In to the woods...

So far I have focused on spirit..

Soul is different...

"From the intimate, inner and psychological point of view, the forest is the place of the soul's operations, of inner transformations and purification". Cirlot, Figuras del destino, 43.

All I know is that during the year before I told him about my feelings,  I was haunted by the song at the top of this page -  And when I was thinking of asking for my session notes, I was haunted by another song.

Erik Davis explains the divide.

By soul, I basically mean the creative imagination, that aspect of our psyches that perceives the world as an animated field of powers and images. Soul finds and loses itself in enchantment; it speaks the tongue of dream and phantasm, which should never be confused with mere fantasy. Spirit is an altogether different bird: an impersonal, incorporeal spark that seeks clarity, essence, and a blast of the absolute. Archetypal psychologist James Hillman uses the image of peaks and valleys to characterize these two very different modes of the self. He notes that the mountaintop is a veritable logo of the “spiritual” quest, a place where the religious seeker overcomes gravity in order to win a peak experience or an adamantine code worthy of ruling a life. But the soul forswears such towering and otherworldly views; it remains in the mesmerizing vale of tears and desires, a fecund and polytheistic world of things and creatures, and the images and stories that things and creatures breed. Erik Davis.

The subject of soul...began with my request for open truth, for emotional honesty; for our roles to be dissolved, for feelings to be spoken of as worthy of respect. But instead I found myself as Actaeon, my hunting hounds turned against me...as if I'd glimpsed in him something that I was never supposed to see or recognise.

Why did he make that choice?

To turn against the soul, to take refuge in pure spirit? 

To assert an intellectual, bloodless purity?

Weeping, he heard a child in the distance, chanting a nonsense rhyme: Tolle, lege, tolle, lege. “Take it and read, take it and read.” Taking the rhyme as a message from God, Augustine went inside and, employing a bit of textual divination popular in the ancient world, randomly opened up a copy of Paul’s Epistles, and let his eyes fall where they would: “…  put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”Augustine snapped. He was born again, a soul freed from the urgings of nature by the fleshless message of a book...Erik Davis.

Still seeking factor X.

Too much unsaid - so I write...