Within the Christian tradition, the human soul is often seen as having two natures, a Divine nature and a sinful or fallen nature. But what do those terms mean for they don’t appear in psychology, which is usually the place we turn to understand human experience? In this blog, I plan to describe how the Diamond Approach understands the human soul, a spiritual psychology based on the insights of Western psychology and the mystic traditions of the major religions. I have been an active student of a Diamond Approach Work School for 17 years now. Within this Diamond Approach framework, we get a far better understanding psychologically of what the Christian tradition describes as the two natures of humanity. Within biology, science has developed a clear picture of the anatomy of the human physical body as the picture below shows. If one could could conceive the human soul in a similar anatomical way, what would be its parts? The Diamond Approach teaches that the human soul has 3 aspects to it: the animal soul, the egoic soul, and the angelic soul. Lets look at each aspect of the human soul in more detail. The Animal Soul One component of the human soul is called the animal soul, one that has its roots in the biological human brain. Our animal soul is run by survival, social, and sexual drives and instinctual appetites where we seek pleasure and avoid pain. The animal soul “is not particularly destructive or grossly and intentionally selfish, but similar to animals in the wild.... ...However, because it is disowned, the animal soul loses contact with the other elements of the soul, and becomes distorted and extreme in the intensity of its aggression, worse than actual animals” (The Inner Journey Home, pg. 203). This disowning happens when the dynamics of our animal soul are judged as wrong and thus denied, buried, and hidden away in our unconscious. When that happens, our animal soul becomes “full of desires, cravings, uncontrollable impulses, lust, and passion for what the world offers. We want with passion, crave with hunger, and desire with instinctual abandon. We desire instant gratification, but our appetite for such gratification has no bottom and no end. We want and want and want. We want to eat, copulate, possess, dominate, even nourish and nurse ad nauseam…The animal drives for shelter, survival, pleasure, and sex reveal their true primitive potential when we experience a barrier to their satisfaction. Our animal side can instantly become inhumanly brutal, grossly aggressive, crassly greedy, heartlessly selfish, and totally uncaring for others to the degree of complete disregard of what they feel" (The Inner Journey Home, pg. 142). Within the Christian tradition, these distorted qualities that arise from our animal soul are what Apostle Paul calls in the Bible the “works of the flesh.” They include “sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these” (Gal. 5: 18). Apostle Paul taught that “what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh” (Gal. 5: 19) . As a result, within Christianity, and this is true of the other major religions too, the dynamics of the animal soul are seen as sinful and evil and need to be tamed, managed, and eradicated if possible. Such religious judgmental teachings, rather than transforming our fallen animal nature, distort it even further and even energize it causing it to be more problematic in our lives. The Egoic soul (ego-self) The second aspect of the human soul is what the Diamond Approach labels the ego-self or what I call the egoic soul. Unlike the animal soul that is driven by our biology, our egoic soul contains psychological structures that form in our soul based on our history and experience. These psychological structures form because our ego-self has a need to preserve itself. It cannot not handle the experience of non-structure that comes with the natural flow of the Present Moment for to the egoic self, this feels too dangerous. The egoic self “is always looking for something concrete, something solid, stable, graspable, to support itself with, to depend on. That is because the self believes that if there is no bedrock, it is going to sink; if the bottom of reality is not solid, the self will get submerged and drown. So we believe that we have to locate some kind of island or rock of solidity to stand on to keep us from drowning” (The Unfolding Now, p. 202). At the center of our egoic soul “is a psychic structure characterized by a specific pattern and by incessant psychological activity. The pattern, or the particular psychic organization, provides the direction of action, while the activity provides the drive to act. This gives the self a sense of orientation, center, and meaning. The psychological activity includes hope—the self is hoping, consciously or unconsciously, to achieve its aim or ideal” (The Point of Existence, p. 85). Now, the structures and activities of our egoic soul are based on history. Our egoic soul contains all our history, our positive memories but also our negative experiences including attachment wounds from our childhood when we, as children, were not seen, valued, and loved by our parental figures and caregivers. This negative history also contains the painful traumatic