A "life review" during a near-death experience

Allan Pring’s account of his life review, Peter Fenwick reports in The Truth in the Light (1997), was the most detailed testimony in their initial NDE research project.

Allan recalls: "In 1979 I had no knowledge whatsoever of NDEs. I did not believe in life after death, I was not religious; I did not believe in God but I did believe that there was a scientific explanation for every mystery, though it could well take quite a few million years for man to figure it all out. Basically my views have not changed a great deal, except that now I believe it is impossible to die, which is not necessarily good news. The events of 1979 are as fresh and vivid in my memory as if they happened yesterday.

"The preparation for surgery was routine and I lost consciousness within seconds of being injected with an anesthetic. All perfectly normal. But the manner in which I regained consciousness was anything but normal. Instead of slowly coming round in a drowsy and somewhat befuddled state in a hospital ward I awoke as if from a deep and refreshing sleep and was instantly and acutely aware of my situation. Without any anxiety or distress I knew that I was dead, or rather that I had gone through the process of dying and was now in a different state of reality. The place that I was in cannot be described because it was a state of nothingness. There was nothing to see because there was no light; there was nothing to feel because there was no substance. Although I no longer considered that I had a physical body, nevertheless I felt as if I were floating in a vast empty space, very relaxed and waiting.

"Then I experienced the review of my life, which extended from early childhood and included many occurrences that I had completely forgotten. My life passed before me in a momentary flash but it was entire, even my thoughts were included. Some of the contents caused me to be ashamed but there were one or two I had forgotten about of which I felt quite pleased. All in all I knew that I could have lived a much better life but it could have been a lot worse. Be that as it may, I knew that it was all over now and there was no going back. There was one most peculiar feature of this life review and it is very difficult to describe, let along explain. Although it took but a moment to complete, literally a flash, there was still time to stop and wonder over separate incidents. This was the first instance of distortion of time that I experienced but it was the beginning of my belief that the answers to many of the questions that are posed by NDEs lie in a better understanding of the nature of time and what we term reality.

"After the life review I spent some time resting and considering the implications of what had happened. I did not feel that I had been judged expect by myself. There was no denying the facts because they were all there, including my innermost thoughts, emotions and motives. I knew that my life was over and whatever came next would be a direct consequence of not only what I had done in my life, but also what I had thought and what had been my true feeling at the time.

"Then I moved to a different place. It is very difficult to describe but I knew that I no longer had a physical existence. I was not conscious of having a body and the only senses that I was aware of were sight and sound but even these were very different. I felt that everything existed inside my non-existent head. Nevertheless, I had no doubt that everything I was experiencing was real.

"I was in a room, without windows or doors, but having four corners in each of which ‘sat’ a ‘person.’ ‘They’ began to question me in a friendly way, rather like being de-briefed after a wartime operational flight. At first the questions were simple to answer but the next questions followed on logically and became progressively more difficult. However, I knew the answers. Eventually the questions were becoming impossible to answer; they concerned existence, the meaning and purpose of life and the universe itself. I could not possibly know the answers but I did! The questions came faster and faster and I knew with the most intense feeling of joy that no matter what ‘they’ asked me I would knew the answer.”

The Truth in the Light: An investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (Berkeley Books, 1997).

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Peter Fenwick's initial NDE research project

A UK neurophysiologist and neuropsychiatrist, Peter Fenwick explains that: “The experiences described in The Truth in the Light: An Investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences are all first-hand accounts from people who wrote to me or to David Lorimer, chairman of the International Association of Near Death Studies (UK), after a television program, radio broadcast or magazine or newspaper article made them aware of our interest in near-death experiences.

“We asked 500 of those who wrote to answer a detailed questionnaire about their experiences. Our aim was to gather in a standardized format as much detail as we could about the NDE, the people who have experienced it, and the effect that the experience has had on their lives.

