Winifred Hodge Rose
Assigned reading:
Approaches, Methods, Tools
My approach to Heathen soul lore begins with the study of words, ancient literature, folklore, comparative religion, philosophy, and modern academic studies of these and related topics. The purpose of this approach is to provide a direction and the first steps for a greater process: bringing this lore into modern Heathen spiritual life. Modern Heathens who wish to do so can read my soul lore writings and other writings on this subject, evaluate these perspectives on soul lore for themselves, add their own thoughts, insights and adaptations, and then put the results into practice in their own spiritual life as they see fit. Here are my suggestions for how to proceed with this undertaking, intended for individual and for group study.
If any of the suggestions throughout this course of study feel uncomfortable or wrong for you, then obviously, don’t pursue them. You may be able to figure out alternative ways of reaching the same goal, if you wish, or you may prefer to just leave these spiritual exercises alone. If you proceed with learning Heathen soul lore simply on an intellectual level, you may find that after a time of study, if you come back and try these exercises and approaches again, they will feel more comfortable and familiar to you. But always, keep your own well-being and sense of what is right for you foremost in your mind.
Methods for Learning
First, it’s important to establish your personal methods of learning, and these methods are going to include some that are not standard academic fare. Yes, there’s study involved as you read and evaluate this soul lore, but that’s only the beginning. The real challenge is taking these ideas, exploring and testing them, and transmuting them, through the alchemy of your own essence, into something that is part of the structure of your own lived experience. Each person who does this is going to have different experiences and come out in a unique place: their own landscape of the souls.
You can see from this that we won’t be dealing with ‘right or wrong answers’; such attitudes are beyond pointless for soul lore study. In fact, they will massively get in your way! We are not seeking ‘certainty or absolute, irrefutable truth’ here. We are seeking understanding, self-knowledge, and experience. We are pursuing wisdom, which must include experience and insight as well as intellectual knowledge.
Insisting on ‘Certainty’, within intangible realms such as spirituality and religion, establishes you in a specific spot in the knowledge-landscape, your own certainty-fortress. Forever afterwards you will be defending that fortress against all threats, challenges, and new insights that might try, and perhaps succeed, in knocking down your throne of certainty. It’s a miserable, stressful way to live, and turns a person into a closed, defensive box. (Of course, what I say about certainty here applies in ‘fuzzy’ realms like soul lore, religion, relationships, and the humanities. When it comes to building a bridge, you do want ‘certainty’ that the girders are going to hold up!)
‘Understanding’, as opposed to ‘certainty’, is delighted by the chance to explore, expand, reach new horizons, test out new perspectives, cogitate on new ideas. There is no way to threaten ‘understanding’: everything that comes its way is food for its nourishment and growth, even though the stretching and growth involved can sometimes be uncomfortable. ‘Understanding’ in deep, experiential ways, rather than dogmatic certainty, is what we are seeking through our study of soul lore.
So, how do we pursue our course here? We have to use study methods that are suited to our purpose. We begin with intellectual study, reading what I provided in the “Soul Lore” series of articles on each soul, and anything else you wish along those lines. We ponder and question until what we’ve read seems reasonably clear. Then comes the real work, innermost work, where we first explore and test the ideas within the reality of our own soul-landscape. Then, if the ideas prove valid to us, we begin the work of incorporating the realities behind the ideas into our lived experience, our deep understanding, our storehouse of insightful wisdom.
The Most Essential Ability: Imagination
For the first step of studying, we need our rational faculties. For the inner-work, the main bulk of our learning here, our imagination is essential. Imagination is the ability of our mind to perceive and mentally work with anything that is not physically there with us at this moment in time. Planning for tomorrow, buying a thoughtful gift for someone, envisioning how that new paint will look in your living room: a great deal of our mental activity every day relies on our imagination; it is an essential tool for human activity, inner or outer.
Imagination is something else, too: it is a sensory organ-system. This latter strength of the imagination is naturally strong in children, and is generally squashed out of them and denied by modern culture. When we have an experience of Deity, of beauty, of insight or intuition, a premonition, a sense of danger, an experience that we long to capture in a song, poem or painting, we are sensing currents of being, of subtle energy, and translating them into modalities that mean something to us.