experiences that occurred throughout our life. However, our egoic part of our soul contains more than these memories. Our egoic soul is also the manager of our life based on our ego ideal. “The ego-self has preferences for what should happen and shouldn’t happen, according to its ideal of what we believe is enlightened or not, and what we think is pleasurable or painful. We have all kinds of value and judgment standards about what’s good and what’s bad, what is scary and what is not. Some of this is conscious, some of it is unconscious, and much of it divides us within. This division creates a kind of war, like a resistance movement within us…When you are resisting, you are basically resisting yourself. It is a kind of self-resistance. Instead of being with yourself, you are resisting being with yourself…The moment we take the posture of ego, of identification with our history, it implies resistance” (The Unfolding Now, pg. 36). Our egoic soul judges pleasure as good and all emotional distress as bad. As a result, the thinking, feeling, doing, and relating structures of our egoic soul are designed to seek pleasure and to avoid the emotional distress trapped in these unhealed memories. Here is a sample of some of our coping patterns around pain…such as denial, avoidance, emotional numbing, medicating through food, alcohol or drugs, distractions like smart phones, TV or movie watching, addictions of various types, living in our heads instead of feeling, focusing only on the positive, and many other spiritual pain management strategies. I want you to notice that all the coping strategies located within our egoic soul take us away from the Present Moment. When we are experiencing pain and distress, we are living in the Present Moment, that is a given. And so if we are rarely in the Presence Moment, there is little risk of experiencing the pain hidden away within our soul. This is why many people spend very little of their lives living in the Present Moment. By now, you are starting to notice some of the intrinsic qualities of our egoic soul. Let me list them to make them more apparent.
The Angelic Soul (True nature) Seeing how the egoic soul works, you can begin to appreciate and understand that there is another aspect of our soul that involves all the experiences of the Present Moment, dynamics that our egoic soul seeks to manage and control, but in doing so, often distorts leading to further spiritual distress for us. When we pay attention to the angelic part of our soul, we notice that there are many energies or qualities that emerge within us in the Present Moment in response to what we are experiencing in our life. These energies arise from what the Diamond Approach calls our True or Essential nature. As Almaas, the co-developer of the Diamond Approach, shares below, this Essential nature is the essence of who we are, when we are not identified or merged with our egoic soul or animal soul. The Diamond Approach has discovered that experiences of True nature have five unique qualities. One is that our True nature is inherently aware, sensitive, a sense of in-touchness, or consciousness. Just as heat is inherent to fire, so is awareness inherent to our True nature (Spacecruiser Inquiry, pg. 32). Two, True nature is an indivisible unity, a field of oneness that includes everything within it (Spacecruiser Inquiry, pg. 32). In contrast, within egoic reality, we lose the perspective that everything is connected and instead perceive everything as divided into disconnected parts, me and you, us and them, inside and outside, good and bad, etc. When we recognize True nature and lose this sense of boundaries, we recognize that oneness pervades the whole universe, and that we are part of this oneness. Three, True nature is dynamic, always moving, changing all the time. Reality is a movie, in constant motion, never a snap shot. Without this sense of change, there would be no awareness (Spacecruiser Inquiry, pg. 32). Four, True nature is totally spacious, unstructured and open to all possibilities manifesting, unlimited in potential (Spacecruiser Inquiry, pg. 32). And, five, True nature has a sense of knowingness to it, that it can reveal to us the knowledge of what qualities are emerging, inform us of what we are noticing in our experience of the Present Moment (Spacecruiser Inquiry, pg. 32). These qualities of True nature arise in us in response to what we are experiencing in the Present Moment. When we see pain in others or experience pain in ourselves, a tender compassion arises within us, possibly with tears, that soften us and allows us to comfort others or ourselves. When we see injustice, an anger-like strength arises that causes us to speak truth and act in ways that confront this injustice. When we see a gorgeous sunset, a feeling of joy, awe and wonder may emerge within us. There are many other such spiritual qualities such as curiosity, insight/truth, joy, love, grace, determination, awareness, kindness, curiosity, etc. that can arise from the angelic part of our soul. It is important to note that we don’t create these energies, that they are not products of our egoic soul. They emerge naturally in us in response to what we are noticing. This is why they are often