“Over 350 people replied. Of these 78 per cent were women and 22 per cent men. Eighty per cent were adults (over 18) at the time of their experience; 9% were ten or younger. About half described themselves as Church of England, 12 per cent as Roman Catholic, 19 per cent as other Christian denominations and 1 per cent were Jewish. Eight per cent described themselves as agnostic and 2 percent as atheist. But few were regular churchgoers—only 16 per cent went to church every week, though just over a third had been to church in the previous month. Asked whether religion was important to them, 39 per cent said it was, 41 per cent that it wasn’t, and 20 percent replied ‘Maybe.’

“We asked those who replied about the effects of their NDEs. Although the great majority (82 per cent) said they have less fear of death, less than half (48 per cent) believed in any life after death. 42 per cent reported they were more spiritual as a result, 22 per cent claimed to be a ‘better person,’ and 40 per cent said they were more socially conscious. 47 per cent of our sample said they felt the experience had made them more psychically sensitive. Only 2 percent said they had been aware of NDEs before their own experience.”

“The first question people ask about near-death experiences is always ‘Are they real?’ Sometimes what they really mean is, are people making it up? The answer to that is definitely no. If the experiencers had simply made it up, why would they have been (as most of them were) so reluctant to tell anyone else about it? For most people the experience is something they talk about only diffidently, and only to people they trust. They fear ridicule—why would they court it by inventing the whole thing? They are describing exactly what happened to them as they remember it. Also implicit in the question is, are they mad? And again the answer is no. They were quite sane before it and just as sane after it.

“In March 1987 Dawn Gillot was admitted to Northampton General Hospital, seriously ill with microplasma pneumonia. She was put into intensive care, and doctors eventually decided to remove the ventilation tubes and do a tracheotomy because she could not breathe. The next thing was I was above myself, Dawn says, near the ceiling looking down. One of the nurses was saying in what seemed a frantic voice, ‘Breathe, Dawn, breathe.’ A doctor was pressing my chest, drips were being disconnected, and everyone was rushing round. I couldn’t understand the panic. I wasn’t in pain. Then they pushed my body out of the room to the theatre. I followed my body out of the ICU and then left on what I can only describe as a journey of a lifetime.

I went down what seemed like a cylindrical tunnel with a bright warm inviting light at the end. I seemed to be travelling at quite a speed, but I was happy, no pain, just peace. At the end was a beautiful open field, a wonderful summery smell of flowers. There was a bench seat on the right where my Grampi sat (he had been dead seven years). I sat next to him. He asked me how I was and the family. I said I was happy and content and all my family were fine.

He said he was worried about my son; my son needed his mother, he was too young to be left. I told Grampi I didn’t want to go back, I wanted to stay with him. But Grampi insisted I go back for my children’s sake. I then asked him if he would come for me when my time came. He started to answer, ‘Yes, I will be back in four—’ then my whole body seemed to jump. I looked round and saw I was back in the ICU. I honestly believe in what happened, and that there is life after death.”

“Mrs Nita McCallum had her experience at a time when she was very ill and in excruciating pain.  At the time of my NDE I was a practicing Roman Catholic. Had I died I would most certainly have expected that any visions I had would have related to my faith; and that if I were to see a being of light I would have related it to Jesus or Mary or an angel. As it was, when I suddenly found myself in this gentle glowing light and standing a little below the three beings above me; they appeared to me as young Indian men, and, though they were dressed alike in high-necked silver-colored tunics with silver turbans on their heads, I felt they were young Indian princes, or rajas. Two were facing each other and the third facing me. And from a jewel in the center of each forehead or turban three ‘laser’ beams emitted, meeting in the center. My whole lifestyle was changed as a result—much reading about various religions and philosophies.

Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light (Berkeley Books, 1997).

Teaching about "extraordinary knowing"

Psychology professor Kathleen D. Noble writes: “In 1975 at the age of 25, I suffered an anaphylactic reaction that precipitated three cardiac arrests and three near-death experiences that completely changed my life. Prior to these events I had studied yoga and meditation for several years and I’d had many incidences of “extraordinary knowing” and “synchronicity” as described, respectively, by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer (Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind, 2007) and Carl Jung (“Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” Collected Works, 1952), all of which had led me to wonder about the nature, range, and scope of consciousness. But none of these incidents prepared me for the vast, sentient, multidimensional, compassionate, and purposeful reality that I encountered during my excursions into death.”

