Purifying the Soul by Dialectic Inquiry

A perspective on trauma and its relation to the so-called soul as understood in Dialectic Inquiry.

In the same way that a flesh wound remoulds the shape of the body after it has been impressed with an object, such as a knife, our individual consciousness can be redirected by impressive events, eventually getting shaped into a patterned form. We must distinguish between our innate impressionability as human beings and traumatic impression. Our natural impressionability can be experienced as part of perception (see ‘Penetrative Perception’). Trauma on the other hand leaves a trace, something which persists in the individual consciousness after it has occurred. What is the nature of the trace? Let’s begin with a brief mapping of the terrain necessary for our exploration.

PRE STRUCTURE

Much of the shaping traces are pre-conceptual, accruing in infancy and early childhood before the use of words and conceptual thought. The evidence for this history is our current experience as adults. To explore it and come to know the nature of trauma, we need to look at what it actually is which gets formed into adult personality.

What we are referring to as ‘personality’ here is a version of identity, a particular form we have assumed and, usually, consider ourselves to be. Experientially it could include a self-image (a mental picture of how you seem and are perceived), a constant internal running commentary, an overall sense of concreteness and being something. These streams converge into a familiar flavour by which you recognise yourself, that overall sense of feeling like you are an entity which looks through your eyes. There is a separateness to it bounded by the body.

If the personality is a shaping, what is it that actually gets shaped? What is the personality made of? What comes before the personality? More to the point: what is it that enters the womb in the process of human conception? We need to consider that there is a substance which arises and is configured into human form. In all likelihood, you have never thought of yourself as a substance. And yet, even if you consider yourself nothing more than so-called physical matter, however coarse, however tangible and noticeable that is, it remains a kind of substance.

SUBSTANTIAL PRESENCE

What makes it alive? Experience might happen in relation to a body while in human form but, in investigating the substance, we are interested in what makes us both be and human. So let’s begin with with the only evidence available to us for our purposes (the drive towards direct knowledge): what is it like to experience the moment? What can we notice happening now? Perhaps there is an aliveness, or some sense of mass or lightness, maybe deadness. What is your now like?

Notice where the experience is happening. Not just in spacetime, some bit of the body or the environment, but the actual medium the experience is suspended in. As we learn in the Buddhist parable of the blind men each touching a different part of an elephant, from its tail to its trunk, and forming their own partial picture of what it is: if we become interested in the question “what else is there to this experience that is not immediately apparent?” perhaps there is more to be known about that feeling of aliveness, or mass. Something implicit beyond its obvious peaks which we haven’t yet noticed.

Something we may begin to recognise is that experience is manifesting. It sounds obvious, but actually the fact that experience is happening is a discovery in itself. What kind of discovery? What do we learn when we notice explicitly that experience is happening, that it’s there? What is this ‘there-ness’? Well it is there. Something about it is. What is the is-ness like?

Here we’re starting to plunge into the nature of experience itself, feeling it by becoming the sensorial points on the inside of the membrane of its form. The is-ness is a fact. There is a self-evident, self-standing truth to it. The interesting question we haven’t yet asked is how does the experience make itself knowable? Meaning: what is the substance which carries the experience, its very ‘experienceability’?

When we are experiencing directly we are knowing experience. What is known? Sensing the experience directly, the immediate knowing of it, we notice it has a presence to it. The presence feels like a living liquid. Is the presence in the experience or in the one sensing it? Let’s check. It seems the presence is a bridge which connects and sustains the two: experience and experiencer. Like when a sandbank appears as its own island but is actually connected underwater to the mainland. The presence is the underwater sand, connecting and composing both.

There is no distance between a thing and itself. In that way, direct experience is immediately self-knowing as liquid presence - no gap. Experiencing directly we learn something about our own nature. We both know the presence in experience, at the same time as we know by that presence. The presence is alive with its own self-knowing experience. We can call this phenomenon the ‘Animative Presence’: that which is alive, is a presence and has knowing in it.

