CHAPTER TWELVE

Instinct as an Expression of the Soul

The soul is not in the body; the body is in the soul

                                         — Hildegarde of Bingen

All that is called instinct in biological terminology, when experienced psychologically is best described as Deity

                                                                                     —  Edward Edinger (1)

There is a beautiful tapestry in the Musée de Cluny in Paris, where a woman stands in the doorway of a tent, flanked by a lion and a unicorn. These are placed by the artist who designed this masterpiece, in a landscape filled with fruit trees, animals, birds and flowers. Sometimes the series of five tapestries is said to represent the five senses. However, to me they represent far more than this. The lion can be said to symbolise the body and the unicorn the spirit. Both are held, so to speak, in the greater field of the soul, personified by the woman. The two banners on either side of her have the crescent moon on them—age-old symbol of the Feminine.
          Instinct gives rise to our capacity to feel, to imagine, to create, to sense what is right or wrong, to relate to and respond to others, to recognise and appreciate beauty. Instinct manages and coordinates the organism of the body and the balance of the heart-brain axis that maintains the homeo-stasis of the whole system. It may be that the consciousness of the universe itself has given birth to instinct in all these different manifestations, which drives the planetary evolutionary process and, ultimately, awakens us to awareness of our cosmic goal.
          Looking back over the last two millennia, it is apparent that, during this time, conventional religious teaching did not preserve the ancient insight that nature and instinct are an expression of spirit: in splitting nature from spirit, emptying matter of soul, and contaminating the instincts with guilt and fear, a vitally important part of our wholeness was injured, even lost. It is crucially important now for us to create a conscious, healing and redemptive relationship with these neglected aspects of spirit, within ourselves and within the culture.
          In Christian culture, the soul has been defined as the ‘spiritual’ part of ourselves and as something separate from the body, that survives the death of the body. A more inclusive definition of the soul which includes the instinct and the body may seem strange. Yet, in its widest definition I think it is absolutely necessary to say that the soul is, at one end of the spectrum, the instinctive life of the body and, at the other, the intelligent life of the cosmos. It is impossible to explain this because there are as yet no concepts or words or mathematical equations that can describe the relationship between them but it may be that the functioning of instinct on this plane of reality may be compared to something like a gravitational field. Some kind of cosmic and terrestial DNA programmes the life and instincts of all species on this planet.
          The dream that I described in Chapter Two, where I stood at the edge of a deep gorge and saw, rising out of it, an enormous cobra-like serpent with its seven hoods spread out in a great semi-circular fan, shocked me into awareness of the importance of instinct. Without actually seeing this archetypal serpent rising out of the gorge, I don’t think I would ever have understood instinct as something so powerfully and overwhelmingly numinous—something that is at the very root of life and the medium through which we are all of us connected to each other and to the life of the planet and, beyond even that, to the life of the cosmos. Even more than this, I gradually became aware that this gigantic serpent personified the instinctive intelligence active and innate within every aspect of the life we have explored and are exploring, active within the whole process of evolution on this planet, leading ultimately to the evolution of consciousness in our species. Moreover, I could clearly see that this instinctive consciousness wanted to communicate with me. It struck me then that this was a very different image of the serpent from that portrayed in the myth of the Fall or even the heroic myths of Greek mythology.
          I had always thought of the soul as the ‘spiritual’ aspect of myself and had tended to look down on the instinct as something inferior to spirit and to mind. It certainly did not occur to me that my instincts could be thought of as a vital expression of the soul or as the root or source out of which my ability to feel, to think, to imagine and to be aware of my thoughts and feelings, had developed. The body to most people is something that is often treated as a kind of servant, doing the will of its ‘master,’ the mind. Yet the body can also be seen as the physical vehicle of the soul—something extraordinary and precious which emerges out of the invisible, rather as the stem of a flower emerges from the dark depths of the soil or the stars emerge from the darkness of the night sky—a kind of epiphany. We might learn from the words of the Indian poet, Kabir:

Within this earthen vessel are bowers and groves,
and within it is the Creator:
Within this vessel are the seven oceans
and the unnumbered stars.
The touchstone and the jewel-appraiser are within;
And within this vessel the Eternal soundeth,
and the spring wells up.
Kabir says: 'Listen to me, my friend!
My beloved Lord is within.'