All of these things come to us through the sensing abilities of our imagination, in the same way that light reflecting off objects comes through our eyes, and our ears pick up audible vibrations. The raw vibrations of light and the audible spectrum are not something that our conscious mind can interpret directly; these things have to go through our eyes and ears and be processed by the relevant parts of our brain, before this light and sound make sense to us. In the same way, the ‘other senses’ of our imagination pick up subtle vibrations in our spiritual / non-physical surroundings, and our imagination processes them into intelligibility, as our brain does with vibrations in the visible and audible spectra. Our eyes and ears and brain are culturally-trained to interpret what we see and hear in culturally determined ways, and the same goes for the sensory system of our imagination.
We need our imaginations to do this work of coming to understand our souls: imagination as a mental ability, as powerful as rational thought or more so, and imagination as a sensory system. We train our rational thinking and observational abilities well in schools and colleges and everyday work and living. (At least, it’s supposed to work that way…) Our imaginations are equally powerful, but often have not been trained and disciplined in appropriate ways. I don’t mean ‘trained’ in the sense of constrained or suppressed, I mean ‘trained’ as an athlete or musician or intellectual champion trains: working diligently to develop and focus all our abilities toward a challenging and highly-valued goal. As we pursue experiential soul lore study, we’ll also be training our primary interface between the physical and metaphysical worlds: our powerful imaginations.
Critical Thinking and Critical Knowing
A word about critical thinking, which is an essential rational ability for living a well-balanced life, in touch with and interactive with the real physical and social worlds. Critical thinking begins its development in toddlers, with their incessant quest to test and explore everything around them through all their senses, including the sense of taste, since everything they encounter is put into their mouth! As they do this, they begin to develop their capacities for evaluation and judgement: this tastes great, that is awful, this thing burns, that thing will fall on me if I try to climb it, doing this is so much fun, doing that will result in somebody yelling at me. Critical thinking depends on our ability to cross-check our own ideas and notions with what is actually going on in the real, physical and social worlds, which in turn depends on being physically and informationally in touch and interactive with these worlds.
Our imagination, or the suite of abilities I call our ‘imaginarium’, needs to develop its own version of critical thinking in the same ways: by exploring and testing our metaphysical environments and learning from actual, lived experiences and interactions. It’s important to realize that metaphysical events are not actually happening ‘in our imagination’, any more than real-life interactions are actually happening ‘in our brain’. Our perceptions, interpretations, judgements and reactions are happening in our brain, but they are reactions to real things and real beings ‘out there’ in the real world where our physical body lives and takes action.
The same is true in the metaphysical space-times that we perceive through our imaginarium and through our souls directly. Instead of the physical objects we experience in the physical world, in metaphysical worlds we encounter forms and flows of subtle energies, which our imaginarium can learn to sense and interpret just as our brain, sensory and nervous systems do with the physical world. Through experience and through pondering clearly and honestly upon our experiences, we develop a faculty of ‘critical knowing’ that serves our imaginarium, just as critical thinking serves us in our rational interactions with the ‘real world out there.’
“We really don’t / can’t know anything about the soul…..”
This is a common phrase used in religious and non-religious discussions about souls and other abstract matters. As we study soul lore, I’d really like us to dump this attitude! Yes, in a sense it is true: true that we can’t objectively ‘prove’ things about souls, Deities, afterlife, and related matters. And it is also wise to avoid that know-it-all, sacred-certainty attitude that tries to force its own views onto other people’s understandings and experiences.
But I’ll tell you this: insisting that “We really can’t know anything about souls, Deities, etc…” is a sacred-certainty attitude that some people try to push onto other people. People can be know-it-alls about uncertainty just as they can be about specific beliefs. They can feel so positive that it is impossible to know anything, that they close themselves off from other avenues of knowing, and push others to close themselves off, too. This attitude is highly counterproductive in studying soul lore and other sacred matters, and the whole issue comes down to the meaning of ‘to know.’
