The Art of Inner Work -VI-

“Out of psyche-pathos-logos came the meaning of suffering of the soul, or the soul’s suffering of meaning.”

~ James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology

The Soul’s “suffering of meaning”. Out of ‘what’ do we make soul?

Not through literal personalistic outer ‘therapies’, nor through infantile spiritual transcendence without shadow.

Instead, through the medium of fantastic spontaneous bizarre images and narratives that spring up from the depths; through suffering, death and brooding, comes perhaps the emergence of the symbol, and then finally an opportunity to experience, however briefly, ‘meaning’ and the making of soul.

It occurs not in the physical world nor the spiritual, but in the metaphorical ‘vale of tears’.

Call the world, if you please, “the Vale of Soul Making”.

Then you will find out the use of the world….

~ John Keats

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