I never did believe in anything I couldn't hold between my fingers I am reading "The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling" by James Hillman. Rather, I'm re-reading many years after I first delved into it. It is spiritual, perhaps to be understood more in terms of myth, and probably wouldn't be appreciated by those who don't believe in the soul, or a spiritual plane. I don't think that when we die, we cease to be aware, or to exist in some other form.

The basis for the book is something he calls the "acorn theory", in which the soul, or "daimon" already knows what it has come to the world to do, and has actually pre-selected the circumstances it is born into, including parents, time, and place. Actually this isn't a unique proposal to Hillman; Plato's "Myth of Er" discusses the same idea, in which a soul, before re-birth into the physical plane, must drink something that makes him "forget" his existence before birth. Hillman says the daimon does not forget, and stays with us on our journey through life, compelling us to make certain decisions so that we fulfill our purpose.

Hillman thus proposes a new idea of "growing down" - i.e. to plant roots, to fill the shoes we were intended for - rather than growing "up", throughout our lives, as we struggle to meet the challenges the soul has set for us before we knew ourselves. I enjoy his unique perspective on familiar topics, such as this one:

"...if there is an archetypal sense of loneliness accompanying us from the beginning, then to be alive is also to feel lonely. Loneliness comes and goes apart from the measures we take. It does not depend on being literally alone, for pangs of loneliness can strike in the midst of friends, in bed with a lover, at the microphone before a cheering crowd. When feelings of loneliness are seen as archetypal, they become necessary; they are no longer harbingers of sin, of dread, or of wrong. We can accept the strange autonomy of the feeling and free loneliness from identification with literal isolation. Nor is loneliness mainly unpleasant once it received its archetypal background.

When we look - or, rather, feel - closely into the sense of loneliness we find it is composed of several elements: nostalgia, sadness, silence, and a yearning imagination for "something else" not here, not now. For these elements and images to show, we first have to focus on them rather than on remedies for being left literally alone. Desperation grows worse when we seek ways out of despair.

Loneliness presents the emotions of exile; the soul has not been able to fully grow down, and is wanting to return. To where? We do not know, for that place the myths and cosmologies say is gone from memory. But the imaginative yearning and the sadness attest to an exile from what the soul cannot express except as loneliness. All it can recall is a nostalgia of feeling and an imagination of yearning. And a condition of want beyond personal needs."

  | ¶ 5:12 p.m.