The soul or subconscious
The soul is the emotional part of you and is roughly the same as Freud’s idea of the subconscious. The soul, subconscious, or, as a poet might say, the heart, has at its center the ego. The ego is roughly equivalent to your sense of self that squats in the middle of all your interactions with the world of people. Me, mine, and myself are the center of this world. Welcome to the soul or subconscious.
Anger, fear, envy, admiration, hope, enjoyment, and a whole lot of other negative or positive emotions reflect your interaction with the world of people. This is where you’ve stored all the memories from dozens of encounters. From this store of memories you will make contracts with others and alliances to work with each other, but there will be submerged feelings or emotions that determine your irrational response to people.
The soul is where all your dysfunction resides. For example, anxiety may result in being unable to sleep, think, or act. Anxiety affects performance in all kinds of ways. If there is a program of old hurts and bad encounters operating deep in your memory, it might 42
result in anxiety that will inhibit your performance. The contrary is also true: good memories around a task might enhance your performance. There is a lot more to it than that, of course, for the same is true of all the emotions, the negative and the positive. It’s a start.
The spirit or unconscious
Deeper still is the spirit or the unconscious. Freud coined the latter word to refer to a part of us that he encountered when working with various patients. The center of this part of you is that self you learned of as the original idea God had. This is the deepest part of you that has no end. When you visit this area of yourself, instead of being concerned about yourself, your concern is for the other. This is where you respond to beauty, truth, and justice. This is where your imagination is born, wells up, and bursts upward into your conscious self, and creativity finds its genesis.
Music, art, and even the aesthetics of mathematics find recognition here. So much gets generated in this deepest part of you, yet for many people their spirit, their center, is barely known to them. Most everyday life is lived at the emotional and conscious level. Relationships are contractual; events are judged by how they affect the person.
At the deepest part of yourself, it is the other that is important. Love is no longer contractual as at the level 43
of the soul. But it is absolute. Ask a parent. There are no conditions to a parent’s love. Awe at the world impacts you, and values provide dimensions to yourself.
That original idea of you being a good idea in the mind of God is growing, expanding, seeking outlets.
A Romantic relationship
So how does this work? A good example is a
relationship between a young man and woman. At the conscious level there is a physical attraction, which we call lust. Good old lust is driven by hormones, is a function of our bodies, and is there to ensure that there is another generation of people in the world. It is neither good nor bad, but is certainly fun. There are plenty of pitfalls along the way, but they are well documented in our literature.
At the emotional or subconscious level, the contract between the two will depend on their needs and how those needs are recognized. This part of the relationship is contractual and gets worked out over time. Both fit together in one way or another.
Sometimes it can be a very sick dependence, but that is another story.
At the spiritual level, caring for the other takes on a new twist. Values, awareness, deep respect, and even awe are encountered and add depth to the evolving relationship.
44
All three levels function together to eventually produce conditions for another life to appear between them.
There occurs the birth of a child and the emergence of a new person in their own right with all the specialness you have yourself begun to glimpse. The relationship, with its three levels, operates as a cradle in which the new life can be nurtured, protected, and raised to experience the wonder of the world.
Below the bottom and beyond the end
Below even your unconscious lies a fresh ocean of being. This is the realm of the Divine that seeks to be known. I told you not to bother with believing in God because your idea would be too small. This presence when invited and engaged will illuminate and generate understanding that is not just about knowledge but is the beginning of wisdom. There are certainly many disciplines that approach it variously, whilst science maps its outline. This is not available for objective description, but has to be encountered to be known.
Click Follow to receive emails when this author adds content on Bublish
Comment on this Bubble
Your comment and a link to this bubble will also appear in your Facebook feed.