seen by some religions as fruits of God’s spirit (Gal. 5: 22-23). When we are developing our ability to experience the angelic aspect of our soul, we cultivate our ability to live more from our True nature, that aspect of our Soul that is beyond our egoic soul. As this maturation happens, our True nature “reveals its omnipresence, disclosing that it is the ground and nature of everything. This appears as True nature revealing its boundless and formless dimensions that transcend the limited boundaries of the ego-self, even the individuality or personhood of the soul” (The Inner Journey Home, pg. 225). When this happens, “our soul does not experience herself here as an individual soul, but as a boundless and nonlocal presence that is part of an eternal nowness that transcends all time, and as a mystery that transcends all determinations” (The Inner Journey Home, pg. 225). These words of Almaas may sound very esoteric, other-worldly, but many people do have moments like this that they see as sacred...that can arise when we are watching a sunset, or kayaking on a river, or watching the twinkling stars in a dark moonless night, or during sexual organism with one's love partner, or playing with our young child or grandchild, or singing at a concert or during a worship service, or during a profound moment in our counselling/spiritual direction session. What we don't realize is those sacred moments are not just profound moments where God's spirit enters our world. Rather those moments are really moments when we dropped down from our merged state with our structured egoic soul into the deeper angelic realms of our soul where we discovered the essence of who and what we really are. When we are able to live more and more of our time from our angelic soul, we eventually realize that our egoic soul that we often think is "me" is not me at all. This is why the Diamond approach calls our ego self the "false pearl" for it is a false version or structured imitation of our Essential nature. When we realized that our sense of "me" is True nature, what is sometimes called the Pearl of Great Price in the Christian tradition (Matt. 13:45-46), and not our egoic soul, a whole new world of possibilities opens up for us, a world when we learn to live more and more of our lives from the Present Moment and our True nature. The Purpose of Spiritual Care
When you understand the human soul through this framework of these three aspects, the animal soul, egoic soul, and angelic soul, you begin to understand what spiritual care and spiritual direction is all about. Spiritual care and direction involves creating a safe supporting space so that the angelic soul of our client can interact with the different structures and dynamics of their egoic soul and animal soul. For this to happen, we must help people move into the Present Moment, for it is only here that people can experience what the Diamond Approach calls Diamond Guidance, what some religious traditions call “the angel of revelation, the holy spirit that brings the word or message from the source. It is the angel that guides us to Beingness that is our ground, our nature, our source. It is the true friend, the total friend, because the Guidance’s only concern is for you as a soul to go back to your source, to be who and what you can be, with total acceptance, total support, total guidance, total kindness” (Spacecruiser Inquiry, pg. 223). This Diamond Guidance refers to the insights that arise as people pay close attention to the dynamics within their experience of the Present Moment…with curiosity, grace, compassion and a longing for the truth. As we help people receive these insights and internalized them, the structures of their egoic soul begin to transform and they find ourselves living more from their True nature in the Present Moment and less time lost in the many complex and often painful structures of their egoic soul and false pearl. Questions to Ponder: 1. When do you find yourselves being influenced by the dynamics of your animal soul: craving pleasure, avoiding pain, fight, flight, freeze dynamics, etc. 2. When do you find yourselves being influenced by the dynamics of your egoic soul? What are some of the ways you manage yourselves to maximize pleasure and reduce feelings of pain, anxiety, fear, anger, guilt, shame, etc.? 3. When do you find yourselves living in the Present Moment and experiencing the dynamics of your angelic soul? What aspects of spirit have you experienced? 4. Most people identified themselves in terms of their egoic soul..."this is who I am." How would your life change if you realized that this sense of self was wrong, that your true identity was based on those sacred moments when you were in touch with your angelic soul...that this is who you truly are? Bibliography Almaas, A. H. Essence with the Elixir of Enlightenment. York Beach: Samuel Weiser, Inc, 1984. Almaas, A. H. Spacecruiser Inquiry. Boston: Shambhala, 2002, Almaas, A. H. The Inner Journey Home. Boston: Shambhala, 2004. Almaas, A. H. The Point of Existence. Boston: Shambhala, 2001. Almaas, A. H. The Unfolding Now. Boston: Shambhala, 2008. Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
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