Detailed Discussion: Soul Care

What is Soul? An Ecological Approach

As described by Thomas Berry,

"Soul is fundamentally a biological concept, defined as the primary organizing, sustaining, and guiding principle
of a living being."

In my work, I adopt this perspective along with the ecological perspective of soul as developed by the eco-depth psychologist Bill Plotkin:

"Foundationally, Soul, for me, is an ecological concept, not a psychological one nor a spiritual or religious one.
Specifically, by Soul I mean a person or thing's unique ecological niche in the Earth community."

With this definition, Soul Care can be understood as the cultivation of a person's holistic development and maturation, in all of their interrelated roles, identities, functions, needs, and energies, including personality, occupation/vocation, relationships, social belongings, biology/physicality, spirituality, and psychology. An ecological approach is necessary for such holistic development because in human life -- and all life, for that matter -- quite literally everything we experience is an ecological phenomenon. Which is to say: nothing in human existence is purely isolated from or independent of anything else.

It has only been in the past few hundred years (a truly miniscule portion of human existence on Earth) that science, philosophy, and spiritual analyses of the human have divided our experience into a proliferating array of discrete, seemingly independent parts, aspects, and functions. With such a compartmentalizing approach has come the hyper-specialization of clinical and functional treatments of people: today there are literally thousands of medical, psychological, physical, therapeutic, and educational specialists offering their services to people seeking alleviation of all manner of conditions, pains, fears, anxieties, symptoms, and questions.

While there is a place for such specialties and specifications of human function, this dividing approach has been taken too far, in a classic case of losing the forest for the trees. As my PhD research detailed, the best available scientific evidence from hundreds of scientific disciplines reveals that life as such can only properly be understood as an ecological-systems-field-network phenomenon. This means that everything in living beings manifests the notion that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." It is this greater than that "soul" refers to. Soul conveys this larger sense of living systems as something more than what can be defined and analyzed through its component parts. This is the essence of ecology. Contemporary science has demonstrated definitively that everything studied by modern psychology - including mind, cognition, thinking, perceiving, communicating, consciousness, emotion, behavior, and the like - is an ecological phenomenon, first and foremost. Secondarily, these phenomena arise within and through individual persons. Primarily, though, they are aspects of fields, systems, and networks of events.

Soul: Mystery Made Tangible

Recall Thomas Berry's construal of soul as "the primary organizing, sustaining, and guiding principle of a living being." Soul, indeed, is an apt term for such a principle, because in the principle and in soul there is a characteristic element of mystery. Over two thousand years of scientific study of life have not explained the most basic nature of living systems. Rather, the best available evidence from the life and mind sciences reveals that, at its core, life is ineffable. This simply means that it cannot be explained analytically, through logico-deductive propositional description.

Life emerges spontaneously. It is self-organizing. In every moment of our lives, there are literally quadrillions of processes occurring in and through our bodies without our direct awareness. We do not control these processes, nor can we in the vast majority of cases. As Richard Campbell explains in his landmark work The Metaphysics of Emergence:

"Self-organization can be defined as the spontaneous creation of a globally coherent pattern out of local interactions. 'Spontaneous' here means that no internal or external agent is in control of the process. … Openness and non-linearity make a complex system in principle unpredictable and uncontrollable."

This unpredictable and uncontrollable aspect of life characterizes its ineffability, its animating principle, its mysterious nature...its soul. Soul is that which cannot be defined, and yet is present and active in literally everything we experience. Soul is the phenomenon of the mysterious operations of life coming into being, literally manifesting in tangible, physical form. It is the potential and the actualization; the process and product; the entity and activity; the collective and the individual. To "understand" life as fully as possible requires cultivating a working relationship with this mysterious nature of the manifest reality we experience. This is the essence of Soul Care.

Soul as Multidimensional Cognition

I also use "Soul" to refer to cognition as a multidimensional phenomenon, not just a mental or psychological phenomenon. Cognition involves everything we experience: it is a dynamic, multifaceted, whole-person matter of sensing, moving, thinking, feeling, believing, forgetting, remembering, predicting, emoting, communicating, expressing, responding, perceiving, dreaming, eating, working, resting, and playing. Cognition is simultaneously and always both "physical" and "mental," and so much more than what those two abstract concepts can convey.

Moreover, cognition is relational and ecological. There are individual aspects of cognitive experience, to be sure, but cognition cannot be reduced to neurological activity physically internal to any given individual. In short, mind is not inside the head; we are inside mind.

Soul, in this context, refers to the holistic experience of all these interrelated dimensions of cognition. When we can embrace and fully experience these various dimensions as an integrated whole, we're in the realm of Soul. How can we do this? What does this look like? How is this more of an ecological and biological phenomenon than a spiritual phenomenon? To explore these questions, check out the page with an in-depth discussion of the somatic nature of soul and cognition.