The Cave of the Soul

Recently I came across this description of soul - "Something outside of the world rushes in - a sulfurous mixture that ignites the spark of life where there was none before and carves out a cavernous inner dimension unique to all things."  Phil Cousineau wrote that.  I've been engaged in a personal project to develop a container for my soul, and this passage resonated with my project, suggesting that the original creation of my soul took the shape of a cave.  I like this evocation of a soul-cave, because as I've wondered what it means, to craft this container, I've often imagined a cave as the best possible form. 

You may be wondering why I'm trying to create a container for my soul.  I came across the idea reading either June Singer or Marion Woodman - they were both students of Jung, psychoanalysts who write beautifully, and I tend to mix them up.  I've searched for the reference but it eludes me in print.  In my mind's eye, however, the image is vivid.  A glass jar, a ceramic vase, a cauldron, a cave, a well.  Something bounded and perhaps rather small.  My soul has, these recent years, become too porous, too fluid, too permissive of outside influences.  It has become large enough to contain multitudes, and in the process has misplaced my personal identity.  I'velost track of me in the continuous circuits of obligation and love.  I am so much of the world that I've forgotten my inner lands.  So now I'm creating a sacred space in which to explore those inward dimensions.

The place I go for this exploration is a cave.  When I was a child I played in real caves, limestone, in the woods behind our house.  They were cool and mysterious and encouraged my belief that I'd entered another world.  Today I don't know where to find such caves so I go to my desk in the basement.  I realize that some people would consider a basement to be sub-standard real estate, but I've discovered the magic of this cave.  There is a bookshelf along the concrete wall, filled with my friends of many years.  There are stacks of bins with my daughter's toddler toys.  I've draped the bins with colorful banners, one of Green Tara, others with abstract designs.  I cover my desk in seafoam damask.  I light the cave with candles, at least four, sometimes five.  A bronze statue of Sarawati sits on the desk, presiding over my offering of pebbles and glass beads.  The result is a sumptuous and exotic cavern, a cavernous inner dimension unique to me.

Does my soul ever feel trapped inside its posh new container?  No, because there are so many worlds to visit inside, some of them hundreds of years in the past.  Just yesterday I was visiting with Santayana, who wrote about "Three Philosophical Poets" almost a hundred years ago.  (The poets are Lucretius, Dante and Goethe, for those of you who can't resist the itch of an unenumerated list.)  But his words come into my life today, fresh as when he wrote them.  He was mulling over the ideas of Lucretius as I am mulling over his.  He tells me that Lucretius imagines the soul to be a material thing, the ground of consciousness, which is at the same time the cause of life in the body.  This he conceives to be a swarm of very small and volatile atoms, a sort of ether, resident in all living seeds, breathed in abundantly during life and breathed out at death".

Santayana asks himself, what happens to these small and volatile atoms when one breathes them out the final time?  Would they dissolve, as Lucretius supposed?  On the contrary, he proposes, "consciousness would continue to exist after these atoms had escaped from the body and were shooting through new fields of space.  Indeed, they might be more aroused by that adventure, as a bee might find the sky or the garden more exciting than the hive."

That's exactly the sort of adventure I discover in my cave.  I don't have to wait for death to travel those new fields of space.  Today, sitting here by candlelight, I can feel the atoms of my consciousness go shooting past the walls, past the hills, past the clouds and into the deep black of beyond.  Now they've hitched a ride on a comet that orbits between Saturn and Pluto.  What a view!  Tomorrow they may make it to Alpha Centauri.