After earning a Ph.D. and teaching for several years Noble created a course on consciousness for university students that also involved reading Raymond Moody (Life After Life, 1975) and an essay by Pim van Lommel (“Near-death Experience, Consciousness, and the Brain,” World Futures , 2006).

A study of students who completed the course “was transformation for most students,” Noble writes, as by “the end of the course they recognized that there is much more to consciousness and to reality than the materialist mindset admits. For most, this was an  earth shaking realization. Yet as their core beliefs began to change, students reported an accompanying sense of excitement and curiosity that most said they rarely experienced in their academic or personal lives. Studying consciousness enabled them to explore aspects of themselves and of life that were otherwise neglected in higher education and elsewhere.”

As students talked with “friends, family, partners, and professors” about the course, “many returned to class shocked by the negative and ill-informed reactions that they encountered.

On the basis of student evaluations of the course, Noble writes: “Undergraduates who had largely and unconsciously absorbed contemporary materialist biases toward consciousness were able, in a short period of time, to open their minds to a wealth of information that reveals these assumptions to be wrong. They left the course feeling more empowered, optimistic, and hopeful about their individual lives because they saw new possibilities for helping to create a healthier and saner world.”

Kathleen D. Noble, John Joseph Crotty, Aarshin Karande, Alexa Lavides, Andrezej Montaño, “Why Consciousness? Teaching and Learning at the Leading Edge of Mind Science,” NeuroQuantology, June 2016, Vol. 14, Issue 2, 175-192.

Democracy depends on pursuing our calling

James Hillman writes: “In our nation the distinction between truth and opinion has solidified into the wall between church and state, between revealed truth and polls of popular opinion. Yet the Declaration of Independence asserts that the American democratic state is founded upon a transcendent ‘Truth’: ‘All Men are created equal.'

“What is the basis of this claim? Inequalities are there before the first breath. Any nurse in the birthing section of a hospital can confirm that inequality exists from the beginning. Infants differ from one another. Genetic studies show innate differences of skills, temperaments, intensities. As for the circumstances into which we descend, what could be more unequal than our environments? Some are disadvantaged, other privileged by nurture and nature both—and from the beginning.

“Since neither nurture nor nature gives equality, where do we even get the idea? It cannot be induced from the facts of life; nor can equality be reduced to a factor common to all human beings, such as erect posture, symbolic language, or manipulation of fire, because individual differences elaborate the common factor in billions of ways. Equality can only be deduced from uniqueness, from what the Scholastic philosophers called the ‘principle of individuality.’ I am imagining this uniqueness as the genius, the formative factor given with each person’s birth, so that he or she is this one and not some other one, no one.

“So equality must be axiomatic, a given; as the Declaration of Independence says, that we are equal is a truth self-evident. We are equal by the logic of eachness. Each by definition is distinct from every other each and therefore equal as such. We are equal because each brings a specific calling into the world, and we are unequal in every other respect—unfairly, unjustly, utterly unequal, except in the face of each’s unique genius. Democracy rests, therefore, upon the foundation of an acorn.

“The acorn pushes beyond the edge; its principal passion is realization. The calling demands untrammeled freedom of pursuit, a freedom ‘live on arrival,’ and this freedom cannot be guaranteed by society. (If the opportunities for freedom are decreed by society, then society has the superior power, and freedom becomes subject to society’s authority.)  As democratic equality can find no other logical ground but the uniqueness of each individual’s calling, so freedom is founded upon the full independence of calling.

“When the writers of the Declaration of Independence stated that all are born equal, they saw that the proposition necessarily entailed a companion: All are born free. It is the fact of calling that makes us equal, and the act of calling that demands we be free. The principal guarantor of both is the invisible individual genius.

“The only theoretical guarantor of the individuality required by democracy and for the sake of whom the American democracy was brought into being is that same soul, here called angel, acorn, genius, by any name as well. Loss of the daimon collapses democratic society into a crowd of shoppers wandering a mall of mazes in search of the exit. But there is no exit without the guide of an individual direction.”

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 271-274.

