I see the soul as the very act of imagining. Everything we live is imagination. Buddhism teaches us that everything we experience is only as if it were true. In truth, it is a dream, a projection, an imagination.
The soul is the very act of imagining.
The soul is a chthonic, underground dimension and therefore imagines for emotions not rationally. Its imagining is aesthetic and not ethical. So the soul sometimes creates images, events, that produce emotions we call sadness or anger, because it is precisely through these emotions that the soul succeeds or can succeed if we understand it, in taking us beyond the constraints of our mind. These are ethical, moral constraints created for the sole purpose of making us governable, measurable, predictable. The soul tends to break these constraints to lead us into a more natural, broader space where our potential can express itself. It does this precisely through emotions, imagining situations that generate emotions.
I always say that by living, we bring a myth onto the stage of life, and each of us redeems, liberates oneself when one sees this myth. The myth creates a dramatic thickness, in the ancient sense of the term, that is emotional, it’s pathos. The soul is the director of this myth.
You talk about trusting, in some way, the succession of events. We finished recounting a series of crises, problems that are also quite oppressive at a political and social level just moments ago. You often use this term: even in the face of adversity, one must trust. What is the difference between what you say and surrendering? The feeling is that sometimes there is nothing else to do but resign oneself.
Trusting means having faith in the event as an entity, entity, spirit, or image of the soul. It means establishing with that event a relationship that is aesthetic and not ethical, which goes beyond the judgment of good or bad, analysis. A purely emotional relationship. For example, one of my great masters, James Hillman, the great psychoanalyst, saw in this ecological emergency, in front of which we find ourselves, a tool that uses nature to “make soul.” Through this emergency, nature calls us to emotions such as sweet sadness, fragility, nostalgia, sometimes even anger. All those emotions that belong to the great sphere of the eternal feminine, that feminine that we have trampled, removed because it is lunacy and does not please the rational mind, does not please power because it is ungovernable. The feminine is also chaos, and nature is calling us to the soul, and therefore, in the face of this, we should more than ever enter into analysis, into right, wrong, or engage in battles through the mind, which are all patriarchal battles, aimed at power, which replace power with another, never leading to a real solution.
We should be able to enter the great universe of the soul and give an aesthetic, poetic, feminine response. To do this, we must change our method of thinking because we cannot think of helping nature using the same tool, namely the patriarchal mind. We need a new method of thinking, which is ancient actually. We must recover feminine, poetic thinking. I like to call it poetic mind.
I want to provoke you: I strongly agree with the idea of not facing problems with the mentality that has accused them. However, our consumer society has been insisting on femininity for some time now. Articles, television programs talk about male violence as if that were the only issue. In reality, the discourse on the recovery of femininity seems to have produced something worse, a feminine caricature. A kind of great wicked mother. We have states that intrude into our intimacy and even control and correct our words, like a stepmother would. I think this emphasis on femininity ultimately translates into something negative.
This is a political feminism, a mannered one, like environmentalism, which doesn’t solve economic problems. One cannot think that we are moving towards the feminine simply because women are finally voting. Just to reference a popular movie. It’s not because women are gaining the right to vote that we’re reclaiming the feminine. Lessons, voting, are entirely patriarchal phenomena. They are tools of patriarchy. The feminine is not this, it’s night, lunar essence, and even chaos. It’s not the established order of institutions; it’s that chaos from which, as Nietzsche said, the dancing star can emerge. If we truly want to reclaim the feminine, what we must do is reclaim that dark, chthonic, underground dimension we call the soul. Our power to imagine, which has been taken from us by this patriarchal power. Everything we can imagine, we can make happen. That’s why we’ve been blocked. Imagination arises from chaos, from darkness, from night, from lunar, feminine powers. If we truly want to put the feminine back at the center, we must resurrect the one great death, buried in our great culture. Death itself. We live in a culture that sets aside death as if it were a sin, but it’s a natural phenomenon. We shouldn’t die as it happens in a patriarchal society, which is in the mind. We must be capable, before taking the big leap, of consciously living in the soul as well. Only then can we make a conscious transition. So, from life to life, from death to death, we’ll remain vigilant. Reclaiming the feminine means returning to being spherical, as Plato tells us. It was so powerful that it threatened the gods. That’s why Zeus split it in half. In this culture, we’ve become increasingly deprived of feminine, nocturnal powers. We must reclaim them.
