bothering to touch the ground with each step. Or, look at the countenance of a person's face; one face, lined, wrinkled, crevasses, the experiences, the sorrows, joys, woes of a lifetime made visible; another person, smooth, delicate skin, all of life experiences instead showing forth through deep, dark, inward directed eyes. All of the world is available for soul-making. What is the purpose of opening ourselves to be touched by the soul, and even to seek ways of encouraging such contact on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis? As soul life gradually becomes more conscious, we feel as if a part of ourselves passes over into whatever comes to us, whether from the depths within or the expanses without. Such feeling is neither in the realm of out- of- body experiences nor mystical experience. I agree wholeheartedly with Rudolf Steiner that all that we call soul is but a variation, a modification of one sort or another of the creating activity of love. I know even less about love than about the soul, so this equation is not meant to settle the mind of those seeking definition, but to baffle it even more. As human beings, with our ordinary consciousness we experience our existence in our own selves; and we experience the world by perceiving it with our senses or grasping it with our reason. But through letting the soul get our attention and developing those experiences to the point of their becoming quite conscious, we undergo an educative process of learning to merge more with the inner and outer worlds without losing the sense of ourselves. When we work to develop the imaginative capacities of our nature and come to the point of being able to experience vivid images even during fully awake consciousness, a quite serious question arises. What happens to image activity? Every time an image forms, after a short time it fades away. Image activity works like this. As I said earlier, the moment we stop taking images as a certain kind of content we can see that it is the coming into being and passing out of being that best describes the functioning of images. You can experiment with this by way of working to observe what are called afterimages. Look intently at the flame of a candle for a few moments. Then close your eyes, and there will be an afterimage of the candle flame, an image that floats in black space for a while, then fades, comes back, and fades again, until it is completely gone. Certainly there are physiological explanations for this phenomenon, but accepting these explanations takes a soul phenomenon and converts it into a purely physical one. From the stance of the soul, what is observed to happen to the image is that it is released, it goes away. Where does it go? It goes into the world. Something of ourselves, of our most subtle nature now mingles with the world. I use this analogy to give a picture of what I have experienced happening through the work of nourishing the soul. That such a thing happens is neither fantastic nor bizarre, not even magical, once you discover the laws by which images operate. Nourishing the soul, as I see it, concerns the act, to be made ever more conscious, of shaping, forming, and interiorizing the essence of each moment of experience, of both an inner and of an outer nature, which when released act to amplify soul in the world. In such a manner, we are doing psychology, not giving it over to the professionals, who in any case are more interested in their theories and ideologies rather than working against the decline of the psychical in the world.

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