          Our consciousness, as Jung described it, is like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. And that rhizome is the vast realm of instinct which, as I now understand it, is inseparable from the life of the soul. He also said that “dreams, fantasies, compulsions, obsessions are carriers of messages from the unconscious, instinctive part of ourselves to the conscious personality…Their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts.”(2) It is the act of paying attention to these strange and, to begin with, incomprehensible messages, that helps us to open a door onto everything that has been shut out of our awareness for millennia.

The Serpent as an Image of Instinct
In Christianity, the serpent as an image of instinct is deeply implicated in the role it played in the drama of the Garden of Eden, tempting Eve to take the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. As the primary symbol of the goddess’s power of regeneration, it was vilified in this myth, punished by God and condemned to bite man’s heel and to be bruised and crushed by him. Unsurprisingly, in the Christian tradition, because of its role in the Myth of the Fall, the serpent came to be viewed as a symbol of evil, even of the devil. Other Western myths of the solar era where the hero overcomes the serpent, such as the myth of Apollo killing the great she-dragon at Delphi, portray man in a new dominant role towards nature.
          Later this image migrates to the battle between the hero and the dragon—the dragon being identified with whoever or whatever was defined as ‘the enemy’ at a particular historical moment but also, in mythology, with the mortal fear of death that the hero has to face and overcome—as when Perseus faced and overcame the Gorgon. But the dragon was also identified with nature that had to be conquered and controlled by man. Following this chain of ideas which derives ultimately from Plato, the body and its instincts also had to be controlled and subdued by the mind. It is extremely difficult to change the deep imprinting of these ideas or beliefs on the collective soul of a civilization.
          An altogether different approach is found in the East where the serpent is ubiquitous as a symbol of life’s eternal power to create and destroy. In China it was identified with the invisible and supremely powerful energies that shape and maintain the life of the earth. In my journeys through the Far East, I found it most strongly represented in the magnificent temples of Angkor in Cambodia and in countless temple sculptures throughout India and south-east Asia. The Buddha is often shown seated on the coils of a gigantic serpent whose seven cobra heads fan out behind him to form a protective canopy. To have the serpent as guardian and guide rather than adversary means that the immensely powerful life energy of the instinct— unconscious in us in its primordial state—has been raised to a fully enlightened state of consciousness.
          This greatest potential achievement of human consciousness is symbolised in Indian mystical teaching by the journey of the serpent goddess Kundalini from the lowest chakra at the base of the spine to the highest chakra at the top of the head where the twin masculine and feminine conduits of the life energy meet in the central channel—the sushuma—and flower into the crown of the thousand-petalled lotus. The long and arduous journey of the instinct from an unconscious state to a fully conscious one in this dimension accomplishes its transformation from blind instinctive impulse to the highest expression of wisdom, insight and compassion. Yet instinct is not ‘lower’ than consciousness. It is the mighty power which animates and organizes all forms, all patterns of life and all the connecting fields between them. To create a conscious relationship with this unimaginable power, coming to know its light and dark aspects, develops the ability to heal and awaken others to their own spiritual or soul potential. In the Buddha’s own words, “Incomparable are the Wake.”

The Importance of the Heart
The life-bearing energy of the heart — acting as a conduit for our instinctive soul — rises like a fountain within us to nourish and irrigate the soil of soul. However, as with the physical heart, if the psychic heart (our deepest instincts and feelings) is not in a healthy state; if one or more of its arteries is blocked; if the psychic circulatory system is not in good order, then we cannot function at a level of optimum health. When our heart carries wounds, these, like blocked arteries, can restrict the flow of instinctual energy through the psychic circulatory system, leading to the impairment of psychic and physical health. Our heart seeks meaning, relationship, connection. But these feelings associated with our heart are really the more refined or developed expression of age-old instincts and it is these instinctive feelings that we need to make more conscious. It is ultimately instinct which carries and transmits to each unique new embryo the whole of the primordial experience of our species encoded in its ‘psychic’ DNA or, to be more specific, the ‘consciousness’ aspect of DNA.
          Below are some definitions of how instinct as the primordial aspect of the soul works within us:

· Instinct gives rise to our deepest feelings and our longing to know and understand
· Instinct in our species gives rise to conscience, the instinctive feeling that something is right or wrong, good or evil, helpful or unhelpful. This is not something ‘god-given.’ It could be said that it is God.
· Instinct is the root of our imagination and our desire to create, prolong and preserve life, to give expression to the creative energy of life itself
· Instinct guides and manages the miraculous organism of the body and affects the balance of the heart-brain axis that maintains the homeostasis of the autonomic nervous system
· Instinct is the power of attraction that draws us to seek relationship and connection — with each other, with nature, with the cosmos
· Instinct gives us our need for and our response to beauty
· Instinct gives rise to our capacity for empathic relationship with others — the capacity to love and also to hate and fear when the core of our being is wounded or when we are threatened
· Instinct is our innate ability to rescue, love, and transform ourselves, to heal the wounds that we and our species carry, once we have understood the need for this

          The sudden opening up to this instinctive core of our soul may come in moments of extreme joy—such as the birth of a child, or extreme grief—when someone we love dies, or extreme terror—as when we are face to face with a threat to our life. We can also experience this deeper connection in a sudden opening to the transcendent, an awakening to the eternal and the timeless. At these moments we are lifted out of our ‘everyday’ selves and experience immensely powerful feelings which transcend the normal range of our experience and may astonish us with their intensity.

The Importance of the Heart in Infancy
If we knew more about the importance of this instinctive dimension of ourselves, we might be more sensitive to how we treat our children. To understand at least some of the reasons why the instinct and therefore the heart and soul of a child may be wounded at the very beginning of life, I find it helpful and, indeed fascinating, to discover that in the foetus, the heart is the foundation of the nervous system and the development of the bi-cameral brain.

· The nervous system develops from the heart cells, 65% of which are neural cells.
· The brain develops from a mass of undifferentiated heart cells before they form into the four cardiac chambers.
· The right hemisphere of the brain is the first to develop out of the heart cells.
· The heart is connected to all the vital organs of the body.

Recent research has shown that the well being of the heart is of primary importance to many processes, including cognition. It has over 40,000 sensory neurons. It has its own independent nervous system. The electrical signal of the heart is 60% more powerful than the electrical signal of the brain. The electro-magnetic field of the heart is five hundred times more powerful than that of the brain and in the adult apparently extends between fifteen and twenty-five feet beyond the body. Just putting our hand over the area of the heart changes the brain waves. The heart produces a balancing hormone - oxytocin, the bonding hormone - and this hormone is activated in a loving and nurturing maternal environment. Frustration and fear make the heart rate jagged and rapid. Loving, stroking, caressing the body, make it rhythmic. (3)
          The transcendent experience of intense bliss comes from the older limbic (mammalian) level of the brain. The infant can know these feelings in the womb and in the first few moments of being reconnected with the mother after birth and in close sensory contact with her presence, her touch, her voice, her smell and her body throughout infancy. This original empathic experience lays the foundation of later feelings of trust and love, of joy, ecstasy and delight in life.
          We know now that the fetus in the womb registers everything the mother is experiencing — her happiness and delight in her growing child or her distress, fear and anxiety. We know it can be affected by alcohol, smoking and drugs but also by tension and violence in the parental relationship. We know it is sensitive to music, noise and the quality of the environment the mother is experiencing. All these factors can affect the heart and the developing nervous system of the fetus.
          Until the age of three to five years, the neural connections between the older limbic brain and the neo-cortical brain and frontal lobes are not established. Until then, the young child lives through the reflexes of the limbic brain and through purely instinctual and unconscious behaviour. Between three and five years the neo-cortical level of the brain and the frontal lobes become activated and the child begins to develop a sense of self, a sense of ‘I’ and a distinction between itself and its environment. The memories associated with the older brain levels gradually become ‘unconscious.’ Yet these early memories, imprinted on the limbic brain, still have immense power to influence our lives and our behaviour. A wound to the limbic brain in infancy can programme our lives in negative ways to the end of our days.
          Study after study has shown that emotional and physical abuse of the mother-to-be affects the neuronal circuits of the child she is carrying and that the neglect or abuse of the infant and small child can alter the balance of its neural chemistry and programme it to depression or to violent, even criminal behaviour later on.           What happens is that when constant fear or distress is experienced in infancy, the adrenal glands produce a high level of the stress hormone cortisol and this upsets or disturbs the optimal formation and equilibrium of the nervous system, interfering with the neural connections between the heart, the different parts of the brain and the frontal lobes. The higher brain centres may be unable to develop due to the distress of constant anxiety.
          This damage to the nervous system can endure throughout our lives with no way of healing it if we are not aware of it. We need to ask whether the rise in violent crime as well as the bullying and aggressive behaviour that is increasingly apparent in our culture does not in part originate in fetal and infant distress, contributing to the disorientation of the adolescent in an uncaring and indifferent world and therefore to the arousal of the most primitive survival instincts and the curtailment of the development of neo-cortical skills.
          For example, we are born with 100 billion nerve cells (this number may change as we learn more). From three to ten months a culling takes place with the loss of 50,000 connections between brain cells every second. Cells that are not used during this time die. Every cell has several branchings off it called dendrons. The more the cells are used the more connecting dendrons develop. They develop complexity and increase by use. If they aren't used, they can be lost. The mother's holding and responding to her infant in the early months and years is vital to the development of these dendrons. Care and bonding with the mother or primal carer help the cells and dendrons to become active and are absolutely essential in the first ten months. If care and love are absent or deficient, they will not be activated. (4)
          In view of this, I worry that the increasing tendency to put children in nursery school at an earlier and earlier age is having a negative effect on their development. The latest suggestion in the United Kingdom is a plan to get children into nursery schools from the age of two. Psychotherapists are agreed however, that at this age the small child still needs the containing environment of the mother and the home. But if the mother does not communicate with her child but leaves it on its own in front of the television, it will not develop language skills; many children start school with unable to speak or communicate with others and with a very poor vocabulary.