Respecting the power of the call

James Hillman writes: “Crooks and criminals, sadistic guards and serial rapists—all the creatures large and small of the underworld—did their souls descend from the lap of Necessity? Can the acorn harbor a bad seed? Or, perhaps the criminal psychopath has no soul at all? In reply to this question of the bad seed, a question which asks about nothing less than the nature of evil, we shall inquire into that figure who was the ultimate criminal psychopathic murderer of modern times, if not of all times: Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).

“One major drawback to this concentration upon the worst is that lesser crooks and smoother murderers slip by. By looking closely at Hitler, we may miss the demon closer to home. Faceless corporate boards and political administrators make decisions that wreck communities, ruin families, and despoil nature. The successful psychopath pleases the crowd and wins elections. The thick glass of the TV tube and its chameleon-like versatility in displaying whatever is wanted favors distance, coldness, and the front of charm, as do many of the sleek accouterments of high station in the political, legal, religious, and corporate structures. Anyone who rises in a world that worships success should be suspect, for this is an age of psychopathy.

“The habits of Hitler, reported by reliable informants and assessed by reliable historians and biographers, give evidence of an identification with or possession by his daimon. The principal difference between Hitler’s possession and that of others lies in the nature of his personality and the nature of the daimon—a bad seed in a personality that offered no doubts and no resistance. “I go the way that Providence dictates for me with all the assurance of a sleepwalker,” Hitler said in a speech in 1936.

“Hitler’s call gave him the self-appointed right to be a sleepwalker outside the human world. Outside also means transcendent, where the gods themselves live. Hitler’s certitude also confirmed his sense of always being right, and this utter conviction utterly convinced his nation, carrying it forward in its wrongs. Absolute certainty, utter conviction—these, then are signs of the demonic.

“We begin to see how power corrupts as the guiding whisper becomes a demonic voice obliterating all others. The seed comes with sure and uncanny knowledge. But while a god is omniscient, a human becomes a know-it-all, and so Hitler had no use for exchange with others. There was nothing they could teach him. To show this omniscience he memorized masses of facts—locations of regiments and reserves, displacement and armature of ships, kinds of vehicles—all of which he used to overpower his questioners and embarrass his commanders. This information ‘proved’ his transcendence and disguised his lack of thought and reflection and his inability to hold a conversation. The demonic does not engage; rather, it smothers with details and jargon any possibility of depth.

“Our republic should learn this lesson from Hitler, for we might one day vote into power a hero who wins a giant TV trivia contest and educate our children to believe the Information Superhighway is the road to knowledge. If one clue to psychopathy is a trivial mind expressing itself in high-sounding phrases, then an education emphasizing facts rather than thinking, and patriotic, politically or religiously correct ‘values’ rather than critical judgment may produce a nation of achieving high school graduates who are also psychopaths.

“The daimon’s transcendence places it outside time, which it enters only by growing down. Hitler felt himself trapped by time. He ignored the day’s division into light and darkness, drawing shades in daytime and burning lights all night. The kingdom he was erecting on earth would last a thousand years, he said and the figures with whom he identified were of another era: Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Christ. Insomnia was one of his major symptoms. This timelessness of the acorn and its push to make everything happen at once indicates possession by the daimon, daimon becoming demonic. The appreciation of everything having its season, of giving time and having time and taking time, does not apply to the Bad Seed, which promulgates manic inflation that brooks no interruptions (Hitler’s invention of blitzkrieg and his fury at anything blocking his way), and that demands impulsiveness and hurry.

“Finally, this evidence of direct demonic intrusion, perhaps the devil himself: ‘A man in the closest daily association with Hitler gave me this account: Hitler wakes at night with convulsive shrieks. He stood swaying in this room, looking wildly about him. It was he! It was he! He’s been here! he gasped. His lips were blue. Sweat streamed down his face. Suddenly he began to reel off figures, and odd words and broken phrases, entirely devoid of sense. It sounded horrible.’