In modern life, rooted in the age of scientific enlightenment, we tend to equate ‘knowledge’ with ‘proven, objective truth.’ Certainly, proven objective truth is an important part of the overall field of ‘what knowledge is’, but that is not all that ‘knowledge’ consists of. Knowledge is also ‘gnosis’, a closely related Greek word that is used in philosophy and religion to mean ‘knowing through personal experience.’
People often react to this concept by pointing out how easy it is to misunderstand, or to fool ourselves and others, when it comes to our own perceptions and reactions about other people and situations, for example. People may interpret gnosis to mean “knowing through personal feelings”. Like, “I just know that this person is the right spouse for me”…and then this turns out not to be the case. Our ‘knowledge’ is then shown to be flawed, and this cuts down our confidence in our own knowing. I’m sure we’ve all had sad experiences of this kind of ‘knowing’. But this is not the kind of knowledge that I’m talking about, either.
Knowledge as skilled experience
The kind of knowledge I’m talking about can be illustrated by using the example of a personal skill that you have, any kind of practical skill, like carpentry, gardening, baby-expertise, mountain climbing, cooking, playing a musical instrument, hang-gliding, pottery, whatever. You learn a lot about this area of skill from other people, and you learn even more on your own, by trial and error and by constant practice. You can tell when you’re on the right track because your skill clearly improves, and when you’re on the wrong track, it stagnates.
What is it that causes this skill to develop in you, personally, in your own unique way? It is personal experience that makes it happen, and there is no other way that can make your own skill develop and increase. Only you, doing the work day by day, can create your own level of skill.
This skill and experience that you gain through your own practice, year by year, your inner recognition of your own skill and your trust in it, is the same kind of knowledge that you need for learning and putting into practice the knowledge of your souls. The only way we can come to know our own souls is through personal experience. There is no other way. No amount of lecturing, analysis and study will get you past the first stage of developing your skill, the beginner stage of gaining basic knowledge of the field.
Other people (like me) telling you things about the souls only gives you a place to start thinking about it all. It offers you the view of a path ahead of you, but only you can walk that path and make it your own. Only you can build your skill as a soul-explorer, and only you can reach that state of inner trust in your own proven skill at doing this, proven by the way you live your daily life, year after year, as a person aware of and true to their own souls.
I’ve been pursuing soul lore and trying to live in accord with it for enough years now, that I am able to trust my own skill, experience, knowledge, in regard to soulful living, and am able to share this confidence with others. Have I reached any kind of finish-point, any place to stop learning and say ‘I’m done’? Have I “perfected myself”? No, far from it! This will never happen. There is always more learning and growing to be done, and the more we grow, the more we become aware of how much more learning lies ahead of us. But that knowledge need not shake our confidence in ourselves: our confidence that we are on a worthwhile spiritual path, and are doing well with our pursuit of experience and knowledge along that path.
I’ll give an example of this inner trust and confidence in my connection with my souls. When I sat down to write these chapters about a personal approach to soul lore, I didn’t know what I was going to write. First, I would wander aimlessly around for awhile, staring into space and letting something germinate within me that I didn’t yet recognize. Then I sat down to write, and ‘writing happened.’ I was as interested to see what came out of it, as anyone else might have been!
Before my inner growth of trust in my own soul-knowledge, I would have felt anxious about not having a writing plan, an outline, something to get started with. I would have tried to take a logical, objective, academic approach, as I do when I write about my more analytical soul lore research. That is intellectual knowledge, and clearly that has its place, it is needed too. I relied heavily on that approach for a substantial part of Book I. But for this book, whichever soul I was working on came forward in a more gnostic way to guide my writing of these experiential soul lore guidelines, ‘experiential’ being the key word.
I have this new-found confidence that I don’t have to wrestle with or plan what to write, I will just ‘know.’ Which doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Once it’s written, it needs to be fine-tuned, better organized and clarified, to make sure I’m communicating clearly. But the first, more spontaneous draft is always on the right track in terms of offering knowledge about the soul in question, knowledge that I often didn’t know I knew, until I wrote it! This form of ‘just knowing’ is based on years of personal experience and learning, and on sharing with and learning from others as well. It is not the “I just know it” of wishful thinking or of motivations hidden from myself and others.