So far we’ve explored the Animative Presence in terms of its functioning by enlivening, knowing and substance. Underlying this is the recognition of Animative Presence as identity itself. It is the same as itself, simply what it is, and in feeling it to be so we can recognise it as what we are. We are not the content of experience, but the very essential substratum which makes experience possible. So not only is there presence, there is the personal distinct presence I am. I am the Animative Presence that I am.

A BURDEN OF BORROWED BEING

So if the Animative Presence is the identity of a person, what then is the personality? In common usage, the personality is actually understood as someone’s identity. But unlike the self-knowing identity of Animative Presence, our personality requires a constant self-affirming. We ‘build’ ourselves up in the way of achievement and acquisition (inner and outer) which gives us stand-ins for strength, worth and confidence. The personality, being inherently devoid of substance, is acquisitive by its very nature, seeking to possess in an attempt to substantiate itself.

It brings to mind the myth of Sisyphus: condemned for eternity to repeatedly rolling a boulder up a hill until it tumbles back down. The personality tumbles in its burnouts, its depressions and breakdowns. Like Sisyphus, we usually don’t see what is going on and re-erect it with that new self-disciplined routine, that newfound determination to be social, become rich or take an exciting trip.

The personality can be considered as “the disowned dents of history”. In other words: the impressions left on our Animative Presence over time. The collection makes up a shape, the personality. It is something real in the sense that it is a morphing of our Animative Presence. Its fakeness emerges when it is taken to be the ultimate identity. Fakeness, or untruth, is an incomplete (or otherwise inaccurate) determination on what is real. This determining defines and closes openness into a shape. By considering a part as the whole we rob it of its innocent right to be a part, and the whole of its fluidly unfolding fullness.

PSYCHIC TATTOOS

This blameless mistake, which is an amnesia, is inevitable. The substance which is the Animative Presence is designed to be impressionable and become formed into personality. With that comes a forgetting; the detainment of this migrant personality guest and the crowning it an impostor sovereign identity. However, in this same impressionability we reclaim the capacity for coming to know the truth. Through it we can un-shape the Animative Presence from its necessary crumpling and fulfil its potential.

What I call ‘impressionability’ is the mutual being affected which happens when the experiencer and experience meet (the very essence of ‘dialectic’ discussed here). Once we have felt that the Animative Presence which perceives is a fluid substrate, which can be vaporous or liquid, subtle or more definite, we start to see that impressions are actually encryptions of energetic signatures at the subtle level. Certain energetic signatures leave traces which perdure in our stream of consciousness as psychic tattoos.

The way they seep in can go unnoticed and, in fact, most remain unconscious, happening as they do in early childhood before conceptual thinking. At that time, the energetic signature of a family environment, the ink of how each person is feeling, communicating, and being in the space, is absorbed. Was the atmosphere in our family of origin loving and safe? Was there conflict and disharmony? For most of us, it’s probably some blend of these.

We do not need to remember this consciously; what is necessary is to feel the impact. This willingness to feel is our welcoming the disowned dents, the inclusion which restores our wholeness and un-dividedness. Because the traces persist over time, the good news is that the impact is immediately feelable right now, perfectly preserved in its mummified cryostasis. Any experience is a lily pad hovering on the surface of the murkier depths of our unconcealable history.

The accumulation of impressions begins to form an external carapace, or shell, which is the architecture of personality. This isn’t just a metaphor, but an actual phenomenon we can discover. One way we can experience it is as wafer thin strata of snapshot images, a camera roll coalesced into sedimented layers and condensed into thicker tiles mosaiced together as a sheath of pixels clothing our consciousness.

SOUL-MAKING

To feel, as adults, history’s impressions, is to do so with a specific intention. It is the intention which actually guides the process of metamorphosis. The intention is, at its core, the love of what is real, to love that more than our own comfort and status quo. Only with love would it be possible to feel the challenge and the suffering of this transformative process. Only through love is its bliss and beauty revealed.

