Care of the Soul

"Care of the soul is a fundamentally different way of regarding daily
life and the quest for happiness … Care of the soul is a continous process
that concerns itself not so much with 'fixing' a central flaw as with
attending to the small details of everyday life, as well as to major decisions
and changes."
"Soul cannot thrive in a fast-paced life because being affected, taking
things in and chewing on them, requires time."

Care of the Soul was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and
spent almost a year on that list. It is rare for a self-help title to
have also received critical acclaim. This is a popular self-help
book, but not like any you may have read. Steeped in a sense of the
sacred and the profound, Moore's thesis is that modern lives lack
mystery, and the success of the book would seem to indicate that most
of us agree.
You should also find it a peaceful experience, almost like a letter
from a forgiving friend; while knowing everything about you, they are
unfazed in their belief in your godliness. This effect may derive from a
combination of Moore's experience as a psychotherapist, his years as a
monk, and his wide learning. Inspired by myth, history, and art, the
book exudes the richness of human experience. Moore's chief influences
are Freud (delvings into the psychic underworld), Jung (the belief that
psychology and religion are indistinguishable), James Hillman (see The
Soul's Code), and the Renaissance men Ficino and Paracelsus.
What is care of the soul?
Care of the soul is "an application of poetics to everyday life," bringing
imagination back into those areas of our lives that are devoid of it, and
re-imagining the things that we believe we already understand. Rewarding
relationships, fulfilling work, personal power, and peace of mind
are all gifts of the soul. They are so difficult to achieve because the idea
of soul does not exist for most of us, instead making itself known
through physical symptoms and complaints, anguish, emptiness, or a
general unease.
Soulwork can be deceptively simple. Often you feel better just by
accepting and going more deeply into what you apparently hate, for
example a job, a marriage, a place. The book contains a quote by the
poet Wallace Stevens: "Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake." Instead of trying to remove any bad feeling or experience surgically
from our mind, it is more human and honest to look squarely at
the "bad thing" and see what it says to us. We will not receive the
soul's messages if it is moved out of sight. An intent to heal, either on
the part of the sufferer or the helper, may obscure insight into what is
actually going on.
Conventional self-help and psychotherapy are problem solving. The
literature on the soul, exemplified by Moore, is "problem-noticing and
wondering." The soul has to do with turns of fate, which are often
counter to expectations and against the desires of the ego and the will.
This is a frightening idea, yet the only way it becomes less frightening is
when we start to make space for its movements and respect its power.
As Victor Hugo put it in Les Misérables:
"There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is
one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul."
Enjoying our depth and complexity
Moore asks us to re-examine the myth of Narcissus, the beautiful
young man in love with an image of himself in a pond. His soulless and
loveless self-absorption results in tragedy, but its intensity eventually
pushes him into a new life of reflection and love for his deeper self and
nature around him. "The narcissistic person simply does not know how
profound and interesting his nature is," Moore suggests. Narcissus is
like ivory: beautiful, but cold and hard. What he could become is a
flower, with roots and part of a whole world of beauty. However,
killing the Narcissus in us is not the way to go; instead of moving to
the other extreme of false humility, it is best to keep our high ideals
and dreams and find more effective ways to express them.
With the analysis of myths such as these, Moore counsels that we
should avoid the simplistic single-mindedness of some self-help writing.
There are many aspects to the self, and by accommodating its competing
demands (for example solitariness vs. social life) life expands into
something fuller. We can sometimes entertain our ego, at other times be
the detached sage. Both are valid, and we don't always have to be making
sure that life makes sense. No one has a soul like ours
"The uniqueness of a person is made up of the insane and the twisted
as much as it is of the rational and normal," Moore notes. This is
attested to by the biographies of just about everyone you have ever
admired—even Abraham Lincoln is getting the revisionist treatment.
Why should you be any different? Care of the Soul warns us to be particularly
careful that our efforts to "iron out the bumps" may only be a
drive toward conformity and a sad loss of ourselves.
Most therapists now focus on specific problems that can be tackled
in a short timeframe, that can restore you to "normality." Through
drugs, cognitive therapy, and sciences like neuro-linguistic programming,
there is no need for introspection. Care of the soul never ends,
however, as the soul itself is outside of time. Only such things as
mythology, nature, the fine arts, and dreams—which all defy time—can
give us proper insight into our mystery.
The book has four parts and thirteen chapters, covering the gamut
of the human condition. The following themes are from the first half.
Love
We should try not to see love in terms of "making relationships work."
Rather, love is an "event of the soul" that may have surprisingly little
to do with who you are with. Love is relief from the mundane, sanitized
nature of modern life, a door into mystery, which is why we seize
it with such force.
Jealousy
Moore had a young client who had whipped himself into a frenzy
about his girlfriend's suspected affairs. Yet the man also believed that
romantic attachment was not modern or acceptable. This purity of
ideals had shunted out the possibility of real attachment, and the result
was an ugly externalization of jealousy.
Nevertheless, jealousy is not all bad, serving the soul through the
creation of limits and rootedness. Flying in the face of modern ideas
about "co-dependency," Moore says that it is OK to find one's identity
in relation to another. Power
The soul's power is quite different to the ego's. With the ego we plan,
direct, and work toward an end. The soul's power is more like a current
of water: Though we may never understand its source, we still
have to accommodate it and let it guide our existence. With the soul we
have to abandon the "consumer logic" of cause and effect and the efficient
use of time.
Violence
The soul loves power, but violence breaks out when the dark imagination
is given no outlet. When a community or a whole culture lacks
soulfulness, the soul is fetishized into objects, for example guns. As
Oscar Wilde suggested, virtue cannot be genuine when it sets itself
apart from evil.
Depression
Moore says that any culture that tries to protect itself against the tragic
side of life will make depression the enemy, but that in any type of society
"devoted to light" depression will be unusually strong in order to
compensate for its unnatural covering up. Moore describes depression
as a gift: It unwraps our neat little values and aims, giving us a chance
to get to know the soul.
Final comments
Late in the book, Moore tells of the summer he spent working in a laboratory,
having left the monastic life where he had been cloistered for
12 years. Enjoying his new-found freedom, he was shocked when a
workmate said to him with conviction, "You will always do the work
of a priest." The success of Care of the Soul is a perfect example of
how self-help literature has taken the place of traditional carers-of-thesoul,
to whose rituals and religious instruction we once would have
turned automatically.
In place of the "salvation fantasy" that he believes characterizes
contemporary self-help, Moore tries to return us to a self-knowledge
quest that can encompass our shadows and complexities. His book is
modeled on the less ambitious self-help manuals of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which offered philosophical comfort for the trials of
life. Care of the Soul may stand out from today's self-help writing, but
in fact continues an old and venerable tradition.
Renaissance doctors, Moore tells us, believed that each individual
soul originated as a star in the night sky. The modern idea, he notes, is
that a person is "what he makes himself to be." We have to value the
self-creating freedom that is enjoyed in our time, but Moore's book
gives us something altogether different: the encouragement to wonder
what is eternal in us.