Basic premises of Soul-Craft
When we pursue soul lore on the basis of personal experience, we need to start off with some basic premises or assumptions: this is proper philosophical technique. These premises correspond to the basic material that we seek to be skillful with, in the examples of personal skills that I gave earlier, like wood, plants, babies, mountains, food, musical instruments, gliders, potting clay. Premises provide the starting point and the ‘raw material’ for our work.
Our most basic premise here is that ‘souls exist’, and more, ‘my own souls exist’. Then: ‘I am capable of knowing and interacting consciously with my own souls.’ A further premise for us is that ‘my souls can be understood and experienced in the context of Heathen traditions, beliefs and practices.’
So, this corresponds to us selecting the basic medium for our craft, our skill. This is what we work with: our souls and our conscious awareness. The context for our work, the setting for our craft, is Heathen tradition and belief, brought into the modern world. Then, there’s knowledge to be learned from other skilled people, as we begin to learn the skill for ourselves. You may choose to regard me as one of those people to learn from, and there are many others around, to learn from as well.
As you become more familiar with the basics of your craft, you begin testing and shaping what you’re learning, putting it into your own context, developing your own vision. Then comes steady practice, and trial and error. This is where you shape your craft to your own vision, learning from your mistakes, refining your vision of where you’re going with this. As your practice continues and your confidence increases, you begin to take ownership of your skill, your craft, your vision, and you reach for mastery.
And how are you tested? Of what does your ‘master-piece’ consist, to show your growing mastery of soul-lore and practice? Your master-piece is yourself and your life, lived day by day: your deeds, your thoughts and words, your attitudes and behavior, your choices, your aspirations, your accomplishments, your giving to the world around you.
You’re not trying to live up to other people’s standards and expectations now. You’re developing your own standards and expectations, based on your growing knowledge of your own souls: what they can be, what they can do, what they need in order to thrive, what they can give to the world. You and all your souls together are creating a vision and bringing it into being, and that vision-in-action is not based on wishful thinking but on hard work, experience, knowledge, skill, confidence, mastery.
To return to an earlier point I made, you cannot achieve all this if you are accompanied by a constant chorus of voices, from inside and outside yourself, that chants at you: “You really can’t know anything about the soul….”! Resist and overcome this! Build up your own knowledge and awareness, and trust in your own experience and wisdom, in the true and soulful life you live, that results from your growing practice and mastery of soul lore.
Your Daybook
If you’ve pursued any kind of esoteric, spiritual, or psychological work in your life, you’ll be familiar with some of the methods we need to use: meditation, journaling, trance-work, active imagination, dream-work, rune-craft, divination, spaecraft, automatic writing. I’m not going to go into detail on all of these; they are each subjects for entire libraries of books! I encourage you to apply any of these skills that you have, and learn more (there are many good Heathen and other books on these subjects), and apply your new learning, too. I will make specific references to using these various skills as we move through the lessons, but now I am going to emphasize two of them as we begin our study: journaling and active meditation.
Soul lore is complex and complicated, profound and life-changing, and it will stimulate your inner growth to a degree that you may find hard to imagine, at first. At least, this is how it is with me, and I assume for you as well. The learning process may (or may not) start out slowly at first, until you begin really processing the unfamiliar perspectives involved. Then, it may take off like a rocket.
For these reasons, it is really essential for you to keep a soul lore journal, or Daybook, as I like to call it (‘journal’ comes from the French word for ‘day’: jour). This is the place to record your questions, confusions, insights, experiences, aspirations. These things will multiply, transform, link up with each other in unexpected ways. There is an endless landscape of learning ahead of you! And just like any explorer, it’s important to keep a map and records of where you’ve come from and what you’ve learned along the way.
Souls are like fractals and holograms, and multidimensional works of art and craft. They are like mathematical ‘fuzzy sets’ and multidimensional Venn diagrams. You learn something about a soul, and three months later, when you’re studying a different soul, you have a sudden mega-enlightenment about how both these souls interact together and how they’ve shaped and expressed themselves in a big way in your life, that you never saw before. So you go back to the insights about the first soul that you wrote in your Daybook, and see that, yes, those clues were there, but you didn’t see them at first. And now you see clues linking up with a third soul, or a different part of your life or character, and have another explosion of insight. Suddenly you remember a life-shaping moment in your childhood that you’d totally forgotten about. Which souls were involved with that, and how did it affect them? What was the result of that rune-casting you did, to ask about your Hugr-soul? Will you remember these things, if you don’t record them?
