Heroes Not Zombies

In The Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist writes, “we can grow a soul – or we can snuff it out”.

Soul is a difficult concept but I suspect we all know it – maybe we can’t describe it, measure it, even point to it, but we know it.

We know what it’s like to have a soul mate. We know what soul food is. We recognise soul music, which is not just a musical genre, but any music which touches us deep in our soul.

I’ve made many visits to Kyoto in Japan, a really remarkable city studded with dozens of shrines and temples. The whole city feels soulful to me. Even though I practice neither Shinto nor Buddhism, I feel the soul energy as I walk into any of the gardens or buildings in the grounds of one of these holy places.

I feel the same stepping into a stone circle in Scotland, or tracing the cup and ring markings on the ancient stones.

I feel it faced with the cave wall art deep underground in France.

There are places which touch the soul.

Iain McGilchrist asks how we might grow our souls and suggests the use of symbols and rituals amongst other things.

In the temples and shrines of Kyoto there are symbols everywhere, and at every turn there are people practising the ancient rites and rituals.

Our industrialised, materialistic societies have been killing off souls. They’ve taken the heart out of life, reduced life to the useful or mundane. I saw a report yesterday that the clear majority of people in the U.K. no longer believe in, or practice, any religion, and who knows if that’s a good or bad thing? But it seems to have accompanied a disenchantment with the world and with life. There seems to be more mental illness, more unhappiness and certainly a lot more anger in the world. Our systems and organisations literally dehumanise us, reducing work to tasks, people to units of consumption and production….they are killing our souls.

So how can we grow our souls? I’m sure as an individual I can seek to spend more time with soul mates, eat food which reaches my soul, listen to the music which touches me at my core, spend time in the places where I feel my soul growing. I can slow down, savour the day, immerse myself in the wonder and awe of the here and now.

But I think we need to do more together to create communities and societies of love, care, compassion and creativity….in other words to prioritise the conditions, economic and social, which grow peoples’ souls.