Trusting in the guardian spirits for children

“Just look at the evidence,” James Hillman writes. “Of the 57 million children (under fifteen years of age) living in the United States, more than 14 million are living below the official poverty level. The United States ranks below Iran and Romania in the percentage of low-birth-weight babies. One of every six children is a stepchild, and half a million make their ‘homes’ in residential treatment centers and group and foster homes. More children and adolescents in the United States die from suicide than from cancer, AIDS, birth defects, influenza, heart disease, and pneumonia combined. Each day, at least 1 million ‘latchkey children’ go home to where there is a gun.

“Besides these children who find their way into sociological statistics, there are those in treatment for attention deficit disorders, hyperactivity, obesity, defiance, bulimia, depression, pregnancy, and addiction.

“Gross economic injustice and political passivity are responsible for the plight of children. But also I accuse the parental fallacy of sponsoring this negligence. Parents’ deficient attention to the individual call they brought with them into the world and the hyperactivity of their distraction from this call betrays their reason for being alive. When your child becomes the reason for your life, you have abandoned the invisible reason you are here. And the reason you are here as an adult, as a citizen, as a parent? To make a world receptive to the daimon. To set the civilization straight so that a child can grow down into it and its daimon can have a life. This is the parent task. To carry out this task for the daimon of your child, you must bear witness first to your own.

“If today our civilization is turning toward the environment to stave off ecological disaster, the first step of this rapprochement is to cross the threshold of the parental house into the home of the world. We are parented by everything around us—if ‘parenting’ means watching, instructing, encouraging, and admonishing. Do you really believe that humans invented the wheel out of their big brains alone, or fire, or baskets, or tools? Stones rolled downhill; bolts of fire shot from the sky and out of the earth; birds wove and probed and pounded, as did apes and elephants. The sciences that master nature were taught by nature how it could be mastered.

“The more we cling to the overriding importance of parents and the more cosmological power we accord them, the less we notice the fathering and mothering afforded by the world every day in what it sends our way. The world affords nesting and sheltering, nourishing and quenching, adventuring and playing.¹ The world is made less of nouns than of verbs. It doesn’t consist merely in objects and things; it is filled with useful, playful, and intriguing opportunities. The oriole doesn’t see a branch, but an occasion for perching; the cat doesn’t see a thing we call an empty box, but sees safe hiding for peering. The bear doesn’t smell honeycomb, but the opportunity for delicious feeding. The world is buzzing and blooming with information, which is always available and never absent.

“Children recognize this nurturance and instruction offered by nature. According to the observations of the brilliant pioneer of ecology Edith Cobb, the imagination of children depends wholly on this contact with the environment.² Imagination does not grow all by itself in the household, or even out of imaginative tales told by parents. Children are ‘by nature’ at home in the world; the world invites them to grow down and take part.

“The more I believe my nature comes from my parents, the less open I am to the ruling influences around me. The less the surrounding world is felt to be intimately important to my story. So the coming ecological disaster we worry about has already occurred, and goes on occurring. It takes place in the accounts of ourselves that separate us from the world by attaching us to parentalism, the belief that what’s out there is less of a factor than my close family in the formation of who I am. The parental fallacy is deadly to individual self-awareness, and it is killing the world.

“Psychotherapy compounds this fault. Its theory of developmental damage owing to the family actually turns the patient away from everything else that might give comfort and instruction. To what does the soul turn that has no therapists to visit? It takes its trouble to the trees, to the riverbank, to an animal companion, on an aimless walk through the city streets, a long watch of the night sky. Just stare out the window or boil water for a cup of tea. We breathe, expand, and let go, and something comes in from elsewhere. The daimon in the heart seems quietly pleased, preferring melancholy to desperation. It’s in touch.

“By leaving the actual world out of its main theoretical constructs, psychological theory imagines that world out there as objective, cold, indifferent, even hostile (therapy as protective refuge, consulting room as sanctuary). Thus the world receives the projection of the bad mother, the killing mother, which its theory has invented. Of course there are demons out there to be propitiated. Disasters lurk, but these powers behind the door and in the bush are also ancestors, not merely germs, spiders, and quicksand. As we have misplaced the cosmological parents, so we have lost the ancestors too. The parents have swallowed them up.