Only by using your Daybook can you keep track of and interrelate all these complexities. Otherwise it’s all going to float off to wherever dreams go when you wake up. You need that Daybook! You don’t need to write in it every day. Write in it when you have insights and experiences you need to remember, perplexities and issues you need to work through, new learnings to record, new connections to follow through all their complexities. Use your Daybook as a process of digestion, digesting new knowledge and previously hidden knowledge and experience. It’s useful to undertake some of this process of digestion by yourself, first, working in your Daybook to help you make some preliminary sense out of it. Then you may want to share this with others who walk the path with you, where shared explorations further promote your learning process.
The other way that your Daybook can serve you as an essential tool is as a place for written conversations between your conscious mind and your souls, and between one soul and another. Find a quiet time and space, open your Daybook, and write a question, wish, concern or whatever. Then wait quietly until some response enters or arises in your mind, and write it down without any second-guessing or editing it. There’s a lot you can learn this way!
Your Daybook can be a physical notebook, or a word-processor that takes typing or dictation. In addition to writing, you may want to add other media: drawings, photographs, songs and poems, etc., that also express the experiences and insights you want to record.
Preliminary Exercise: Where are you starting from?
For your first exercise in studying Heathen soul lore, get your Daybook notebook or set up your e-file. Then start writing about two subjects:
1. What is your current understanding about what a soul is? Where does your understanding of this come from? How much of it consists of your own ideas and insights, and how much comes from what you were taught and simply accepted? How much comes from rebelling against whatever you were taught, and taking the opposite point of view? If you currently don’t much believe there is such a thing as a soul, these questions apply equally well. Why do you believe that souls don’t exist? Where does this perception come from? Was it taught to you, did you absorb it from those around you, did you think carefully and reach this conclusion? What kind of emotional baggage is attached to whatever your ideas about souls are?
2. What do you want to achieve by studying Heathen soul lore? What are your hopes and aspirations?
Focused Awareness
I’m actually not going to say anything here about ‘how’ to meditate. I figure many of you are experienced with this already, and even those who aren’t, if you’re interested in soul lore, you probably have enough familiarity with briefly achieving a quiet state of mind to get started. Each of our study modules is going to call for somewhat different approaches to ‘meditation’, anyway, so we’ll talk about these as we go along.
The main reason we’ll take some different approaches to meditation is because each of our own souls has its own way of ‘meditating’, that is, of entering into a focused state that intensifies its powers and its sense of itself. Some of our souls are strongest in intellectual pondering or cogitating, sometimes called discursive meditation. Some do the transcendental-state-of-cosmic-being thing. Some are good with entering into a super-sensing of the natural environment and absorbing those sensations. One senses the flow of time, and ponders and absorbs the meaning of this. Some are good at trance-work and other occult practices requiring focus and clear mind. Some can reach (or be thrown into) ecstatic states where high-voltage power flows through, which can be useful, or can be disastrous, depending on how it is handled. Some can sink into our physical body and attune to its processes and needs. And it goes on. Please note: when I say “different souls” I am not talking about “different people’s souls.” I am talking about your own multiple souls, as I discussed in the assigned reading for this study guide.
So, we don’t want to tie ourselves down to any particular method of meditation, nor to any particular definition of what it is. We’ll just call it a way of focusing our mind, and our souls, and take it from there. What I want to emphasize here is that, just like using your Daybook, focused awareness is an essential tool for soul lore study, and you’ll want to stay flexible about how you do this as we get to know our different souls.
Exercise 2-1: Thinking about soul-ideas
Questions:
Review the assigned reading. There are some important basic concepts for you to consider here. One is my three-part definition of what “a soul” is. What do you think of this definition? Does it make sense to you? Do you think it ‘works’ as a basis for studying souls? Do you think anything important is missing from this as a basic definition? Does it change anything about what you have thought, until now, to be the nature of a soul? Or does your idea of what a soul is, fit well with my definition? Look back at your responses to my questions in the preliminary exercise, to respond to the last questions.
