….Generally we only ever seriously ask about the nature of the Soul, the Mind and the Psyche when we’ve had a crisis in life or experienced an encounter with our own mortality. We begin asking questions when, as Joseph Campbell describes, we hear the call to adventure in our own Hero’s Journey. Often this comes when we’re transitioning one of life’s major stages like puberty, marriage, or having children; it also often comes when we’re grieving, when we’re confronting serious illness or when we ourselves are faced with either the sudden shock of our potential demise or with some kind of spiritual crisis or cultural crisis that shifts the ground of meaning beneath us. In many cases we don’t enter this treacherous maze willingly. We find ourselves suddenly lost in it with no map.
A crisis of meaning can happen during major life decisions or as a consequence of external events like disasters, war, famine, plague or social collapse that throws us into the darkness of the unknown.
It can also happen in brief moments of wonder, like looking up at the magnificence of a dark, clear night sky, and seeing, as a great Canadian poet said, “the constellations reveal themselves one star at a time.” In these moments, if they are profound enough, we naturally begin to ask the big questions: Who am I? Why is this happening? Why did this happen to me or to us? What hand hung those stars upon the heavens? Those moments are like doorways that open in our lives into the Psychic world; into the mysteries; it brings us to the crossroads, into the world of the soul, and for most of us this is a deeply unfamiliar place.
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