“‘Ancestry’ in our culture implies chromosomal connection; ancestors are those humans from whom I have inherited my body tissues. Biogenetics replaces the spirit world. In other societies an ancestor could be a tree, a bear, a salmon, a member of the dead, a spirit in a dream, a special spooky place. These may be addressed as ‘Ancestor’ and an altar home built for them, away from the home you inhabit. Ancestors are not bound to human bodies and certainly not confined to physical antecedents whose descent into your sphere was allowed only via your natural family. Only if a member of the natural family (itself not always determinable), say a grandparent or an uncle or an aunt, is worthy enough, powerful enough, knowledgeable enough, may he or she become an ancestor in the sense of a guardian spirit. To be an ancestor you do not need to be dead, but you do need to know the dead—that is, the invisible world and how and where it touches the living.

“Without a sense of ancestors, what can we propitiate as having a direct and controlling influence over our lives, but our parents? We take literally the commandment to ‘Honor thy father and thy mother,’ which shows decency and kindness. But let’s not forget that the fifth Commandment, along with the ones preceding it, aims to eliminate all traces of pagan polytheism, in which ancestor worship is essential. The text makes it clear that these ‘parents’ are not just human Mom and Dad. They have huge powers and are to be honored as guarantors of fate, ‘that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee, upon the land which the Lord thy God hath given thee’ (Deut.5:16) Like ancestor spirits, they are protective guardians of a long life, bearers of good fortune, and nature spirits inhabiting the land itself. By command, henceforth and forever more, the parental fallacy is established.

“The primordial spirit world has been reduced to the all-too-human concrete statues of personal figures. This reduction by official religion of that splendid archaic menagerie of ancestors has taken centuries. We call it civilization. ‘Honor thy father and thy mother,’ yes, indeed; but do not confuse them with creator-destroyer gods, or with ancestors. It is laborious to ‘work through’ the ‘parent-problem’ because it is not a mere logical error or misplaced concreteness, or a difficult step in a therapeutic process toward individual self-determination. Working through the parental fallacy is more like a religious conversion—out of our secularism, out of our personalism, out of our monotheism, developmentalism, and belief in causality. It requires a step backward into the old connection with invisibilities and a trusting step out and over the threshold into the rich profusion of influences afforded by the world.”³

¹ Hillman credits J. J. Gibson’s psychological school at Cornell University for this insight.

2 Edith Cobb, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood (Spring Publications, 1993).

3 James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 63-91.

Each of us is chosen

Psychologist James Hillman argues: “If any fantasy holds our contemporary civilization in an unyielding grip, it is that we are our parents’ children and that the primary instrument of our fate is the behavior of your mother and father. As their chromosomes are ours, so are their mess-ups and attitudes. Their joint unconscious psyche—the rages they suppress, the longings they cannot fulfill, the images they dream at night—basically form our souls, and we can never, ever work through and be free of this determinism. The individual’s soul continues to be imagined as a biological offspring of the family tree. We grow psychologically out of their minds as our flesh grows biologically out of their bodies.

“If sharp definitions of parent and parents have begun to melt owing to the infiltrations of law, demographics, and biochemistry, the idea of parenting and parents is more hardened than ever in the minds of moral reformers and psychotherapists. The shibboleth ‘family values,’ expressed by catch phrases like ’bad mothering’ and ‘absent fathering,’ trickles down into ‘family systems therapy,’ which has become the single most important set of ideas determining the theory of societal dysfunction and the practice of mental health.

“Yet all along a little elf whispers another tale: ‘You are different; you’re not like anyone in the family; you don’t really belong.’ There is an unbeliever in the heart. It calls the family a fantasy, a fallacy.

“Even the biological model has puzzling gaps. Contraception is easier to account for and practice than conception itself. What goes on in that massive, virginally intact, single, round ovum that allows only this particular minuscule sperm among millions to enter? Or is the question more correctly addressed to the sperm? Is one of you more wily, more pushy, and more sympathetically congenial? Or is it just the randomness of ‘luck’—and what is luck, really? We know about DNA and the results of joinings, but we are left with the mystery that Darwin spent a life with, the mystery of selection.

