In the Upanishads, we are told a story about how, in the beginning, and in his natural state, God the creator (Self) was utterly transparent to himself and entirely known, so much so that in a short while he became bored and invented a game of hide and seek which he began to play with himself. The image is thus of an original, unitary, and divine Self distilled into many beings who are relocated to a mundane, tellurian world where a (theatre) play was devised to keep the illusion (from ludere, to play) alive and make it all very convincing (Maya). But the game was so good, the illusion so real, that the creator Self eventually forgot himself there and became lost. There are countless other stories from mythology that also attest to the original—but lost, missing, or absent—divine nature of the human soul. Accordingly, undoing the inherent agony of being lost in a world where the divinity of one’s own nature remains out of reach is the spiritual work of re-membering to which every human life is yoked by necessity and by design. C. G. Jung called this indispensable spiritual work the teleological nature of the human psyche. James Hillman called it soul-making. The alchemists named it the magnum opus.
Rilke lived it in/through poetry.
When the original Self is transmuted into material physicality, a forgetting occurs. In Plato’s myth of Er, for example, reincarnating souls pass through the river of Lethe (forgetting) so that all knowledge of previous affairs of the soul and of the integrating purpose of the forthcoming life are lost. But apparently, we are not alone on this journey of remembering: an emissary/daimon—the holder of our soul memory/pattern—accompanies us in this rebirth journey. Ira Progoff, in his lecture series “Waking Dream and Living Myth (2010),” offers the image of a newly born soul, calling it an “organic soul” and comparing its nature and process of development to the seed of a plant, much in the same way that Hillman speaks of the acorn theory. The idea is that each individual life contains a specific life pattern within its seed/soul, a pattern which gestates, then, slowly, evolves into a mature specimen of its species. If we think of the original divine Self as a unitary whole, then we can imagine the soul pattern of each individual life as one thread in the giant tapestry of a unitary divinity. In this way, by living out our life pattern (growing from acorn to oak), we each become creative weavers of a jointly held divine destiny. Or, as James Hollis (2010) puts it, “We are asked to become the individual in order that our small portion of the unfolding of the divine may be achieved. To flag or fail in that task is to injure God” (p. 44). In other words, failing to realize our soul pattern impoverishes not just our own, but the transpersonal anima mundi or world soul.
Fusing body with soul and giving it voice through the imaginal language of poetry was the pattern contained in the soul of Rainer Maria Rilke. But the crucial characteristic of this fusion—namely, the part of it which requires work—is beautifully depicted in the tao of Rilke’s inseparable human and soul life. Rilke’s life itself unfolded as a process of religious magnitude precisely because his work involved making god real through art, for, ultimately, it is through art, through the creative act as work, that god (the creator) is born into the world. As Lou Andreas-Salomé explained, this is the very meaning of religion. She explained that each individual contains a piece of god—a unique and personal image of god contained in the seed/soul/psyche—and that by living out this specific, individual life/image we are, in turn, both creating god and being (re)created as god. Our images—human and divine—are thus forever entwined in a double helix of ongoing creative work, of mutual co-creation. As the poetry of soul-making, Rilke’s work is therefore deeply religious for it fuses art, religion, and psychology (the holy trinity) into one unified and inseparable whole. Andreas-Salomé thus identified a condition she named the “religious affect” which calls for both humility and pride since our lives are simultaneously alchemical vessels (bain marie) for the creation of the divine and mere (sinful?) mundanity continually devoid of a divinity who is always absent (playing hide-and-seek), continuously sought, found, and lost again. Archetypal psychology, too, is ultimately “a religious project since its primary concern is for the soul and its relationship with the Gods” (Khoie, 2019, n.p.).
Studying the life and work of Rilke has given me a deeper comprehension of the real meaning of soul-making, a level of understanding which eluded me before. Since my vocation involves becoming a scholar of archetypal psychology I would venture to say that this more in-depth knowledge is of incalculable value not just to my vocational aspirations, but to the ultimate purpose of my life which is to realize essential truth for myself.
Hollis, J. (2010). The archetypal imagination. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press.
Khoie, G. (2019). The religious psyche. [Personal blog]. Retrieved from http://www.gelarehkhoie.com/jungian-studies/2019/9/11/the-religious-psyche
Progoff, I. (2010). Waking dream and living myth. [Audio lecture]. Retrieved from amazon.com