There’s a problem with associating the impulse towards integration primarily with progress, growth, transcendence, and enlightenment. Those spiritual impulses may enable our potential, but they don’t embrace what’s actual. A more grounded spirituality marries spirit and soul–the impulses towards both evolution and involution. Happiness may be a sign of spiritual contentment, but not if it’s divorced from the natural need to express the full range of human emotions, including sadness.

A poignant article on the subject of America’s obsession with happiness and its harmful consequences has been written by Eric G. Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University. Here are a few short passages concerning the virtues of melancholia:

I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life’s enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.

I’m not questioning joy in general. For instance, I’m not challenging that unbearable exuberance that suddenly emerges from long suffering. I’m not troubled by that hard-earned tranquillity that comes from long meditation on the world’s sorrows. I’m not criticizing that slow-burning bliss that issues from a life spent helping those who hurt. And I’m not romanticizing clinical depression. I realize that there are many lost souls out there who require medication to keep from killing themselves or harming their friends and families. I’m not questioning pharmaceutical therapies for the seriously depressed or simply to make existence bearable for so many with biochemical disorders.

Technorati Tags: emotions, psychology, soul, spirituality

Originally posted July 28, 2007.

Caring for the soul is the topic of “Soul in Integral Theory,” a post by Bill. Theology feeds the mind, not the soul. It’s silly to try to get nourishment from theology. Theology will not give us a sense of being grounded and alive to the harmonious rhythms that unite our bodies and nature. But the silliness of the enterprise doesn’t mean it’s not tempting. Bill helpfully teases out the map coordinates of that which Ken Wilber calls “the aspect of self that adapts to the psychic/subtle realm” and relates it to that which Thomas Moore calls “the soul” (pretty much the same thing if you ask me, except Moore’s use of soul demonstrates a fuzzy pre/trans fallacy, mixing the psychic and subtle with the prerational freely).

Bill finds Moore’s fuzziness appealing, and I have to admit to finding Moore’s careful attention to the psychic realm and its demand for concern to be very helpful and Moore’s fuzziness to be not particularly problematic. From the psychic/subtle realm’s perspective, distinctions such as those between lower body and higher mind are simply irrelevant. The soul defeats attempts to break it down into modules and transcend its messier aspects with the neatness and purity of spirit. So let the soul defeat us. But let us not wander forever in the realms of the psychic/subtle, for this is not territory that most of us will want to spend the rest of our lives traversing! Let us come to the fullest possible understanding of our true nature, a sense of identity that enfolds the soul, but one that allows us to choose whether we allow ourselves to descend into the soul’s muddy waters or whether we choose to live from a wider sense of identity. I believe in the great “I AMness” that we are, the great Everyness of each moment, there is a self-recognition of Spirit. There is possible the realization of our highest and widest identity in the unborn spirit, existing outside of Time yet one with all levels of our individual and collective beings. I believe proper caring for the soul can mean giving our psychic/subtle self a rest, and not always placing the entire burden of our existence on so fragile a peg. So let us choose carefully how we engage our spirits and souls, for this passion play of a world very much needs us to bring all of who we are to the drama.

Technorati Tags: integral, soul, Spirit, theology