The Right Hemisphere of the Brain
In the light of the recent dramatic breakthrough experiences of certain individuals it seems that the right hemisphere of our brain may be a missing piece in the puzzle of consciousness. These experiences suggest that the right hemisphere is our conduit to what poets, visionaries and mystics of all cultures have called cosmic consciousness, the oneness of being or union with the divine ground. It may be that too great a focus on linear, left hemispheric consciousness has blocked access to the right hemisphere and upset the balance and natural relationship between them. Our modern methods of educating children to develop the sequential thinking of the left hemisphere too early in their lives (before the age of six) may programme our whole culture to be unable to develop the right hemisphere to its full potential and this, in turn, may block access to our feelings, to our heart and our instinctive soul which suffer and atrophy from being “shut out”.
          A neuro-scientist called Jill Bolte Taylor has recently described (in 2008 on Ted) her extraordinary opening to the right hemisphere when her left one was incapacitated by a stroke, reducing her usual capacity for articulate speech to a mumbled series of sounds and grunts. It took her ten years fully to recover her left-brain skills. Her experience was truly revelatory for her and her ability to communicate it, coming from a respected scientist, has impressed and fascinated millions. (5)
          The unconscious drives and patterns of behaviour that we call instinct are a fundamental aspect of the soul’s life. The miraculous interaction of the many systems which together constitute our ‘bodymind’ organism are intrinsic to the soul’s life in this dimension of reality. Memories of happiness and delight or of terror, anxiety and grief which are imprinted on the autonomic nervous system in earliest infancy and early childhood—even in the womb—remain imprinted on the nervous system throughout our lives and can affect the frontal lobes of the brain as these develop, whether positively or negatively. With the development of the frontal lobes comes the ability to reflect, to reason, to apply knowledge gained to specific goals but also to imagine, to make intuitive connections between apparently unrelated things and ideas. But if the instinct is wounded or traumatized, or deflected from a normal path of development by anxiety, this capacity for harmonious and balanced interaction between the three brain systems and the right and left hemispheres will be impaired.