“The acorn theory suggests a primitive solution. It says: Your daimon selected both the egg and the sperm, as it selected their carriers, called ‘parents.’ Their union results from your necessity—and not the other way around. Does this not help to understand the impossible unions, those antipathies and misalliances, the quick conceptions and sudden desertions occurring between the parents of so many of us, and especially in the biographies of the eminent? The couple came together, not for their personal unity, but to beget the unique person, endowed with a specific acorn, who turns out to be you.

“The parental fallacy depends largely on the fantasy of a one-way vertical causality, from larger to smaller, from older to younger, from experienced to inexperienced. Yet, just as actual motherhood is waning in the face of social changes that alter its conventions, so the theory of Mother’s importance is being undermined by evidence against vertical causality within families.

A twice-told tale about the behavior of a family of rhesus monkeys on an unpopulated Japanese island, where researchers left fresh sweet potatoes on the beach: “Imo spat out the sand clinging to her sweet potato, put it into the sea, and rubbed it vigorously with her free hand. She ate the cleaned potato, enjoying its salty taste. Nearby, Nimby watched—and thrust her potato into the sea. She didn’t get all the sand off, but it still tasted better than ever before. The two playmates’ example taught others; soon their age-mates, both male and female, had caught on to the potato-washing routine. Imo’s mother also learned, and soon was teaching potato washing to Imo’s younger siblings. Imo’s father, though he enjoyed a reputation for toughness and leadership, was too stubborn to try the new trick.”

“The researcher, David Roe, wants us to see that innovation and the transmission of ideas take place in various ways: horizontally within the family (sibling to sibling); vertically, but reciprocally, child to mother and mother to child; outside the family, as young monkeys learn from one another. Some—the old males—seem not to learn at all, or at least not about washing potatoes.

“But one crucial question is not asked: How did Imo get the idea? How come she washed that first potato? What prompted that bit of behavior? Her daimon, of course—which inspired the whole event to begin with, and also the oft-told report. Imo’s genius continues to teach you and me by means of this story. Yes, animals, too, have angels. As far back as we can imagine cultural history, it was widely believed that animals were the first teachers. Our earliest language, our dances, our rituals, our knowledge of what to eat and what not to eat, passed into our behavior through theirs.

“Suspicion of vertical causality, particularly suspicion of the mother as primary factor in determining fate, comes from another direction as well. Diane Eyer calls mother-infant bonding (which gives her books its title) ‘a scientific fiction’ (her subtitle): ‘Bonding is, in fact, as much an extension of ideology as it is a scientific discovery. More specifically, it is part of an ideology in which mothers are seen as the prime architects of their children’s lives and are blamed for whatever problems befall them, not only in childhood but throughout their adult lives.’

“For any one of us,” Hillman argues, “child or adult, the question eclipsing all other is: How does what comes with you to the world find a place in the world? How does my meaning fit with the meanings to which I am asked to conform? What helps growing down?

“Archaic peoples and tribal communities offered their children constancy, an unlimited time span of continuities. Cyclical changes and nomadic migrations did not shake the foundations. Myths made life livable, and hope was not even a category of archaic existence. Hope enters history, and our psychology, as trust in continuity fades.

“Our main myth,” however, “is apocalyptic, as the Revelation of St. John, the last book of our Bible, says, and our children today live among and act out images of catastrophe. Of course suicide among children shows a startling rise. How troubling it must be for a child to tie its star to a collapsing structure of depletion, extinction, and loss that cannot be repaired by bonding people together in satisfying human relationships. It’s all beyond people, says this myth. The only hope, according to the authorized version of the catastrophe, is in a divine redemption and a second chance. In face of that cosmic science fiction of Armageddon, psychology’s scientific fiction narrows the cause of devastated children to dysfunctional parenting, while a world with all the parents in it edges toward the cliff.

James Hillman, The Soul's Code.