“In the last scene of the tragedy Othello, when Iago is revealed to be the malicious cause of murders and the destruction of Othello’s noble and gullible character, Othello asks him: ‘Why he hath thus ensnar’d my soul and body?’ Shakespeare has Iago reply: ‘Demand me nothing: what you know, you know.’ These are Iago’s final words, and they leave interpreters guessing about his motives. But this statement by one of Shakespeare’s arch villains is not enigmatic at all. Iago says, in essence: ‘You already know, Othello. In the lines just preceding you have already twice named me a devil.’ Iago made tragedy out of nothing—as if sport, a game. The Bad Seed takes pleasure in malice, enjoying destruction.

“Without a profound sense of psychopathy and a strong conviction that the demonic is always among us—and not only in its extreme criminal forms—we hide in denial and wide-eyed innocence, that openness which also opens wide the gate to the worst. Again: Note how political tyranny lives on a gullible populace, and how a gullible populace falls for tyranny. Innocence seems to ask for evil.

“Thwarting the Bad Seed begins with a theory that gives it full recognition. So long as our theories deny the daimon as instigator of human personality, and instead insist upon brain construction, societal conditions, behavioral mechanisms, genetic endowment, the daimon will not go gently into obscurity. It drives toward the light; it will be seen; it asks for its place in the sun.

“Above the world is where M. Scott Peck places some of his patients who have in common a condition Peck calls ‘evil.’ He uses the term as a diagnosis: evil basically consists in arrogant, selfish narcissism or supreme willfulness. The rigid frame enclosing his vision does not allow Peck to see the daimon in the demonic. A deep-seated Manichaeism divides Peck’s world into saints and sinners, saved and damned, healthy and sick. ‘Evil is the ultimate disease . . . the evil are the most insane of all.’ By means of a psychiatric diagnosis the moralist can place a patient among the damned.

“A logic that so radically divides good and bad can offer only the same old standardized recommendation we’ve heard for centuries in the Christianized West: Fight the good fight. Peck calls it ‘combat.’ Therapists will be in the front lines of this fight because of their capacity for and training in love. ‘I think,” Peck asserts, ‘we can safely study and treat evil only through the methods of love.’

Hillman responds: ‘Love’ is surely the most omnipotent word in current usage, since the Christian God himself is defined as love. It can do all things. I would insist, however, that it can do very little with ‘evil’ unless this ‘love’ first recognizes the soul’s call within the bad seed. Love may be less an exercise of the will in an act of combat and more an exercise of intellectual comprehension of that daimonic necessity that calls above and beyond the world to the sinner as to the saint. I am claiming that the acorn theory allows a wider comprehension of the Bad Seed than the diagnosis of evil does.

“Prevention, as I understand it,” Hillman writes,” may neither restrict nor admonish. It has to address the same seed, the same call, and invoke the same invisibles that are claiming the price of life itself. The most immediately dangerous of all invisibles is the explosive charge in the seed, its obsessive, compelling potency, like Hitler’s raging obstinacy. Before dismantling the bomb or isolating it in solitary confinement, we may need to lengthen its fuse.

“Effective rituals begin as downers, with mourning. Even if there is no remorse about vicious acts, there can be increased awareness about the demon that prompted them. Hitler only followed the demon, never questioned it, his mind enslaved by its imagination rather than applied to its investigation. After the downers comes not repressions disguised as conversion and born-again reform but that turn toward community service we can witness every day when ex-cons take to the schools and grow down into the kids’ worlds, explaining how the Bad Seed works, what it wants, what it costs, and how to be smart. Mentoring juveniles as a regular repetitive service of dedication is also a kind of ritual.

“Finally, prevention of the demonic must be based in the invisible ground ‘above the world,’ transcending the very idea of prevention itself. Prevention requires not combat but seduction, inviting the daimon in the acorn to move out from the hard-shell confines of an only-bad seed, so as to recover a fuller image of glory. For what makes the seed demonic is its single-track obsession, its monotheistic literalism that follows one prospect only, perverting the larger imagination of the seed toward serial reenactments of the same act.

“My notions of ritual suggest ways of respecting the power of the call. They suggest disciplines imbued with more-than-human values, whose rituals will be touched by beauty, transcendence, adventure, and death. Society must have rituals of exorcism for protecting itself from the Bad Seed. Yet we must also have rituals of recognition that give the demonic a place—other than prisons—as Athena found an honored place for the destructive, blood-angered Furies in the midst of civilized Athens.