Thoughts to consider:
The second item to consider is my proposition that Heathen souls are not simply ‘soul-parts’ or functions such as ‘thought’, ‘emotions’, or ‘memory’. My perception is that souls are full-blown entities, soul-persons, in their own right. Many of the souls have ‘soul-parts’ of their own, including thought, will, emotions, etc. Some of them have afterlives as independent beings, and some can potentially exit the living body and act independently at a distance.
The third unusual concept here follows from the second: in my approach to soul lore, I claim that we consist of multiple soul-beings who are all members of our personal “soular system.” Later on in our studies, we’ll look at some ideas about how these different soul-beings mesh with each other to form our ‘soular system’ or our hiwscipe / hiw-ship: our soul-household. And we’ll look at how all of them interact together to create our own conscious ‘sense of self’. We’ll explore my assertion that instead of saying “A person has a soul,” it may be more accurate to say “Souls create a person.”
Obviously, there is no requirement for you to accept any of these ideas, and it’s hard for you to judge what you think about them until you know more, right? So, for now, let’s approach it from the “for the sake of argument” perspective: let’s say “these propositions may be true” and see where that takes us. It’s actually really interesting to do this, and if you continue being interested, there’s a long and fascinating path of spiritual adventure ahead of you!
Before we begin the next exercise, I need to offer some precautions. If these ideas seem too creepy, strange, uncomfortable for you, you don’t have to proceed with the following exercise of delving deeper into them. Do whatever is the right thing for you. If you’re really interested in soul lore but want to take it in easy steps, more digestible bites, that’s absolutely fine! Whenever you’re starting to feel a bit overwhelmed by the strangeness, you can step back and buffer the impact by focusing on intellectual rather than experiential learning. When we approach something as an intriguing intellectual idea, as a possibility rather than as an immediate personal experience, this helps ease us along at a more gentle pace. You can continue the readings, thinking about them, working in your Daybook, and discussing ideas with like-minded folks. As the new perspectives settle into your mind, you may be able to come back to the experiential exercises and find them more congenial to you. Always be aware of what is best for you, and follow that path.
Exercise 2-2: Feeling and reacting to soul-ideas
Review: In preparation for your next step, first go back to the reading, Definitions and Overview of Heathen Souls, and review what I wrote about these ideas: my definitions of what souls are, the idea that a true soul is an individual being, and the idea that we are made up of a group of several of these beings. Then skim the overview summarizing the natures of each of these souls. You don’t have to remember everything in detail; just plant the seeds in your mind. Then stop reading and sit quietly. Focus your awareness on your inner sensations and emotions, as they react to what you have just read.
Questions: How do these ideas make you feel? Not what do you ‘think’ about them, but what ‘feelings’ do you have, what emotions, intuitions, and even bodily sensations might you feel, as you allow these ideas to float around in your field of consciousness, without intellectual judgement? Don’t either accept or deny the ideas for now, just allow them to soak in as possibilities, potentials. Approach it the way you’d feel and sense the breeze, the sun, the bird calls, when you’re standing outside on a pleasant day, without performing judgements and evaluations.
Discussion: This exercise can be quite unsettling! You may have a lovely, spiritual experience, or you may feel unpleasant emotions like fear or distaste. You may have some odd body sensations: twitches, twinges, flushes or chills, dizziness, restlessness, aches that you didn’t realize you had. It’s really important here: make no judgements, and don’t go off chasing your feelings in an intellectual, analytical way. Don’t be overwhelmed by them, either. Don’t blow them up, don’t whack them down. Just sit with them. Let them be what they are. This is you, and your first obligation as a mature human being is to accept and honor who you are: warts, shiny bits, and all.
