Free Conversations with a Soul by Tom McArthur Page B

understand ourselves and often demand a radical reappraisal of our being.
    The word, Soul is another word that we use quite freely, without attempting to flesh out.
    Heart and soul seems to be a short-hand way to describe the totality of a person; soulful feels sad and soul music is a combination of various musical styles rooted in the unique experience of black people, which has the power to reach across the years and summon afresh their struggles.
    Whenever the word is used it frequently points to the guts of something without disclosing who or what the Soul is.
    However, unlike the word love, once we begin to explore Soul , something strange seems to happen! The more we try to define the word, the more obscure it becomes. The Soul seems to know when we are intent on capturing the Soul’s essence in words and definitions and immediately takes flight! It is almost as though the Soul has no wish to be exposed and hides within the very structures it illuminates. Heraclitus, a fifth century Greek sage, warned that, The Soul is its own source of unfolding.
    It has taken me a long time to learn the wisdom of those words!
    A conversation with the Soul has nothing to do with ghostly visions or strange voices. Instead, a conversation with the Soul takes place through the Soul’s illuminating presence , most powerfully present in the words around which we structure our lives, and in the images that contain our stories.
    In the telling of our personal histories, we’ve all assigned persons, events, chance encounters and a variety of experiences to account for the life-changing decisions that we’ve made.
    Who could have predicted…..I never expected….. Out of the blue…... are all common phrases that we weave into our stories and set the scene so as to account for the mystery that attends every life. However, what we seldom recognize, is that behind these chance events and unplanned encounters, is an even greater mystery: a mystical presence that works through people and circumstances. Sometimes, usually in hindsight, we catch a glimpse of something or someone but it is never more than simply a glimpse, for we cannot strip away the mystery in which the Soul chooses to be cloaked, all we can do is simply be present and open to the mysterious promptings that arise from within.
    James Hillman phrased our engagement with the Soul in a striking way, which I have found illuminating:
It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate – an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence – that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify Soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it by itself apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. 28

    Most of us have an idea that the study of the Soul rightly belongs in the custody of learned theologians and philosophers. Never the less, over the years, we have put together our own ideas of who the Soul is and how the Soul relates to us. We would probably be the first to confess that our language is far simpler and more homely than the scholarly pronouncements we might expect to find coming from academics, and, were we honest, we might also acknowledge that our language is full of contradictions and confusion, both portals through which wisdom is wont to climb into our lives!
    It is usually when we are unwilling or unable to own our uncertainties that something demonic claims us. Fundamentalism in any shape is a form of blindness and an affront to the Soul.
    Our journey in quest of the Soul is initially forged and shaped in the indiscriminate, mythical world of childhood. Ideas about God and about what we believed flowed quite naturally from our fertile imaginations, not to mention our willingness to absorb whatever we