The Split Between the Conscious Mind and Instinct
We can see everywhere, both in people's personal lives and in the world as a whole, how instinct, acting blindly and unconsciously, brings untold suffering and evil into being, a situation which will be explored in depth in the next chapter. As long as we continue to shut off this instinctual part of ourselves from our awareness, it has the power to take over our fragile ‘rational’ consciousness by triggering unreflecting responses to events that happen to us and by arousing negative responses to other people which may lead us to act aggressively towards them.
          As the split between our conscious mind and the matrix of instinct grows wider, the instincts take on a more dangerous aspect. Instinct can take over not only individuals but a whole culture, driving us along paths that we would not need to take, were we more receptive to its presence and its power and more aware of why it can take on a dangerous or negative aspect. The voice of instinct, cut off from relationship with the conscious mind, can become ever more strident and fanatical as it takes over the personality. Fundamentalism, which today confronts us in many forms, is one example of this. Another example is the corporate greed that has led to the banking collapse. A third is the political drive to achieve more and more power and to develop ever more terrifying weapons.
          I am reminded of a passage Jung wrote in his commentary on the Chinese text The Secret of the Golden Flower where he describes how, as consciousness gains more and more autonomy and independence from the deeper matrix of the instinct, the whole super-structure of consciousness becomes detached from the age-old base or ground out of which it has developed. “Consciousness thus torn from its roots…possesses a Promethean freedom but it also partakes of the nature of a godless hubris.”(6) This unconscious split creates great conflict between the two aspects of the psyche which finds its way into the many conflicts that are acted out in the wider arena of the world. Yet what confronts us as an implacable enemy may be a convoluted expression of the outraged instinct that we, in our conviction that we are rational beings, have ignored.

Messages from the Soul
When I began analysis, I did not know how to recognize and interpret the messages coming from the instinct. But as my understanding developed, I began to observe the ways in which the instinct communicates with us. I began to pay attention to its signals. I learned that it communicates through visions and dreams, through imaginative ideas, through feelings and passionate longings, through subliminal intuitions. It may also try to communicate through powerful emotions of rage, fear and hatred which may lead, in the more deprived sections of the community, to the violent crime and gang culture that is so prevalent in our cities. Millions today live in hideous over-crowded cities, no longer in touch with the earth and the star-strewn night sky as our ancestors were. This in itself does violence to the instincts. Millions are involved in and dependent upon work for their survival which does not satisfy them and from which there is no escape.
          The breakdown of families which is, in part, an effect of this disorientation, contributes to a chronic state of anxiety and to patterns of behaviour which reflect the distress of the instinct. Boys without a male role model provided by a caring father look to gangs to give them security and status. Girls follow the dubious role models offered to them by media “celebrities” and try to adapt their feminine nature to the masculine ethos and goals of the culture.
          If there is nothing to help us to become aware of or develop insight into this foundation of our life, there is no way in which it can reach us. Nor can we be enriched and developed by a relationship with something that is infinitely more powerful than our small and fragile conscious ego. Cut off from instinct, we become impoverished and diminished because a vital part of our wholeness does not receive the attention it requires and deserves and has no means of gaining the attention of the conscious mind. We could see the constant images of violence on our television screens as a symptom of a dysfunctional instinct. By portraying traumatising images, we further traumatise it.
          In childhood we are in touch with instinct, living in a state of unconscious fusion with it. If all goes well, we stay connected with it and it guides us through the power of attraction to the right partner and to some kind of work that gives us pleasure and fulfilment. But for countless others, through parental neglect and abuse, shockingly inadequate education, or the exhaustion of the struggle to survive, the instinct and with it the heart and soul, are wounded. As we grow to adulthood, the routine of everyday life becomes burdensome and meaningless, as if the germ of wheat has vanished, leaving only the husk. Many people turn to crime and drugs or fall into depression, not knowing how else to deal with their sense of stress and distress as they are driven from day to day by survival needs and by a sense of failure in the face of the goals our competitive culture imposes on them that they cannot attain.
          Governments try to deal with the symptoms of this distress, manifested in crime and illness of all kinds but the proliferation of new laws, regulations and exhortations does not address and cannot alleviate the underlying problem.
          In The Heart of the Hunter Laurens van der Post tells us that many people would write to him after hearing his lectures about the Bushman, saying they had dreamed about them. A particular dream from one of these letters made such a deep impression on me that I remembered it years after I had read his book:

I had not had a dream for years, but last night after the talk I dreamt I was in a great dilapidated building rather like a neglected castle I once knew. Somewhere inside it a woman was weeping as if her heart would break. I rushed from room to room along corridor after corridor and down stair after stair, trying to find her so that I could comfort her. Everywhere I went was empty; the dust thick on the floor and cobwebs on the wall. I was in despair of ever finding her, though the sound of her weeping grew louder and more pitiful in my ears. Suddenly one of your little Bushmen appeared in the window. He beckoned to me urgently with his bow, indicating that he would lead me to the woman. I started out to follow him, but immediately there was a growl behind me. To my horror one of the fiercest of the wolf hounds which I let loose in the grounds of my house as watch dogs every night, leapt forward and dashed straight at the Bushman. I tried to call the hound back but I could not find my voice. In the struggle to find it, I woke up in great distress and could not sleep again. (7)

          Here are the images of the neglected dimension of the soul—the empty, dust-covered building, the weeping woman. The little Bushman, symbol of the guiding wisdom of the instinct, cannot connect the dreamer with the woman because of the fierce wolf-hound, the Cerberus-like image of the critical, dismissive left-hemisphere of the mind may bar the entrance to the underworld of the instinctual soul. This inner controlling critic has to step aside before the Bushman can function as guide and the weeping woman be rescued.
In compensation for the loss of the priceless treasure of relationship with the deepest aspect of ourselves—the instinctive heart of our being—we may succumb to the values and models of behaviour which promote competitiveness, greed and the acquisition of material things. We may copy the model of sexuality presented as a means of exploiting and manipulating another person for our own imagined needs. These secular values may be presented as essential to our happiness but they have nothing whatever to do with the quest for the hidden treasure. Because their superficiality cuts us off from connection to our deepest ground, they draw us into addictive patterns which can destroy our lives and our relationships and may, eventually, destroy our culture.

Healing the Wound of Separation
I like the story of Androcles and the Lion—a story that has stayed with me since I heard it as a child—because it illustrates so clearly how becoming aware of the wounds the instinct carries and healing them brings rich rewards in the arena of life:

Androcles was a Roman slave who had been taken to North Africa. He tried to escape to the coast and return to Rome. He knew that if he were caught he would be killed, so he waited until the nights were dark and moonless before creeping out of his master’s house and stealing through the town into the open country. He hurried as fast as he could but when day broke he found that instead of reaching the sea coast, he was in a lonely desert. He was tired, frightened, hungry and thirsty. Seeing a cave in the side of some cliffs, he crept into it, lay down and very soon fell asleep. He was awakened by a terrible roaring and to his horror, saw a huge lion standing at the entrance to the cave. Androcles had been sleeping in the lion’s den. There was no escape. The great lion barred the way.
          Androcles waited for the lion to spring on him and kill him but it did not move. Instead, it moaned and licked one of its paws that seemed to be bleeding. Seeing that the animal was in great pain, Androcles forgot his terror and came forward. The lion held up its paw, as if asking for help. Androcles then saw that a great thorn had become embedded in the paw which had cut it and made it swell. He drew the thorn out with a quick movement. Relieved of pain, the grateful lion licked its paw, then limped out of the cave, and in a few minutes returned with a dead rabbit, which it laid at Androcles’s feet. When he had managed to light a fire and cooked and eaten it, the lion led him to a spring of fresh water gushing out of the earth.
          For three years, man and lion lived in the cave, but at last Androcles began to crave the society of his fellow men. He left the cave but was soon caught by some soldiers and sent as a fugitive slave to Rome. There he was condemned to be killed by wild beasts in the Colosseum on the first public holiday.
          A vast multitude of spectators came to see the sight, including the Emperor. Androcles was pushed into the great open space and a lance was thrust into his hand. With this, he was told, he was to defend himself against the powerful lion which had been kept for days without food to make it savage and fierce. Androcles trembled when the ravenous lion sprang out of its cage with a terrible roar, and the lance shook in his grasp as the great beast came bounding up to him. But instead of knocking him to the ground with a blow of is paw, it began to lick his hands. Androcles saw to his amazement that it was the same lion with which he had lived in the wilderness. He patted it and leaned on its head and cried.
          All the spectators marvelled at the strange scene and the Emperor sent for Androcles, asking him for an explanation. He was so delighted with the story that he made Androcles a free man.

