I read Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul a couple of weeks ago. After the first few chapters, it seemed like the book was going to amount to a watered-down retelling of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, framed in self-help psychobabble. But while that’s still one way to look at it, I was pretty surprised by it as well. Some sections are better-written than others. It was worth sticking it out.
The book’s premise is that people try too hard to “improve” themselves, to try to stamp out every perceived anomaly or eccentricity. Your mind thinks it needs to go in and clean up the soul, and in that way you’ll finally solve your problems and be happy. However, it doesn’t work like that, there’s always conflict in yourself (since you’re a microcosm of the universe), and the trouble is that people put too much stock in their mind’s judgments and not in listening to the soul’s conflicts and desires. He supports this argument with, yes, mythology, but also with a range of classical and religious philosophers from multiple eras and traditions.
What really gave me pause were the moments in the book where he suggests that it’s arrogant narcissism on humanity’s part to assume that nothing else has a soul (an animistic argument) and his suggestions that care of the soul involves giving the gods their space (a sort of psychological polytheism – he adds that you don’t have to believe in multiple gods per se, but doesn’t say you shouldn’t, either). I subscribe to both, but was fairly shocked to find them in what’s ostensibly a mainstream book. And, although the author was once himself a Catholic monk, he has the same criticism of most modern Christianity that Joseph Campbell did – mistaking the symbol for the thing itself. The symbol points past itself, and if you get caught up in the symbol as fact, as Campbell pointed out, that’s the real meaning of idolatry.
Thudfactor informs me that there are a lot of negative reviews of this book on Audible.com, which has a very conservative audience. I bet.
So the author talks about symbolism and mystery. Symbols can’t be fully pinned down by the mind. There’s no one interpretation to a dream; it’s better to let it live and breathe, and spend time with it, but don’t look for a pat answer. He says the same about psychological issues. Obviously, some people are deeply disturbed and need a lot of treatment, but for most of the time he illustrates that the answer is to be found in listening to what is going on instead of trying to stamp it out. He calls this approach homeopathic. Give it a little more of what you are trying to avoid, and see what it really is.
Probably my favorite bit, and a good illustration of what the book is like, is one where he tells a story about himself instead of about a client. He’d been having a mysterious pain in his side, and he and his regular physician decided to wait and observe instead of rushing in with “heroic treatments.” He went to a couple who practiced gentle therapeutic massage. They started the session with a discussion of the larger context of his life, which he said “set me in the direction of observing the world surrounding the pain and of listening to its poetics.” As they began the message, he sunk into a deep relaxation.
I felt their hands move along my body, slowly and without much pressure. Then I felt fingers on the place of the pain. I expected to rise from my retreat and protect myself against their touches. Instead, I remained in that area of distant consciousness.Suddenly, several large, brightly colored, imposing tigers leapt out of a cage. They were so close that I couldn’t see their entire bodies. Their color was more brilliant than anything that could exist in the natural world. They seemed at once playful and ferocious.
One of the massagers said, “How does it feel when I touch you there?”
I said, “Tigers have arrived.”
“Speak to them,” she said. “Find out what their message is.”
I’d love to have found out, but it was obvious to me that these tigers had no interest in speaking English to me. “I don’t think they talk,” I said.
Even though I was talking to the woman massaging me, the tigers remained playing in the little piece of jungle that had opened up in the dimly lighted room. I didn’t make friends with them; they were obviously not about to become pets. But I watched them for quite a while, awed by the strength and brightness of their huge bodies. When the massage was over and the tigers had gone home, I was told that animals frequently make an appearance in that massage room.
[snip]
My tigers, long after my “treatment,” are still a source of wonder and insight for me. They haven’t been vanquished by a particular message or meaning I have extracted from them. Such intellectual surgery is usually fatal to the animal who comes from that special jungle I had stepped into.
As someone who spends a lot of time trying to think through things that can’t be progressed through thinking, and often wrapped up in the pitfall of “self improvement,” the book was timely and helpful for me, and I got a lot out of it. It’s the same message I had been getting from other places as well.
Give the gods their space.
It also made me want to re-read Campbell books I haven’t read in 10 years. I bet I’d have rather a different perspective on them now.
I’d recommend this book to people who feel like they need to strive for spiritual progress and enlightenment or who read self-help books.