The Middle Way of Soul

In today’s blog post, I share a number of images—neurobiological, mythic, narrative, and otherwise—that have been helpful to me, gently inviting the possibility of experiencing a middle place of “soul” in our inner lives. I personally needed several ways to consider this realm before I found myself experiencing them directly.

Dunlea and Hollis: Neurobiological and Psychological

In the context of the nervous system, Marian Dunlea refers to a middle realm that exists between the opposites of activation and deactivation, between sympathetic and parasympathetic responses. She calls this a "dynamic equilibrium, neither activation nor deactivation.”

Those two words — “dynamic equilibrium” — hold a lot of helpful information for understanding this middle place within. The word dynamic suggests that it is living; it is in motion; it moves.  And it is autonomous; it has its own life. It is not subject to conscious will or control (although its behavior shifts when attuned to with conscious awareness).

We can attune to and even track its movements. We can feel into those movements; can nurture a felt sense of them. And as we do, we may well notice that the nature of experience changes; that our felt experience and sensory perception of the outer world shifts as we tune into the movements of this dynamic middle realm.

Importantly, the word equilibrium is not meant to suggest that this middle place is static (hence its pairing with “dynamic”). Rather, the movement itself is created by dancing between the seeming opposites. We could say this dynamic equilibrium represents the “something in us that knows us better than we know ourselves” to which James Hollis refers.

Dunlea: The Triskelion

Marian invokes the imagery of the Irish Triskelion — the Neolithic triple spiral — as a visual representation of this living, middle place, and its emergence from the relatedness of seeming opposites. We might imagine one spiral as activation in the nervous system, another as deactivation or regulation, and the dynamic equilibrium between them as the middle realm. Her sense of the triskelion lends new dimensionality to Jung's description of the transcendent function of the psyche.

Jung: Two Cones Whose Apexes Both Touch and Do Not Touch

Jung offers another image of this middle place. He speaks of psyche as two cones whose apexes "both touch and do not touch" — an interior and exterior that both are and are not each other. Feeling into the region at the apexes, we might sense the energy between the two cones, a living middle realm, not unlike an initial experience of feeling life between our left and right hands in the practice of Qi Gong.

Hillman, Bolen, Woodman: Soul Not as Substance, but as Experience

This middle realm has often been called “soul,” a problematic word when viewed from a theological or metaphysical lens. Soul, in this post, is not a theological or metaphysical assertion; is not a synonym for the animating life force in a body, nor is it meant to indicate the “eternal” part of ourselves that continues on after death.

Instead, when I use the word “soul,” I am drawing largely on Carl Jung, James Hillman and Marion Woodman; their psychological use of the word. Hillman writes that soul is “the place between events and experience,” that it is the place in the psyche where events are transformed into experiences. He emphasizes soul not as substance, but as a mode of experiencing or perceiving; soul as the experience of depth. To him, that experience is rooted in living images as the ground of psychic being, and those images have their roots in the archetypes.

“Archetype” can be another difficult word to sort through. My understanding here is rooted in Jean Shinoda Bolen’s teaching that archetypes are ancient patterns or forces that exist in us and in the world.

Marion Woodman adds another set of images to my sense of “soul,” in the psychological sense, and invokes the image of this life as a womb in which our psyches are weaving images in relationship to Life. To Woodman, the weaving together of those images is, itself, “soul-making,” a term she borrows from Yeats. Which drops us right back at Hillman, and his sense of the “poetic basis of mind.”

Even with these helpful insights, this third realm, this place of soul, feels enigmatic to me, as if it is unknown, and often feels unfamiliar and even inaccessible.

The Two-Dimensional Map of Psyche

The fact is, many of us inherited a two-dimensional map of psyche — human being as two parts: Body and Spirit, or Mind and Matter. Perhaps we were raised religiously to literalize spirit and even demonize body, or raised secularly to literalize body as machine and mind as synapses. Either way, and even if our cultural formation was largely benevolent, most of us learned this two-part model, explicitly or implicitly.

Meade: Three-Dimensional Map of Psyche and the Historic Split

Yet, millennia ago, a three-part model was more common: body, soul, and spirit. Mythologist Michael Meade points to a specific moment when that third place of soul was stripped from the dominant overculture — 369 A.D., the Second Council of Constantinople. In his words, "“And the three-part was spirit, soul, and body, with soul being the energy that kept spirit and matter [or] spirit and body together. They didn't want soul, because it was so mysterious, so connected to the earth, so erotic, it was disturbing the dogma. So they decided there was no more soul...and you could say that was the beginning of a lot of trouble, because that gave you the mind-body split in a more exaggerated way, and it gave you the split between the divine and the earthly. And we lost soul."

Wen: the I Ching

For a visual reference, we might imagine the yarrow stalks of the I Ching divided into two piles — earth and sky — with a single stalk between them representing the human, as Benebel Wen invites us to consider. I like to consider that single, connecting stalk as an image of the middle realm of soul.

We inherited a dominant culture that did its best to rip out that middle stalk, to tear away the womb-tomb of regenerative life that the ancients knew as soul. And with that middle place removed from consciousness, the split between the outer realms increased. It’s fair to say that most of us carry this wound.

The Split in Fairy Tale

This split is also vividly imaged in fairy tale, and I found these images extremely helpful in understanding the split and the missing middle realm.

In The Goose Girl, golden hair is kept up away from the neck — that bridge between head and body.

In Allerleirauh, the golden hair is imaged as feminine spiritualized (read: disembodied, idealized) to the point that a father-king would marry his own daughter.

In The Maiden King, a tutor inserts a pin into the neck of young Ivan to prevent him from encountering his beloved, his soul.

And in Iron John, the kingdom is split from the surrounding forest and the instinctual it holds — the king's men empty an ancient pool by bucket, uncover an instinctual man beneath, bind him with cords, and lock him in an iron cage in the sunlit courtyard.

For me, these are startling images of shame and the structures erected to keep the instinctual in its proper place within a culture of power.