“These rituals of societal protection take the demons in. They see the daimon in the demon. And these rituals sharply contrast with current ideas of prevention, which, following Hitler’s own preferred methods for purifying society, would eradicate the Bad Seed.

“Public programs are being proposed to test schoolchildren for their ‘genetic predispositions,’ to uncover potentials for crime and violence in terms of character traits and personality, ‘weeding out’ those who show such factors as ‘early irritability and uncooperativeness.’ These traits indicate not mainly crime, but that genial exceptionality on which a whole society depends for leadership, invention, and culture. Besides, once sorted out, on what compost heap would the weeds be thrown? Or would they merely be ‘improved” and rendered compliant by drugs to which you may not say no, or kept in privately owned, for-profit penitentiaries exempt from labor laws and minimum-wage scales?

“For adequate rituals we substitute rigidities and formulaic fixes like ‘three strikes and you’re out.’ Without exorcisms that attempt to separate the Devil and the daimon, we have only eradications that get rid of both. Rituals not only protect society from the demonic; they also protect it from its own paranoia, from falling prey to its own obsessive and vicious measures of purification, that ever-present American myth: the return to innocence in a Puritan paradise.

“Innocence is America’s mystical cloud of unknowing. We are forgiven simply by virtue of not knowing what we do. To wrap ourselves round in the Good—that is the American dream, leaving place for the evil nightmare only in the ‘other,’ where it can be diagnosed, treated, prevented, and sermonized about.”¹

“A society that willfully insists upon innocence as the noblest of virtues and worships innocence at its altars in Orlando and Anaheim and on Sesame Street, will be unable to see any seed of any kind unless it be sugar-coated. Like Forrest Gump eating chocolates and offering sweets to strangers before he ever looks into their eyes, stupid is indeed as stupid does. The idea of the Bad Seed, the idea that there is a demonic call, should startle our native intelligence, awakening it from the innocence of our American theories so that as a nation we can see that evil is attracted, belongs with, innocence. Then we might finally recognize that in America, Natural Born Killers are the secret companions of, are even prompted by, Forrest Gumps.

 “The capacity to deny, to remain innocent, to use belief as a protection against sophistications of every sort—intellectual, aesthetic, moral, psychological—keeps the American character from awakening. The American character remains blind to the fact that the virtues of mediocrity—those pieties of disciplined energy, order, self-control, probity, and faith—are themselves messengers of the devil they would overcome.”²

1 “A history of this habit of the heart has been exposed by Elaine Pagels (in her important study The Origin of Satan) as a disastrous, perhaps ‘evil’ essential, an inherent bad seed, in Western religious denominations, making obligatory as countermeasure their relentless insistence on ‘love.” James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 247.

2 Ibid., 214-270.

Fate or Calling?

James Hillman writes: “The Greek idea of fate is that: Events happen to people. But fate causes only events that are unusual, that oddly don’t fit in. Not each and every thing is laid out in a superior divine plan. The Greek word for fate, moira, means a share, a portion. As fate has only a portion in what happens, so the daimon, the personal, internalized aspect of moira, has only a portion in our lives, calling them but not owning them. Moira derives from the root smer or mer, meaning to ponder, to think, meditate, consider, care. It is a deeply psychological term, requiring us to scrutinize events with respect to the portion that comes from elsewhere and is unaccountable, and the portion that belongs to me, what I did, could have done, can do.

Fatalism holds that everything is predetermined. “It’s all in the stars; there is a divine plan; whatever happens, happens for the best in the best of possible worlds (Voltaire’s Candide). Catching the sly winks of fate, however, is a reflective act. It is an act of thought, while fatalism is a state of feeling—abandoning thoughtfulness, details, and careful reasoning.

“The acorn seems to follow just this sort of limited pattern. It does not indulge in long-term philosophies. It excites, calls, demands—but rarely does it offer a grand purpose. The pull of purpose comes with force; you may feel full of purpose. But just what it is and how to get there remains undetermined. Purpose does not usually appear as a clearly framed goal, but more as a troubling, unclear urge with a sense of indubitable importance.