What you are doing now is beginning to make a safe space, a clear space, for your own souls to begin to step forward into your awareness: a meet-and-greet process! You probably have some experience with, or idea about, safe spaces and why people need them in order to communicate, build healthy relationships, and find peace of mind. Well, souls need this, too! You are laying the groundwork for communicating consciously with your souls, and for becoming aware of your soul-household, your hiwscipe or hiw-ship. There is no room for criticism and judgement, self-justification or self-shaming, hatred, fear, and avoidance in this safe space. There is only room for your whole soul-household, and your Self that arises out of them all, to feel valued and at home together.
I’ve said that you might have a lovely spiritual experience, or maybe an uncomfortable or perplexing one, but I haven’t yet mentioned the most likely outcome the first time you try this: nothing happens, that you are aware of. This is okay; don’t give up. You may need some time to get used to the whole idea and purpose of this exercise, and to practice it for awhile until you can feel comfortable and focused instead of self-conscious or stupid for pursuing it.
Even if you don’t sense anything or have any specific ‘experiences’ or insights, you are setting your intention here: an essential action for any kind of esoteric work. This exercise is our first step: opening the door into our deeper being, opening up some awareness-space within ourselves. We’ll be doing a lot more of this as we go along.
Personal Example
I’ll share here what the experience of sensing all my souls feels like to me, to give an example and to set the stage for our final exercise. Your experience may—probably will—be totally different than what I share here!
I feel like I’m swimming in the ocean. There are cool spots and warm spots in the water, that the waves and currents move around. Shadows come and go across the sun, the wind ripples the waves. Light, movement, warmth, and coolness fluctuate; boundaries are vague and blurry. It’s hard to see clearly what things are. There are currents, deep ones and shallow ones. Strange creatures swim by. All of these things: light and shadow, currents and pressures, temperatures, creatures, all of them are strange presences, mysteries of the deep. This is a mysterious, potentially scary place, not a place that “I” control. Yet still I feel at home here, in my own element, alive and vigorous, snorting water through my nose and feeling the salt burn, feeling the pressure of the water upon my chest as I breathe.
These are not images that I’m viewing here, as an observer. These are sensations I’m feeling in my body and souls. My imagination translates these sensations into the perception of ‘swimming in the ocean’: “I feel like I’m swimming in the ocean.” Really, the feelings are inexpressible, and I have to use analogies as I do in my description above.
The ocean, all the blurry, powerful, fluctuating, mysterious nature of it, is my total ‘soular system’. What I perceive as my own body, swimming in the ocean, is my conscious sense of myself. This image shows that, far from containing my souls within my body and my conscious self (“I have a soul”), my body and my conscious self are smaller beings floating in the great ocean of my own ‘soular system’. “My souls have me-the-person”, or rather, “I-the-person arise from the surging and swaying of all my souls together, all these fluctuating presences meeting in the center and condensing into me-the-person.” A little body of condensed matter, floating in a sea of beings.
The Role of Our Sensory-Organ Analogs
We each seem to have a ‘primary sense’ through which our imagination-senses can most easily reach us. For many, the primary sense is vision: people see visions, see the colors of auras, see visual patterns and extract meaning from them, are clairvoyant. For many others, the primary sense is hearing: hearing or perceiving verbal messages and knowledge from otherworlds, being greatly inspired through music and the sounds of nature, being clairaudient. For myself, as may be apparent from what I described above, my primary senses are touch and taste.
Though I have many spiritual experiences that come through any or all of my bodily senses, strange as it may seem, my most powerful and enlightening ones come through my sense of touch, of body-like sensation, as I described above. And often when I am trying to sense something that lies beneath the surface of everyday appearance, I find myself opening my mouth and trying to taste the air at the back of my throat, where the air feeds in from my nasal passages, at the same time as it comes in through my mouth. I think some scenting animals, like dogs, do this too, and I’ve read that the various species of cattle, wild and tame, do also: smelling through nose and mouth, taste-smell, together. What I pick up this way doesn’t seem like ‘scent’ or ‘taste’, and isn’t anything I can put into words, but it’s closer to these than to anything else, and it ‘tells me things’. In my personal example, I not only used the sense of touch, taste and sight, but also proprioception: the sense of how my body was oriented in space, being tossed around by the waves and currents.
