At the Rommelmarkt in Delft I bought the book Carl Jung and Soul Psychology.
In the book I found an article of James Hillman called Soul and Spirit. The article gave me a lof of insight so I started to look for James Hillman with Google.
I found the following: “Hillman’s 1997 book, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, outlines what he calls the acorn theory of the soul.
This theory states that each individual holds the potential for their unique possibilities inside themselves already, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak, invisible within itself.
It argues against the parental fallacy whereby our parents are seen as crucial in determining who we are by supplying us with genetic material and behavioral patterns.
Instead the book suggests for a reconnection with what is invisible within us, our daimon or acorn and its calling to the wider world of nature.
It argues against theories which attempt to map life into phases, suggesting that this is counter-productive and makes people feel like they are failing to live up to what is normal.
This in turn produces a truncated, normalized society of soulless mediocrity where evil is not allowed but injustice is everywhere—a society that cannot tolerate eccentricity or the further reaches of life experiences but sees them as illnesses to be prescriptive and argues against the idea of life-maps by which to try and grow properly.
Instead, Hillman suggests a reappraisal for each individual of their own childhood and present life to try and find their particular calling, the seed of their own acorn.
He replaces the notion of growing up, with the myth of growing down from the womb into a messy, confusing earthy world.
Hillman rejects formal logic in favour of reference to case histories of well known people and considers his arguments to be in line with the puer eternis or eternal youth whose brief burning existence could be seen in the work of romantic poets like Keats and Byron and in recently deceased young rock stars like Kurt Cobain.
Hillman also rejects causality as a defining framework and suggests in its place a shifting form of fate whereby events are not inevitable but bound to be expressed in some way dependent on the character of the soul in question”.
The citations speak for themselves.
What was my insight?
In the article Hillman shows the development of the symbol Soul.
Soul is an ambigouis concept because if it was a well defined concept it could not exist.
He showes that because of the process of definition the soul degenerated in time. The soul was wiped out of the Earth.
Soul is not a concept but a perspective, a mediator. Soul is a reflection of ourselves in streaming water. It deepens Events into experiences.The Soul is the creator of metaphor, dreams, images and fantasies.
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Tags: acorn, book, Byron, Carl Jung, carl jung and soul psychology, james hillman, jung, Kurt Cobain, soul, spirit
