DEFINITIONS
Soul, Spirit, Self, and Ego. “Why all the capitalized words?” you might ask. Simply to remind you, throughout this book, that I’m using these common words to refer to aspects of psyche defined in specific and not necessarily common ways.
Here, then, are my definitions of these and other key components of the Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche:
SOUL. The Soul is a person’s unique purpose or identity, a mythopoetic identity, something much deeper than personality or social-vocational role, an identity revealed and expressed through symbol and metaphor, image and dream, archetype and myth. Some other ways to say this: Soul is the particular ecological niche, or place, a person was born to occupy but may or may not ever discover or consciously embody.2 Or, in a more poetic vein, Soul is “the largest conversation you’re capable of having with the world,” it’s “your own truth / at the center of the image / you were born with,” it’s the “shape / [that] waits in the seed / of you to grow / and spread / its branches / against a future sky,” or it’s “your individual puzzle piece in the Great Mystery.”3 For example, the Soul of Irish poet William Butler Yeats can be articulated by way of a poem he wrote (and an experience he had) in his late twenties, as the niche of one who “pluck[s] the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.”4 Ecophilosopher, Buddhist, and Earth elder Joanna Macy, at age thirty-seven, experienced a life-transforming inner image of a stone bridge that spanned “between the thought-worlds of East and West, connecting the insights of the Buddha Dharma with the modern Western mind.” She knew in that moment that her destiny was, in part, to be one of the stones in that bridge — “just one, that was enough.”5 And it might be said that cultural historian Thomas Berry was ensouled as someone who “preserves and enhances [wild- ness] in the natural cycles of its transformation” and who perceives, articulates, and advocates the “dream of the Earth.”6
SPIRIT. Spirit (or God, Mystery, or the nondual) is the universal consciousness, intelligence, psyche, or vast imagination that animates the cosmos and everything in it — including us — and in which the psyche of each person participates. When consciously attuned to Spirit, we experience a profound connectedness with all things — the “oneness” of Spirit. The manner in which Spirit manifests itself or unfolds has been called, to cite just three examples, evolution’s trajectory, the Tao (the way of life), or the Universe story.
SELF. The Self is an integral whole, a bundle of innate resources every human has in common, a totality that holds all the original capacities of our core humanness.7 The Self incorporates the four facets of our horizontal human wholeness, which exist at birth but only as possibilities that, like the Soul, we may or may not learn to access, actualize, and embody. These four facets can be described in terms of archetypes, universal patterns of human behavior and character found in all cultures and in myths, dreams, art, and literature. The Self contains all the resources we need to meaningfully contribute to our more-than-human (which means not-merely-human) world in order to live a mature, fulfilling, creative human life, to effectively manifest our Soul’s desires, and to align ourselves with Spirit’s unfolding. In this book, I use Self and horizontal human wholeness interchangeably.
SUBPERSONALITIES. The subpersonalities are the wounded and sometimes hidden fragments of our human psyches — such as our “inner” Victim, Rebel, Critic, Tyrant, or Addict — each of which attempts to protect us from further injury. These are constellations of feelings, images, and behaviors that operate more or less independently from one another and often independently of our conscious selves (Egos). Subpersonalities form in childhood, with the enduring purpose of protecting us from physical, psychological, and social harm. Often they succeed. Often they also create additional troubles or mischief for us and others. Our subpersonalities are the source or instigators of what Western psychology understands to be our psychological symptoms and illnesses.
I borrowed the term subpersonalities from the approach to psychology known as psychosynthesis, developed by Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli in the early 1900s. Other traditions and schools of Western psychology have referred to intrapsychic fragments of this sort as complexes (Freudian and Jungian analysis), parts (Gestalt psychology), internal objects (object relations theory), ego states (transactional analysis), or selves (Hal and Sidra Stone’s Voice Dialogue or Psychology of Selves; and Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems Therapy). Each subpersonality functions by way of an interrelated set of ideas, emotions, memories, impulses, and behavioral patterns.
EGO. The Ego is the locus, or seat, of conscious self-awareness within the human psyche, the “I.” (I also use another term, the three-dimensional Ego, or 3-D Ego, to refer to an Ego blessed with some degree of conscious communion and integration with Self, Soul, and Spirit.) By personality I mean the characteristic patterns of behavior the Ego engages in.
How the Ego Operates
When awake, we (our Egos) can, in principle, be conscious through the frame of reference of any of the other four aspects of the psyche — namely, the Self, Soul, Spirit, or subpersonalities. This is to say that we can be conscious as, and act from the perspective of, any one of these four aspects of the psyche. But the subpersonalities are the “default position” for our Egos. Unless and until we cultivate conscious relationships with Self, Soul, and Spirit (and in that way function, at least at times, as 3-D Egos), we experience and behave by way of our psyche’s fragmented or wounded parts — from the perspective, for example, of our Conformist, Escapist, or Victim. With a healthy, mature 3-D Ego, we are fully anchored in the fourfold Self, and we more often than not experience ourselves as being in service to Soul and, consequently, to Spirit, too. As 3-D Egos, we can also at times experience ourselves as Soul or as Spirit.
Self and subpersonalities are not entities or little people inside people. A better way to think of them is as different versions of ourselves that we experience and enact at different times.8 Here’s a slogan to help remember this: “Self and subpersonalities don’t do anything; people do.” People often act by way of or by means of or through their subs, for example, and sometimes they’re conscious that they’re doing this and sometimes not.9 But subpersonalities don’t act in the world independently of the person of whose psyche they are a component.10 A given sub is simply one version of the person in action. Same goes for the four facets of the Self.
Our subpersonalities generally function autonomously from other versions of ourselves, which is to say that, when our Ego is identified with a subpersonality, we tend to be undeterred by the perspectives we hold at other times. When identified with a sub, we might be completely unaware of the existence of some or all of our other versions (the four facets of Self as well as our other subpersonalities). In contrast, when our Ego operates by way of the Self, we are aware — or at least potentially aware — of our subs as well as the facets of the Self.
THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY
Something essential to note before continuing: The map is not the territory! In this book I’m offering a way to understand our human psyches, but the reality is always more complex and nuanced than any map can convey. May we always be astounded and humbled by the mystery of our human selves and our animate world.
THE SELF
The Self is what we’ll explore in the first half of this book. Even though you may find it less familiar than the subpersonalities (because of what Western psychology and culture emphasize as well as what they neglect), the Self is where we’ll begin, because it’s the foundation of individual well-being, spiritual development, healthy relationships, and mature cultures. It’s also the dimension of our psyches through which we’re able to heal the wounds protected by and embodied within our subpersonalities. We must cultivate the resources of the Self before we can truly heal.
Although the Self is a single dimension