“Let’s say the acorn is more concerned with the soul aspect of events, more alive to what’s good for it than to what you believe is good for you. This helps explain why Socrates’ daimon told him not to escape imprisonment and execution. His death belonged to the integrity of his image, to his innate form.

“What matters is not so much whether an interference has or does not have purpose; rather, it is important to look with a purposive eye, seeking value in the unexpected. The purposive eye starts from the assumption that events can indeed be accidents. The world is run as much by folly as by wisdom, as much by order as by chaos, but—and this ‘but’ is huge—these accidents may still intend something interesting.

“Wisdom in Greek is sophia, as in our word ‘philosophy,’ love of wisdom. Sophia had a most practical meaning, referring originally to the crafts of handling things, especially to the helmsman who steers the boat. The wise one steers well; the wisdom of the helmsman shows in the art of making minor adjustments in accord with accidents of water, wind, and weight. The daimon teaches this wisdom by constant appraisals of events that seem to pull off course. This is also philosophy: the love of making little corrections, little integrations of what seems not to fit in.

“This idea of continual, moving adjustments is nothing new or strange. As far back as Aristotle the soul was conceived to be both the form and the motion of a body. The form is given with beginnings as the image of your lot, and it shifts as we move. This form, for which we are using many interchangeable terms—image, daimon, calling, angel, heart, acorn, soul, pattern, character—stays true to form.

“A serious accident demands answers. What does it mean, why did it happen, what does it want? Continuing reappraisals are part of the aftershock. The accident may never be integrated, but it may strengthen the integrity of the soul’s form by adding to it perplexity, sensitivity, vulnerability, and scar tissue.

“Remember Plato’s tale: The goddess Ananke, or Necessity, sits on her throne amid the Fates, her daughters, companions, and aides. But it is she, Ananke, who establishes that the soul has selected for its lot to be necessary—not an accident, not good or bad, not foreknown or guaranteed, simply necessary. What we live is necessary to be lived.

“When something doesn’t fit, seems odd or strange, breaks the usual pattern, then more likely Necessity has a hand in it. Though she determines the lot you live, her ways of influencing are irrational. That is why it is so difficult to understand life, even one’s own life. Your soul’s lot comes from the irrational principle. The law it follows is Necessity, which wanders erratically. Little wonder that we readers are drawn to biographies and autobiographies, for they offer glimpses of how irrational Necessity works in a human life. Although Necessity’s rule is absolute and irreversible, this determinism is indeterminate. Unpredictable.

“By claiming that Necessity has laid its hand on each of the decisive moments of my life, I can justify whatever I do. It appears as if I can slip the harness of responsibility—it’s all in the cards, or the stars. Yet this unyielding dominatrix of a goddess makes me quaver over each decision, for there is no predictability in her errant irrationality. Only in hindsight can I find certitude, saying it was all necessary. How curious that life can be foreordained, yet not foretold.

“Then where are the errors? How can one go wrong, and why feel guilty? If all that happens is necessary, what about remorse?

“Since necessity incorporates whatever decision I make as necessary, then necessity must be imagined as an inclusive principle that adjusts the image of each life to include all its actions one by one, whatever they may be. We are still collared, but the collar is adjustable. Necessity’s yoke produces the feeling that we are always somewhere caught, somehow a victim of circumstances, longing for liberation. I may know that what had to be, had to be, yet nonetheless I feel remorse. Necessity, says the remorse, too, is necessary as a feeling and belongs to your yoke, but it does not refer to what you actually might or should have done otherwise.

“To understand necessity in this way makes mistakes tragic, rather than sins to be repented or accidents to be remedied. It takes a large heart to accept the tight collar. Most times we reject the odd irrational events that come down on us. Most times we try to ignore disturbances—until the heart calls our attention to them as possibly important, possibly necessary. The mind is the last faculty to submit, and there is usually a tug-of-war between the heart’s calling and the mind’s plan, a conflict within each human replicating Plato’s two principles of nous and ananke, reason and unreasonable necessity.

