21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview
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T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S
8. Descendancy is Soul
‘Our soul is everything — mediating between our personality and our essence, and part of both…’
Simon Parke — The Beautiful Life
As discussed in the Introduction, the term descendancy is used in order to describe those aspects of life that I am suggesting represent its soulfullness. It might be more appropriate to say that the soul reaches out to body and nature rather than reaches down (as implied by descendancy). Descendancy however is being used to contrast with ascendancy. We are already ‘down’ as it were, but we often do not recognise this. What does it mean to favour soul over spirit — descendancy over ascendancy? Again, it is to employ the method of contrasting a polarity in thinking and to look at what happens when the less-favoured of the binary oppositions is given prominence.
Some venture that experience suggests that there is a ground of being which is somehow more fundamental than mind and body. There is a ‘real me’ who has needs and desires of which I am not always consciously aware. This has traditionally been referred to as the soul.
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