To be alive is also to be lonely

Psychologist James Hillman agrees with this Jewish mystical insight: “The Zohar, the main Kabbalist book, makes it clear that the descent is tough; the soul is reluctant to come down and get messed by the world. ‘At the time that the Holy One, be blessed, was about to create the world, he decided to fashion all the souls which would in due course be dealt out to the children of men, and each soul was formed into the exact outline of the body she was destined to tenant. Go now, descend into this and this place, into this and this body.’

“Yet often enough the soul would reply: ‘Lord of the world, I am content to remain in this realm, and have no wish to depart to some other, where I shall be in thralldom, and become stained.’ Whereupon the Holy One, be blessed, would reply: ‘Thy destiny is, and has been from the day of thy forming, to go into that world.’ Then the soul, realizing it could not disobey, would unwillingly descend and come into the world.”¹

The cosmological myths of Plato and the Bible also “place us in the world and involve us with it.” Whereas, “The cosmologies of today—big bangs and black holes, antimatter and curved, ever-expanding space going nowhere—leave us in dread and senseless incomprehensibility. Random events, nothing truly necessary. Science’s cosmologies say nothing about the soul, and so they say nothing to the soul, about its reason for existence, how it comes to be and where it might be going, and what its tasks could be. The invisibilities that we feel enmeshing our lives with what is beyond our lives have been abstracted by the cosmologies of science into the literal invisibility of remote galaxies or waves. They can’t be known or perceived, because they are measured by time, and our lives are mere nanoseconds in the vast panoply of science’s myth. What’s the purpose of anything?

“The creating myth of random events in unimaginable space keeps the Western soul floating in a stratosphere where it cannot breathe. No wonder we look to other myths, like that of Plato’s Er, the book of Genesis, and the Kabbalist Tree. Each of these gives a similar mythical account of how things are: They found us in myths, and the myths unfold downward into one’s personal soul. No wonder, too, that Plato says this about his ‘fable’: ‘It may preserve us, if we are persuaded by it.’

“Loneliness in a child’s heart may be aggravated by fears of the dark, punishing parents, or rejecting comrades. Its source, however, seems to be the solitary uniqueness of each daimon, an archetypal loneliness inexpressible in a child’s vocabulary and formulated hardly better in ours.

For us, as adults: “Moments of dejection drop us into a pool of loneliness. Waves of intense loneliness occur as aftershocks of childbirth, or divorce, of the death of a long-lived partner. The soul pulls back, mourns alone. Twinges of loneliness accompany even a marvelous birthday celebration and a victorious accomplishment. Are these mere hangovers—compensatory falls after unusual heights? Nothing seems to hold against the drop. All the networking that has interlaced our extension outward and downward into the world—family, friends, neighbors, lovers, little routines, and the results of years of work—seem to count for nothing. We feel ourselves curiously depersonalized, very far away. Exiled. No connection anywhere. The spirit of loneliness has taken over.

“To guard against these moments we have philosophies that explain them and pharmaceuticals that deny them. The philosophies say the uprooted and hurried condition of modern city life and impersonal work has created a social condition of anomie. We are isolated because of the industrial economic system. We have become mere numbers. We live consumerism rather than community. Loneliness is symptomatic of victimization. We are victims of a wrong way of life. We should not be lonely. Change the system—live in a cooperative or a commune; work in a team. Or build relationships: ‘Connect, only connect.’ Socialize, join recovery groups, get involved. Pick up the phone. Or ask your doctor for a prescription for Prozac.

“Deeper than social philosophy and social remedy is the account of moral theology. It recognizes in loneliness the sin of the Fall. We are cut off from Eden and from God owing to the Original Sin of humankind. When we feel alone and lost in the valley, we are stray sheep that have wandered from the path of redemption, out of grace and out of faith and therefore out of hope. We can no longer hear the call of the shepherd or obey the bark of his persistently nipping dog hounding our conscience with guilt. We are alone purposely, in order to hear the still small voice whose whispering is drowned out by the madding crowd.

“Moral theology of the East considers the suffering of isolation to be the task imposed on this life by past karmic actions in another reincarnation or as a preparation for the next. Moral theologies whether Eastern or Western subtly transform the sense of loneliness into the sin of loneliness, exacerbating its unhappiness.