“Sure, the mind can postpone the call, suppress, and sell out. You will not therefore necessarily be punished and damned. The daimon is not necessarily a pursuing demon, a Christian hound of heaven. Revenge is not one of Necessity’s daughters. Necessity, in fact, refers only to that which could not be otherwise, or that which you could not escape. Escape is not a sin, because Necessity is not a moralist. Escape can belong just as well to your soul’s lot and its pattern, as can facing the music and taking the arrows in the chest

“The truer you are to your daimon, the closer you are to the death that belongs to your destiny. We expect the daimon to have prescience about death, calling on it before an airline flight or during a sudden attack of sickness. Is this my fate, and now? And when the demands of our calling seem undeniably necessary, again death appears: ‘If I do what I really must, it will kill me; and yet if I don’t, I’ll die.’ To be the calling or not to be, that still and again seems to be the question.

“Perhaps this intimacy between calling and fate is why we avoid the daimon and the theory that upholds its importance. We mostly invent, and prefer, theories that tie us tightly to parental powers, encumber us with sociological conditionings and genetic determinants; thereby we escape the fact that these deep influences on our fates don’t hold a candle to the power of death. Death is the only complete necessity, that archetypal Necessity who rules the pattern of the lifeline she spins with her daughters, the Fates. The length of that line and its irreversible one-way direction is part of one and the same pattern, and it could not be otherwise.”

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 155-213.

"There is soul stuff out there."

James Hillman argues: “The individual identity of each human person is not only an article of religious faith or an axiom of the Western mind. Human individuality is also a statistical quasi-certainty. Each of us has the capacity to generate 10³⁰⁰⁰ eggs or sperm with unique sets of genes. If we consider 10³⁰⁰⁰ possible eggs being generated by an individual woman and the same number of sperm being generated by an individual man, the likelihood of anyone else with your set of genes in the past or in the future becomes infinitesimal.

“Moreover, genetic research itself warns that the genes cannot be grasped by simplistic explanations. The timing of their interventions occurs in spurts and lags, their interrelation with environmental circumstances is infinitely involved. So research since the 1980s has focused more and more on separate lives, behavioral differences, nonshared orientations, or what you and I would call individuality.

“Behavioral science concludes ‘that human pairing is inherently random.’ It retreats to the statistical luck of the draw to account for the most important choice of all, because psychology as a science dares not imagine what it cannot measure.

“We can, however, read the recent research as support for the autonomy of the genius. Its fire lights up precisely the companion required, for better or worse, for long term or short, convincing me that this other is a one-and-only and this event is unique. The other styles of loving charted in the research—sharing, caring, practical commitments, and libidinal intimacy—are less selective, less personal. They do not insist upon this particular partner who embodies the image I carry in my heart.

“Without that sense of fate in the choice, the romance of the love doesn’t work. For this sort of love is more like a daimonic inheritance, a gift and curse from the invisible ancestors. The categories of nature and nurture do not reach into the heart or see through its eye. That is why we have had to add to our examination of genetics and environment this coda on love.

“The meeting between lover and beloved is heart to heart, like that between sculptor and model, between hand and stone. It is a meeting of images, an exchange of imaginations. When we fall in love we begin to imagine romantically, fiercely, wildly, madly, jealously, with possessive, paranoid intensity.

“The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.

“The contrary direction to narrowing nature to brain simplistics is expanding nurture to a far more embracing notion of environment. Since anything around can nourish our souls by feeding imagination, there is soul stuff out there. So why not admit that the environment itself is ensouled, animated, inextricably meshed with us and not fundamentally separate from us? The ecological vision restores to environment also the classical idea of providentia—that the world provides for us, looks out for us, even looks after us. It wants us around, too. This breathable, edible, and pleasant planet, invisibly serviced and maintained, keeps us all by means of its life-supporting system. Such would be an idea of nurture that is truly nurturing.

“As notions of environment shift, we notice environment differently. It becomes more and more difficult to make a cut between psyche and world, subject and object, in here and out there. I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I am in the psyche as I am in my dreams, as I am in the moods of the landscapes and the city streets, as I am in ‘music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts’ (T. S. Eliot). Where does the environment stop and I begin, and can I begin at all without being in some place, deeply involved in, nurtured by the nature of the world.”

 

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 128-154.