Exercise 2-3: Your sensation-strengths
I invite you to consider the experiences you have while you are practicing Exercise 1-2, and discern which of your senses your imagination reaches you through most strongly. This is useful to know, one more thing to add to the process of knowing yourself better. Once you know which sense is strongest, you can choose to work to make it more clear and strong. Likewise, if you wish, you can work to strengthen the senses that are less tightly linked with your imagination-senses. The more ways our awareness is linked with our imagination-senses, the more richly and broadly we can perceive other worlds and beings, and our souls who interact with them all.
Your Soul-Habitat
Each of our souls has a ‘habitat’ where it is most at home, and most in touch with its own powers. It’s helpful to enter consciously into these habitats as we begin to explore each of our souls, which means first discovering what those habitats are. As we proceed with our soul-explorations, I’ll offer exercises designed for this purpose.
Consolidation
Now you’ve got some preliminaries and preparations under your belt. We’ve talked about the importance of our imagination as a sensory system: a way of intaking, processing and presenting metaphysical information to our conscious mind. We’ve talked about strengthening the links between our experience of our physical senses, and the analog-senses of our imagination. This enhances our ability to explore, experience, and interpret the metaphysical realms similarly to the way we do in the physical realm: by using our senses, and the brain processes that allow us to interpret them and use them to build more complex ideas, plans, etc.
The way our brain functions to handle our physical senses is analogous to the way our imagination functions to handle our metaphysical senses. And just as with our brain and our intellect, our imagination needs education, training, practice, clarifying, focusing. Esoteric work of many kinds, and disciplined work with creative arts and crafts of all kinds, are excellent ways to make this happen. But without clear awareness of what is going on in the outer world and in our own inner world, the abilities of both our intellect and our imagination are diminished and wasted. Thus, we’ve started using ways to focus our awareness and our imaginations, and we’ll continue doing that as we go along.
Your toolbox is building here: focused awareness, imagination-in-training, sensory and analog-sensory awareness, and your Daybook to record it all and make some sense out of all the pieces! You’ve given some serious thought to what your starting position is, your current understanding of what a soul is, and what you want to achieve by pursuing this course of study.
You’ve started (or continued) opening some awareness-space within you, making room to begin an expanded experience and understanding of your souls. And you’ve allowed some safe space and quiet time to process emotions and feelings that are related to all these activities of soul exploration. This is an important part of healthy soul-working, and you’ll want to continue doing these foundational exercises for as long as you need them, even as you proceed further in our course of study.
As you encounter new and unfamiliar souls in our upcoming studies, you may want to go back and repeat these practices of expanding awareness-space, and maintaining a safe, reassuring space and practice for emotional processing. Trusted Heathen friends and family can be very helpful here, too, as well as study groups. And don’t forget your Daybook! It’s a great space for working through issues, and you’ll find that seemingly unrelated issues and events happening in your everyday life will in all likelihood turn out to be related to the soul you are currently working with. If you’re not working through these things in your Daybook, you may not fully realize and remember the extent to which your soul-work and your everyday life are overlapping. You’ll lose many opportunities for deep learning.
….And More Daybook!
Whatever questions, issues, arguments, insights you may have during your first reading of each of the soul lore chapters, record and work on them in your Daybook. But don’t stop with that. Now that you’re beginning to work with your actual souls, it’s important to also pay attention to what’s happening in your everyday life. Our souls, or most of them, are very much involved in our everyday life, are actors in our life, and are affected by events in our life. It’s very likely that as you work on each of the souls in turn, issues, events, insights relating to that soul will occur in your daily life: your actions, decisions, reactions, relationships, experiences. Don’t ignore this; be aware!
Each soul you are working with will be trying to open communication with you in many different ways, and everyday life is a primary one. This is a major and essential avenue for learning about your souls. Maintaining awareness of what is going on within you and around you, and working in your Daybook, are the means to carry out this task. Each day, when you have a few minutes to think, look at the events and pattern of your day to see how the soul you are working with might be involved or reflected there, and note this in your Daybook.
Some Esoteric schools of study, and monastic communities of various religions as well, recommend doing a daily review of your actions at night, just before you go to sleep. This is a good practice for soul-working as well: sift through the events and actions of the day, and consider how the soul you are working with was involved and impacted.