You often speak of sweet sadness, especially regarding those dealing with depression, one of the most widespread afflictions of our time. Perhaps it stems from the avoidance of death, of suffering. We, as Western society, always try to avoid dealing with the most challenging aspects. When someone no longer functions properly, they get stuck, then they are abandoned.
These problems stem from a desacralized therapy, that is patriarchal, which filters the soul through diagnostic categories. We are storytelling. If we narrate ourselves through diagnostic categories, it’s obvious that we see all the most powerful traits of the soul as illnesses. Sweet sadness, a powerful tool of the soul and for soul-making, to allow us to dissolve the constraints of the mind, this wonderful tool, filtered through diagnostic categories, becomes depression. Desacralized therapy has imagined so many illnesses, pathologies, all with the sole purpose of continuing to make us normal. In this way, it means governable, measurable, and predictable. We must not aim to normalize ourselves. We must be alive, be free. Freedom is our goal, not normality. We must have the strength to reconsider everything that this culture calls “evil”, “illness”, “discomfort”, “problem”. To see it as a resource, as a message from the soul and a possibility of a broader expression, a broader power. As a possibility to achieve freedom.
Along this path to achieve freedom, you often talk about overcoming what you call “false beliefs,” which are very widespread today. Without delving into the topic of fake news, how do you think one can distinguish a false belief from a true one? What determines the measure of truth in a condition or thought?
There is no true belief. There is neither true nor false. Beyond beliefs, there is the state of non-mind, the knowledge of the present moment. That state in which we are absolutely and totally free and victorious. That to which all esoteric, mystical, and spiritual disciplines and paths lead us. There was one who described the state of non-mind simply. The path of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. In his book, he says, “The warrior must fight in the state of non-mind, the state of knowing the present moment.” That condition in which you don’t think before what you have to do. You know the move you make the moment you make it. If the samurai thinks before what he has to do, he is dead. The samurai must be capable of fighting in the state of non-mind. It means that I have no beliefs of any kind. I don’t believe that my opponent is weak on the left. I don’t even believe that a left side exists. I simply offer myself to the event and allow it to happen. Then I realize that life is always a triumph. A victory, Ananda, joy, and freedom. I realize that what prevented me from being free and victorious was simply my own mind. Who is the enemy? The enemy is always our own mind. That’s why we need to dissolve all our beliefs. Live in the present moment with faith. If you have faith, you don’t need to reason about the event beforehand. You simply make it happen. This is studied by the psychology of the flow state, which I discuss in my book Ikigai, it’s called the psychology of optimal experience. A person can live in this state the moment they are free from beliefs, that is, being in a state of expanded consciousness. Belief is a cage that builds around you and limits you. As Jung said, organs are gods. In this expanded state of consciousness, the inner vision opens and you see your body from within. You don’t see the organs, as Anatomy teaches you, but you see lights. Then you realize that even the organismic model of the body is a belief. Even gender is a belief. Indeed, gender is the belief upon which the entire civilization of good and evil, right and wrong is based. To govern a people, you need ethics, which do not exist in nature, which is aesthetic. The separation of opposites is based on gender, which we impose on nature through our gaze and senses. Our senses are mental operations and the mind inserts gender into nature. It does this by limiting us in the sense of the Self, which is then a limit of space/time. If you can break free from this limitation of space/time, you regain all aspects of yourself. You may remember, if you are a woman, when you were male. But you realize that this state of being happens here and now. Linear time is a mental construction. If you eliminate the mind, you eliminate time. All states of your being occur simultaneously. The true reality is emptiness, which is not nothingness, but vacuity, the desire to give oneself, to offer oneself, love.
