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PART ONE SOUL

1    Soul or Self

we have discovered the nature of the human being to be a dynamic,

living organism of consciousness, an ever-changing, open, multidimensional field whose experience can come to know and actualize all dimensions of Being.

We can see this in the term soulful, which we normally use to describe someone with a depth of feeling or a sense of inner richness. In other words, to lose one’s soul means to lose contact with the inner depth and richness of being human.

In contemporary life, rather than conceiving of human beings as fundamentally souls, we conceive of them as what we now call self, and this conventional sense of self is one that is normally not so much in contact with its soul; it is a self alienated from the soul’s inner richness and spiritual depth.

The perspective of soul with no self, the sense that the spiritual is distinct and divorced from the psychological, also characterizes some areas of Eastern thought. In Eastern or Western spiritual work, this imbalance manifests as working on spiritual development without taking care of one’s psychological conflicts and aberrations. So one may develop with deep spiritual experience and insight, but retain some neurotic and emotionally conflicted manifestations.

However, psychological understanding shows us that even moral and ethical purification might not be effective in dealing with deep-seated neurosis, or with what is called structural weakness in the ego. Our present understanding of how unconscious beliefs and motivations manifest in distorted attitudes and behavior can help us see how one can be scrupulously devout and moral but at the same time be addictive, abusive, or otherwise psychologically unhealthy.

More than any other factor in our modern life, the dissociation of soul/self from the divine realm or Being and from the world terribly impoverishes us. The transformation of our identity from soul to self has indirectly impoverished our world; robbing us of our spiritual potential, this development left us increasingly identified with and thus dominated by the physical dimension of the self. And the more we experience

ourselves as mainly physical, the more we see our world as fundamentally physical. This view of the world is in most of modern society the prevalent one: the world is simply matter.8 Rather than inhabiting a comprehensible but ultimately mysterious living world, we inhabit a material universe, explainable only by physical science. The world or cosmos, separate from soul and from God/Being, is only matter. It is a dead world, an inert universe waiting to be explored by our scientific reason.9

AI Summary

The Inner Journey Home by A. H. Almaas presents key insights from the Diamond Approach tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.

Core Themes:

• [To be expanded]

Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.

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