          Androcles had two encounters with the lion: the first was in the wilderness, the lion’s domain; the second in the Roman arena, symbolically the arena of life. There are, even in this children’s story, undertones of heroic myth telling the story of the man who makes the journey into the wilderness of his soul, there to be reconciled with the instinctual powers symbolized by the lion, whose wound he heals. He makes the return journey into the world. There, in the fearful arena of life, instead of having his life destroyed by the wounded and enraged animal, he has its support and friendship. To make friends with the lion and to take the thorn out of its paw is to receive the protection and guidance of the instinctual powers of the soul.
          There is a strange saying of Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, “Blessed is the lion which the man eats, and the lion may become a man; and cursed is the man whom the lion eats, and the lion will become man.” (logion 8) His words point to the danger of the unconscious instinct ‘taking over’ or ‘possessing’ the conscious personality.
          An extraordinary photograph, published in the newspapers on January 13th, 2007, showed a lion reaching through the bars of its cage to embrace a woman, giving her what looked like a passionate kiss on the lips. Its two paws were tenderly wrapped around her neck, its eyes were shut and it looked for all the world as if it were in a state of bliss. The woman, Ana Julia Torres, is a teacher who lives in Columbia. She had rescued this African lion, called Jupiter, from a circus where it had been mistreated and nursed it back to health. Ten years ago she began to rehabilitate abused animals and now has a centre housing eight hundred lions as well as a variety of other animals. There was something immensely moving about the warmth and tenderness of the lion's spontaneous embrace and the trust of this woman who dared to invite and welcome it, stroking the lion’s thick rough mane for all the world as if it were an enormous dog. It was so perfect an image of the relationship we might have with our instinct, if only we knew how to embrace it and allow it to embrace us, to love it, as in the story of Beauty and the Beast, where the feared beast is transformed, through Beauty’s love, into a prince.
          
The Wounds the Heart Carries
Many people pass their lives in a state of slavery to misery, illness and depression, or to circumstances they loathe and feel imprisoned by, or in a state of hatred and resentment against something or someone they feel has injured them. These powerful feelings are symbolized by the wounded lion with the great thorn in its paw. If the thorn is not removed, it is likely that the lion will become dangerous. The lives of countless people are destroyed by the enraged and wounded lion that is condemned to roam the wilderness beyond our conscious awareness. Many people are dangerous, even terrifying to live with because of their power to hurt and destroy others. Many murders are committed by the enraged lion within us.
          Again, the lives of millions of children are blighted by the cruelty of parents, teachers and other adults who carry soul wounds of which they are barely conscious because they cannot remember or acknowledge the effects of the suffering and abuse they themselves experienced as children. They grow up to inflict suffering and abuse on others, acting out their own deeply buried trauma. Apart from poverty, hunger and AIDS, the greatest problem in the world today is the neglect of children’s emotional needs, not only in the theatres of war but also in the affluent West where broken marriages and serial partners inflict enormous suffering on children. The poorest child in Africa may receive more love and attention than a western child with all its technological “toys”.
          If the matrix of instinct and, therefore, the entire nervous system developing out of the heart has been wounded in the early stages of life through the effect of drugs or alcohol taken by the parents, through the constant infliction of physical or verbal violence and abuse or the experiencing or witnessing something horrific, or simply emotional neglect, this unconscious wound is likely to manifest later on in symptoms that are increasingly destructive and compulsive. The more instinctual feelings are shut away from consciousness, the more uncontrollable and overwhelming they become until at last they burst forth in ways that may injure others as well as ourselves. Depression, aggression—perhaps even the psychosis of war that we see today in many parts of the world—are all symptoms of psychic wounds, both individual and collective, which need healing.
          In a culture whose entire focus is on extraverted activity rather than attending to these symptoms of distress coming from the instinctual soul, we have trained ourselves to ignore them, ploughing on through life regardless, never seeing the connection between this repression and the problems that arise in our health and our relationships. Governments have to deal with the huge financial cost of this suffering in an overburdened health service. Repressed pain and anger may be vented through projection onto our partner, our children or some other person or scapegoat who may take the full brunt of the anger and aggression stemming from unrecognised and untreated wounds. Widening this perspective to humanity as a whole, the increasing aggression and terrorism in today’s world can be read as a symptom of underlying psychic distress in millions of individuals. A capacity for relationship with the soul is available to all of us but may not be activated unless we feel so threatened by our symptoms that we are forced to do something about them. Obviously, the terrible traumas inflicted by war, particularly on the soul of vulnerable and helpless children, but also in the veterans who carry physical and psychic wounds, enormously magnify the later symptoms of distress in a whole society.