“Existentialism, another way of accounting for loneliness, accepts the sufferings of isolation as basic to its theory of human existence. Heidegger or Camus, for instance, places the human being into the situation of ‘throwness.’ We are merely thrown into being here (Dasein). Life is your project; there is nothing to tell you what it’s all about, which of course leaves you feeling existential anxiety and dread. It’s all up to you, each individual alone, since there is no guarantee that anything makes sense.

”These ways of thinking about loneliness—social, therapeutic, moral, existential—make two assumptions that I cannot accept. First, each says that loneliness equates with literal aloneness and consequently is remediable by some sort of human action, such as repenting for sins, therapeutic relating, building the project of your life with your own heroic hands. Second, each assumes that loneliness is fundamentally unpleasant.

“But if there is an archetypal sense of loneliness accompanying us from the beginning, then to be alive is also to feel lonely. Loneliness comes and goes apart from the measures we take. It does not depend on being literally alone, for pangs of loneliness can strike in the midst of friends, in bed with a lover, at the microphone before a cheering crowed. When feelings of loneliness are seen as archetypal, they become necessary; they are no longer harbingers of sin, or dread, or of wrong. We can accept the strange autonomy of the feeling and free loneliness from identification with literal isolation. Nor is loneliness mainly unpleasant once it receives its archetypal background.

“When we look—or, rather, feel—closely into the sense of loneliness we find it composed of several elements: nostalgia, sadness, silence, and a yearning for ‘something else.’ For these elements and images to show, we first have to focus on them rather than on remedies for being left literally alone. Desperation grows worse when we seek ways out of despair.

“Nostalgia, sadness, silence, and imaginative yearning are also the inmost stuff of religious and romantic poetry in many languages and many cultures. They remind the acorn of its origins. Like E.T. in the Spielberg film the acorn seems nostalgic, sad, silent, and filled with yearning for an image of ‘home.’ Loneliness presents the emotions of exile; the soul has not been able to fully grow down, and is wanting to return. To where? We do not know, for that place the myths and cosmologies say is gone from memory. But the imaginative yearning and the sadness attest to an exile from what the soul cannot express except as loneliness. All it can recall is nostalgia of feeling and an imagination of yearning. And a condition of want beyond personal needs.

“The Platonic myth of growing down says the soul descends in four modes—via the body, the parents, place, and circumstances. These four ways can be instructions for completing the image you brought with you on arrival. First, your body: Growing down means going with the sag of gravity that accompanies aging. Second, admitting yourself to be one among your people and a member of the family tree, including its twisted and rotten branches. Third, living in a place that suits your soul and that ties you down with duties and customs. Last, giving back what circumstances gave you by means of gestures that declare your attachment to this world.”²

1 Gershom Scholem, ed., Zohar—The Book of Splendor: Basic Reading from the Kabbalah (Schocken, 1963), 91.

2 James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 41-62.

The miracles of character in children

In The Soul’s Code psychologist James Hillman writes: “Children present the best evidence for a psychology of providence. Here I mean more than providential miracles, those amazing tales of children falling from high ledges without harm, buried under earthquake debris and surviving. Rather, I am referring to the humdrum miracles when the mark of character appears. All of a sudden and out of nowhere a child shows who she is, what he must do.

“These impulsions of destiny frequently are stifled by dysfunctional perceptions and unreceptive surroundings, so that calling appears in the myriad symptoms of difficult, self-destructive, accident-prone, ‘hyper’ children—all words invented by adults in defense of their misunderstanding. The acorn theory offers an entirely fresh way of regarding childhood disorders, less in terms of causes than of calls and less in terms of past influences than of intuitive revelations.

“In regard to children and their psychology, I want the scales of habit (and the masked hatred within the habit) to fall from our eyes. I want us to envision that what children go through has to do with finding a place in the world for their specific calling. They are trying to live two lives at once, the one they were born with and the one of the place and among the people they were born into. The entire image of a destiny is packed into a tiny acorn, the seed of a huge oak on small shoulders. And its call rings loud and persistent and is as demanding as any scolding voice from the surroundings. The call shows in the tantrums and obstinacies, in the shyness and retreats, that seem to set the child against our world but that may be protections of the world it comes with and comes from.