Love is the essence of understanding. In meeting the difficulty of a hard outer shell with love we are actually understanding it. The understanding is what transfigures the chrysalis, the stage before a butterfly is born, which is still cocoon like in its hardness until it dissolves into the very material of the newly born one it was encasing. This is truly a second birth. The first is the incarnation into the human form we assume on Earth. The second is the gradual emergence from personality back into Animative Presence.

From the perspective that is emerging here we can look at the process of human life as what John Hick, the twentieth century theologian, called “a vale of soul-making”. The first phase is how our consciousness, the Animative Presence (which I will from here on use synonymously with ‘soul’), which both enlivens and manifests as a unique individual presence in human form, comes to be moulded into a personality. It is probably more accurate to call the second phase of soul-making an ‘un-making’. This is where we start to unkink what has been kinked.

ANAMNESIS: ESSENTIAL RECOLLECTION

I consider this a practical application of what Plato calls anamnesis, recollection. Plato bids to trust only “whatever reality the soul by itself understands” (Phaedo). What I read is an invitation to investigate the nature of the soul on its own terms, which is to take the soul as the vehicle into itself. The shared understanding with Plato is that the knowledge is innate. Our amnesia is traversable because Animative Presence is latent knowledge stored in the personality: one “will know it without having been taught but only questioned…finding knowledge within oneself” (Plato, Meno).

This is the understanding which allows to navigate the traumas which are not worded and, eventually, beyond. In investigating the patterning of our soul, the personality, we discover what we are. By feeling the trauma we feel the substance of our Animative Presence which has been impacted and itself impacts and softens the personality, returning itself to its original state of pullulating potential.

It is not unlike the process of phagocytosis we see in magrophages (white blood cells) which engulf into themselves antigens in the immune system. In the case of dialectic inquiry what happens is that the piece which is foreign, a hardness of personality which appears somehow dislodged from the central substance (what we may experience as rigidity and constriction in our experience), returns to being felt as what it really is: no more than a shade in the iridescent colour pallet constituting the soul.

The assimilation happens when this fragmented chip of experience, which until this moment has been a scale in the cocoon of the personality, is felt fully and starts to be re-integrated into the sensorial soul. It is no longer its casing, but it starts to be subsumed into the main substance, the tattoo’s ink dissolving under the laser beam of presence's loving inner touch.

DAIMONION: INNER GUIDANCE

This opens the possibility of the next stage of the journey when, in having learnt what is in fact the soul’s inner language of impressionability “it passes into the realm of what is pure, ever existing, immortal and unchanging, and being akin to this…it ceases to stray and its experience then is what is called wisdom” (Phaedo). Plato here makes explicit that wisdom is knowable only by the soul, speaking its same language. In unlocking the soul by digesting its trauma we develop the capacities which make possible its continuation into deeper mysteries.

Preparing the soul for this journey by digesting trauma is a purification process. Plotinus calls it catharsis, meaning purgation. His analogy is of removing the earth which smears gold, unveiling its pure uniformity. Another way he speaks of it is as the soul becoming naked and undressed of what has been admixed into it. From our perspective what has been blended are the impressions left by historical experience.

Plotinus is speaking to Plato’s teaching that true philosophy is about investigating reality by means of the soul. In order to investigate reality in this way we must undergo the purification which is keeping our vision blurred. In other words: we are giving our rocket ship its engine back. Meaning: re-endowing the soul with its original capacities and reinstating it as the vehicle of exploration it was born to be.

In purifying the soul we are cleaning it, restoring its receptivity to the guidance it needs to live harmoniously. Daimonion, the inner guide which led Socrates’ own exploration, is actually the driver of the practice and unfoldment itself. It will be discussed more in a future article but cannot go unmentioned here as it is the literal beam of light which, expressing itself in a soul as love, assiduously and unwaveringly burns with its luminosity the scales which vainly cling to cover it.