Healing the Heart
As the relationship with the ground of life changes, so do we change in our relationships to partner, child or parent; our understanding of life and other people deepens and expands. Over the course of many years of listening to the voice of the soul, the base metal of a personality which was unaware of the numinous ground on which it rests or the source of the light which gives it life, is transformed into gold as it learns how to engage with this ground as with an invisible partner and friend. Aspects of our psychic life which may, in our unconsciousness, have controlled our lives and our relationships through anxiety, greed, hatred, envy, fear, and a sense of powerlessness which leads to the drive for power and control over others are slowly transformed as our relationship with the soul grows.
          The purpose of these symptoms is always to draw attention to the state of imbalance in our inner lives, just as the pain of a cut draws attention to the need to treat it. Ultimately, the hidden intention of many different symptoms of imbalance is to make us whole. In becoming whole, we open to the wholeness that our limited, partial consciousness has unknowingly obstructed. As we establish a deeply lived relationship with the soul over the course of many years, it becomes increasingly difficult to live or work in such a way that we injure others or life in general. At the same time, some kind of work that is deeply satisfying manifests, often changing its form in different phases of our lives, but always expressing a love of what we are doing, whether it is helping other people or expressing that love in some kind of creative form.
          Insight into the world of the soul gives us greater understanding of life. We need no longer live unconsciously, reacting blindly to events. We can begin to relate to the great invisible web of being that connects all things to each other, and the spirit that informs the whole, and align our life with this greater life so that, gradually, another perspective comes into being: values develop which do not violate our instinctive needs or those of others.
          Whenever we have a longing to create something or a passionate attraction to a place or an idea, the soul is making itself known to us through these longings and feelings of attraction. Following the thread of this instinctive attraction may lead us in unexpected directions in our lives. The soul carries within it the active intelligence, the intention and the power to transform these unconscious patterns so that humanity can reach its evolutionary goal of a mature, transformed and integrated consciousness. This instinctual soul, focused through the heart and connected to the greater cosmic web of life is the tap root of our imagination and our creativity. Almost as soon as we begin to pay attention to our inner life, it becomes apparent that there is an intelligence in its depths that is infinitely superior to our conscious ego or personality. In relation to this greater intelligence, the surface personality is like a tiny planet compared to the size and radiance of a supernova, and so it will remain to anyone who has had experience of its directing wisdom.
          Whoever ventures into the realm of the soul, will discover, as T.S. Eliot did, that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” She will know that each line of poetry that has stirred the reeds of longing, each image of beauty and fragment of what was felt to be truth has served to reveal, little by little, a Presence that has taken humanity millennia to discover, yet has always been there, awaiting the moment of recognition. The measure of commitment that is asked of us by the soul in return for its gift of wisdom and guidance may be only gradually revealed, but the inscription on the lead casket chosen by Bassanio, in the hope of winning the hand of Portia, says it all:

                                         Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath. (8)

Notes:

1. Edward Edinger, Melville’s Moby Dick: An American Nekyia. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1995, p. 101
2 . C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols p.52
3 . see Heartmath website www.heartmath.org
See also See Lennart Nilsson and Lars Hamberger, A Child is Born, Doubleday, p 92. An essential and fascinating book that will interest both parents and children and should be used in every school.
4 . Dr. Peter Fenwick, formerly neuro-psychiatrist at the Maudesley Hospital, London. notes from a lecture.
See also Sue Gerhardt, Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain, Brunner-Routledge, 2004
5 . Jill Bolte Taylor, Ted transmission, 2008, also My Stroke of Insight, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2009
6 . C.G. Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 84
. 7. Laurens van der Post, The Heart of the Hunter
8 . Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

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