“This book champions children. It provides a theoretical foundation for understanding their lives, a foundation that draws its own foundations from myths, from philosophy, from other cultures, and from imagination. It seeks to make sense of children’s dysfunctions before taking these disorders by their literal labels and sending the child off for therapy.

“Without a theory that backs the child from its very beginning and without a mythology that connects each child to something before its beginning, a child enters the world as a bare product—accidental or planned, but without its own authenticity. Its disturbances can have no authenticity either, since the child does not enter the world for its own reasons, with its own project and guided by its own genius.

“The acorn theory provides a psychology of childhood. It affirms the child’s inherent uniqueness and destiny, which means first of all that the clinical data of dysfunction belong in some way to that uniqueness and destiny. Psychopathologies are as authentic as the child itself, not secondary and contingent. Given with the child, even given to the child, the clinical data are part of its gift. This means that each child is a gifted child, filled with data of all sorts, gifts peculiar to that child which show themselves in peculiar ways, often maladaptive and causing pain. So this book is about children, offering a way to regard them differently, to enter their imaginations, and to discover in their pathologies what their daimon might be indicating and what their destiny might want.

“We can put on parade,” Hillman writes,” one after another, eminent men of accomplishment and bravery who as children gave quite opposite indications. Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel—the Desert Fox, a heroic soldier, decorated with the highest medals for bravery under fire in two world wars, a field marshal, campaign veteran, tactician, and inspirer of his men in campaigns in Belgium, France, Romania, Italy, and North Africa—as a little boy was known in his family as the ‘white bear’ because he was so pale, dreamy, and slow of speech. Falling behind his classmates in primary school, he was considered lazy, inattentive, and careless.

“Robert Peary, who walked the Arctic wastes until he ‘discovered’ the North Pole, was the only son of a widow. He stayed close to home, ‘to evade boys who called him ‘Skinny’ and teased him about his fearfulness.” And Mohandas K. Gandhi, who “was a short, thin, ailing, ugly, and frightened child, afraid especially of snakes, ghosts, and the dark.”

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 3-23.

What is your calling?

Psychologist James Hillman explains that the idea of having a calling “comes from Plato, his Myth of Er at the end of his most well known work, The Republic.

“The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we are to live on earth. [In ancient Greece, daimons “were considered divine powers, fates, guardian spirits, or angels, who gave guidance and protection.”*] This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.

“As explained by the greatest of later Platonists, Plotinus (205-270 CE), we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belong to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul’s own choice—and I do not understand this because I have forgotten.

“A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.

“For centuries we have searched for the right term for this ‘call.’ The Romans named it your genius; the Greeks, your daimon; and the Christians your guardian angel. The concept of this individualized soul-image has a long, complicated history; its appearance in cultures is diverse and widespread and the names for it are legion. Only our contemporary psychology and psychiatry omit it from their textbooks.

“These many words and names do not tell us what ‘it’ is, but they do confirm that it is. They also point to its mysteriousness. We cannot know what exactly we are referring to because its nature remains shadowy, revealing itself mainly in hints, intuitions, whispers, and the sudden urges and oddities that disturb your life and that we continue to call symptoms.

“Despite psychology’s reluctance to let individual fate into its field, psychology does admit that we each have our own makeup, that each of us is definitely, even defiantly, a unique individual. But when it comes to accounting for the spark of uniqueness and the call that keeps us to it, psychology too is stumped.

“Its analytical methods break down the puzzle of the individual into factors and traits of personality, into types, complexes and temperaments, attempting to track the secret of individuality to substrata of brain matter and selfish genes. More strict schools of psychology kick the question right out of the lab, packing it off to parapsychology for the study of paranormal ‘callings,’ or to research stations in the distant colonies of magic, religion, and madness. At its most bold, and most barren, psychology accounts for the uniqueness of each by a hypothesis of random statistical chance.

“The acorn theory proposes and I will bring evidence for the claim that you and I and every single person is born with a defining image. Individuality resides in a formal cause—to use old philosophical language going back to Aristotle. We each embody our own idea, in the language of Plato and Plotinus. And this form, this idea, this image does not tolerate too much straying. The theory also attributes to this innate image an angelic or daimonic intention, as if it were a spark of consciousness; and, moreover, holds that it has our interest at heart because it chose us for its reasons.”

