21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

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Both quotes from Thomas Moore — The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life

And according to Joanna Macey (The Work that Re-Connects) the future is: ‘…not constructed by our minds as much as to emerge from our dreams…We will never be able to build what we have not first cherished in our hearts.’

Even authors with no particular religious or spiritual intent make use of the idea of the soul to illustrate our situation as human beings. Take this quote from psychologist Alexander Lowen: ‘A person who does not feel he is part of a larger scheme, that does not sense that his life is part of a natural process that is bigger than himself, can be said to be without a soul.’ (Alexander Lowen — Pleasure.)

Lowen continues:

‘If he has a soul, a man can break through the narrow boundaries of the self and can experience the joy and ecstasy of oneness with the universal. If he doesn’t have a soul, a man is locked in the prison of his mind and his pleasures are limited to ego satisfactions.’

I hope that it is obvious that there is a very decisive split between the aspiration of spirit on the one hand and the needs of the soul on the other. Both our contemporary culture and much of organised religion in the West reflect the ideals of the economy of ascendancy. By contrast, Thomas Moore (Original Self) tells us: ‘The soul does not evolve or grow… Its odyssey is a drifting at sea, a floating toward home, not an evolution toward perfection.’ So our ascendancy and descendancy raise some

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