“That the daimon has your interest at heart may be the part of the theory particularly hard to accept. That the heart has its reasons, yes; that there is an unconscious with its own intentions; that fate plays a hand in how things turn out—all this is acceptable, even conventional.

“But why is it so difficult to imagine that I am cared about, that something takes an interest in what I do, that I am perhaps protected, maybe even kept alive not altogether by my own will and doing? Why do I prefer insurance to the invisible guarantees of existence? For it sure is easy to die. A split second of inattention and the best-laid plans of a strong ego spill out on the sidewalk. Something saves me every day from falling down the stair, tripping at the curb, being blindsided. How is it possible to race down the highway, tape deck singing, thoughts far away, and stay alive? What is this ‘immune system’ that watches over my days, my food sprinkled with viruses, toxins, bacteria? Even my eyebrows crawl with mites, like little birds on a rhino’s back. We name what preserves us instinct, self-preservation, sixth sense, subliminal awareness (each of which, too, is invisible yet present). Once upon a time what took such good care of me was a guardian spirit, and I damn well knew to pay it appropriate attention.

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code.

*Susan Athanasakou, “Greeker Than the Greeks, http://greekerthanthegreeks.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/lost-in-translation-word-of-day-demon.html.

Each of us is called and born with a character

Psychologist James Hillman, former director of the C. G. Jung Institute and author of The Soul’s Code (1997), never wrote about near-death experiences. But he described the soul-image as a bridge between the invisible world of the unconscious and our visible conscious world. His writings challenge us to “imagine”—to look for our calling in the myths and stories of our culture—and then to fulfill this image in our lives.

Hillman also gave me a new understanding of parenting (and grandparenting) and is great reading for those of us getting old: “Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one’s character.”* Hillman helped me imagine who I might yet be.]

The Soul’s Code begins: “There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow. Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this ‘Something’ as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.

“Because the ‘traumatic’ view of early years so controls psychological theory of personality and its development, the focus of our rememberings and the language of our personal story-telling have already been infiltrated by the toxins of these theories. Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods.

“At the outset we need to make clear that today’s main paradigm for understanding a human life, the interplay of genetics and environment, omits something essential—the particularity you feel to be you. By accepting the idea that I am the effect of a subtle buffeting between hereditary and societal forces, I reduce myself to a result. We are victims of academic, scientistic and even therapeutic psychology, whose paradigms do not sufficiently account for or engage with, and therefore ignore, the sense of calling, that essential mystery at the heart of each human life.

“In a nutshell, then, this book is about calling, about fate, about character, about innate image. Together they make up the ‘acorn theory,’ which holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived.

“Your person is not a process or a development. You are that essential image that develops, if it does. As Picasso said, ‘I don’t develop; I am.’ You are born with a character; it is given; a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians upon your birth. Each person enters the world called.”

 

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code.

*James Hillman’s Quotes & Sayings, https://www.inspiringquotes.us/author/2605-james-hillman.

Results from Dr. Pim van Lommel's NDE research

All of Dr. Pim van Lommel’s research is based on cases involving patients under the care of physicians treating them when they had a cardiac arrest. He conducted a prospective study by interviewing all cardiac arrest survivors to see if they had memories during their cardiac arrest: 282 of his 344 patients did not have memories, but 62 patients did.[1] These cases provide evidence that persons may experience an enhanced consciousness, when according to accepted medical criteria their brains were unable to support any consciousness at all.

Were there differences between these two groups of survivors that might explain some of these NDEs? Van Lommel reports: “To our big surprise, we identified no significant differences in the duration of the cardiac arrest, no differences in the duration of the period of unconscious-ness, and no differences in whether or not seriously ill patients who remained in a coma for days or weeks after a complicated resuscitation needed intubation for artificial respiration.

“Neither did we find differences among the 30 patients who had a cardiac arrest during electrophysiological stimulation (EPS) in the catheterization laboratory and whose heart rhythms were always reestablished through defibrillation (electric shock) within fifteen to thirty seconds. So we failed to identify any differences between patients with a very long or a very brief cardiac arrest. The degree or severity of the oxygen deficiency in the brain (anoxia) appeared to be irrelevant.”

Also, “The administered medication played no role. Most patients suffering a myocardial infarction receive morphine-style painkillers, while people who are put on a ventilator following a complicated resuscitation are given extremely high doses of sedatives.

“A psychological cause, such as the infrequently reported fear of death, did not affect the occurrence of a NDE, although it did affect the depth of the experience. Whether or not patients had heard or read anything about NDEs in the past made no difference either. Any kind of religious belief, or its absence in nonbelievers and atheists, was irrelevant, and the same was true for the standard of education reached.”[2]

In the van Lommel study, factors that do increase the frequency of an NDE are “an age below 60 and a first myocardial infarction, in which case the patients were also younger than the mean age of 63. If patients required several resuscitations during their hospital stay, they were more likely to report an NDE. Remarkably, all patients who had experienced an NDE in the past reported them significantly more often in our study.”

“A complicated resuscitation can result in a long coma, and patients who have been unconscious on a ventilator for days or weeks are more likely to suffer short-term memory defects caused by permanent brain damage. The longer the coma, the greater the risk of these cognitive problems, which also occur after sever concussion or a stroke and which may wipe hours, days, and sometimes even weeks from a patient’s memory. These patients reported NDEs significantly less often, which suggests that a good memory is a prerequisite for remembering an NDE.”[3]

Van Lommel says his research colleagues were: “particularly surprised to find that medical factors failed to explain the occurrence of an NDE. All the patients in our study had been clinically dead, and only a small percentage reported an enhanced consciousness with lucid thoughts, emotions, memories, and sometimes perceptions from a position outside and above their lifeless body during resuscitation.

“If this enhanced consciousness had a physiological cause, such as oxygen deficiency in the brain (anoxia), all patients in our study should have reported an NDE. They had all been unconscious because of their cardiac arrest, which resulted in a loss of blood pressure and the cessation of breathing and all body and brain stem reflexes.

“The severity of the clinical picture, such as a lengthy coma after a complicated resuscitation, also failed to explain why patients did or did not report an NDE, except in the case of lingering memory defects.

“The psychological explanation is improbable because most patients experienced no fear of death preceding their cardiac arrest; its onset was so sudden that they failed to notice it. In most cases they were left without any memories of their resuscitation.”[4]

Van Lommel’s research included interviews with NDE survivors after two years, and these verified: “a significant decrease in fear of death among people with an NDE and a significant increase in belief in an afterlife. There were further significant differences between people with and without an NDE with respect to a number of social and religious factors such as showing emotions, accepting others, a more loving attitude to life, and more love and compassion for oneself and others. “

Other differences pertained to a greater involvement in family, a greater interest in spirituality and the meaning of life, and greater appreciation of ordinary things, coupled with less interest in money, possessions, and social norms (‘keeping up appearances’).”

Interviews with survivors eight years later revealed “the NDE had become an experience that provided a fresh insight into everything that matters in life: compassion, unconditional love, and acceptance of oneself (including acceptance of one’s negative qualities), others, and nature. Fear of death was usually gone.”[5]

In response to critics who argue that NDEs are vivid dreams, Van Lommel agrees that there are similarities. “Consciousness is so greatly enhanced during a dream that time and distance become irrelevant. Like NDEs, some dreams also feature visions of the future.” In addition, “people can meet deceased persons in lucid dreams, just as in NDEs.”

Yet, van Lommel reminds us, unlike NDEs: “Dreams usually occur during the REM phase of sleep, during which the brain displays a great deal of activity.” Also, “People with an NDE say that during their near-death episode they experienced a vivid reality, which was fundamentally different from anything they ever experienced in dreams.”[6]

A 2013 presentation by van Lommel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avyUsPgIuQ0&t=102s

 

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[1] Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 144.

[2] Ibid., 146-147.

[3] Ibid., 147-148.

[4] Ibid., 148-149.

[5] Ibid., 150-151.

[6] Ibid., 132-133.