Many pseudo-spiritual teachings tell you that you can change the world, that you can even “conjure” a million for yourself. But that has nothing to do with the spiritual. In fact, it is a path towards self-destruction. Let me explain why. Descartes saw the human being as a union of soul and body, and from that union come passions—our dependencies, which have no existential meaning of their own. He considered the soul a kind of substance peculiar to human beings.
Today we could say that a person has two levels of soul: a lower, Animal Soul and a higher, Divine Soul. The lower level exists in all living creatures and is responsible for the most primitive things—instincts. But I mean not only the instincts described by behaviourists, but also a certain existential aspect of them.
What is behaviourism? It describes the human being as a kind of biological automaton. One of its best-known representatives is Pavlov. I hope everyone remembers his experiments. This is a necessary and useful line of inquiry, but, as often happens in science, by breaking things into parts we lose sight of the whole.
What is existential meaning? It is whatever gives meaning to your life: the meaning of your actions and deeds, the meaning of those same archetypes. Without meaning, a person falls into depression and suffers. Without meaning, evolution does not happen. Meaning is the most important thing driving life. Even things you consider meaningless have meanings of their own; you simply do not see them. Even in psychopathic behaviour, actions or rituals have a meaning, and that meaning, although it may be a trap for the sufferer, seems existential to them.
So let us be clear: we have the Animal Soul (a level) and the Divine Soul. The Animal Soul consists of bodily instincts and the existential meaning of those instincts. The Divine Soul consists of our emotions and thoughts, together with the meanings they carry.
Now let us place the Divine Soul above and the Animal Soul below. To illustrate this, we can use the Tarot de Marseille. I recommend the Conver, CBD and Lo Scarabeo versions; Jodorowsky’s version is more complex in its symbolic content. If you intend to work with this symbolism yourself, it is better to have the deck to hand.
Here we have the twenty-first trump, The World. We see a maiden dancing inside a wreath, with four evangelical creatures in the corners. This card is, above all, a diagram of your inner world, your microcosm. The upper creatures represent the Divine Soul; the lower ones, the Animal Soul. Now let us examine each creature separately.
The Bull is our body and everything connected with it: the automatic part of the soul and our instincts. Look carefully: unlike the other creatures, the Bull has no halo. This points to gross matter—or rather, the halo indicates a spiritual nature, while the Bull represents the physical. This is what behaviourists study. The bodily level is always a given; we are accustomed to seeing it as the past. The bodily always gravitates towards the past. But this animal, bodily component has no will, or rather no meaning to drive it further, because it is precisely from meaning that Will is born. On the card, Will is represented by the Lion.
The Lion represents the existential meanings of the Animal Soul. It is still part of the Animal Soul, but the active part, the one that gives everything its drive. These are our desires, for desires arise from meanings. For example, wanting to eat has a clear existential meaning: the continuation of life. If you do not eat, you die. That is a primitive meaning, but it sustains not only our own lives; it drives evolution itself. Reproduction, too, carries existential meaning, though in a broader sense: the life of a family line, a tribe, an entire species… So the Lion represents all our desires. Desires are always directed towards the future.
There is another division in this card, between left and right, past and future. This is very important.
Feelings, Thoughts, and the Origins of Trauma
The human being, or angel, represents the sphere of feeling: the higher part of our instincts, everything that gives us experiences. Love and anger, joy and sadness—our entire emotional range. Though sadness and anger are about the absence of joy and love, but that is a separate matter. This is our emotional plane. Through emotions, we adjust our behaviour to circumstances. Emotions give us the feeling of satisfaction. But emotions are always about the past: we draw on past experience, and so emotions live in the past. Yet emotions without meaning become a dependency. Our thoughts give them meaning, and thoughts are represented by the Eagle.
The Eagle is our reasoning, our mental constructions. At the same time, it is the existential component of the Divine Soul, the meaning of emotions. We have thoughts so that we can discover meanings of a higher order than simply eating and conceiving children. Here we reflect on the overarching meaning of life, on gods, our actions, morality and social institutions. Thoughts are always about the future, or rather, they look towards the future. A clear example: we recall something bad from the past and become sad because the unconscious projects a similar experience into the future, provoking unpleasant emotions. In our minds, we are always carried into the future. Even while remembering the past, you will involuntarily slip into the future, because meanings, too, are always in the future.
Now look at the whole picture. We have a body that experiences stimuli and satisfies its needs through desire. As soon as we have emotional reactions to those stimuli, they make us think about their nature, giving them meaning and bringing forth the Divine Soul. In other words, all of this must work together.
And here we move from Descartes to Spinoza. Spinoza saw the human being not as two separate opposing entities, but as different aspects of a single essence. Now look at the Maiden herself: she holds a wand with two ends. Is that not a sign of the unity of the soul?
For a balanced person, represented here by the Maiden, life goes well. Such a person does not take on things they cannot manage and therefore does not injure themselves with an unbearable burden. They do not grieve over the past, because the past is the past and has no place in the future; consequently, neither does trauma.
So where does trauma come from? Trauma is an emptiness: when our actions bear no fruit, when our desires bring no satisfaction, when our expectations collapse. But all of this can be avoided by becoming aware of what is happening. Let us look at how traumatisation occurs. Your body experiences a need; the need gives rise to desire; satisfaction or dissatisfaction brings emotions; emotions give rise to reflection; reflection creates constructs and convictions that tell us what is good and what is bad.
Suppose the body needs food. It signals this need, and the body produces the desire to eat. When we eat something delicious, we feel pleasure. Pleasure gives rise to the thought that we should eat it again. Now imagine that we remember this food and our thoughts already create an expectation of how it will taste. But the expectation is disappointed: the food has gone bad. There you have a simple trauma. You will certainly remember this and return to the sensation so that next time you can tell bad food from good.
But food is a useful example. You will not torment yourself over it. You value the experience because you know that the failure and unpleasant sensation will protect you from similar situations in the future. This is a rational response. But what about the irrational—about feelings?
Suppose you enter a relationship that first satisfies the Animal Soul, but the pleasure you experience also leaves its trace in the Divine Soul. Then betrayal occurs, and you are traumatised. You cannot explain to yourself why it happened; you have no rational answer, and so the trauma carries no meaning. Trauma without meaning is a path to suffering.
The Trap of Prohibitions and the Cult of Success
The simplest way to avoid being traumatised is to shut off thinking and feeling, and live through the Animal Soul alone. But this leads to the degradation of the species, because all our development takes place precisely on the plane of the Divine Soul. Every great discovery, every achievement, all the conveniences you enjoy—including the internet through which you are reading this text—are the fruits of the Divine Soul. So what should we do?
People take a simple route: they establish a system of restrictions and prohibitions. This is the most primitive kind of sectarianism, yet it produces results. A ban on philosophising, a requirement to suppress bad thoughts with prayer, and so on.
There is a second option, a more cunning product of consumer culture: the cult of “successful success”. You are told that your goal is, say, social recognition and money, and that this is what you must desire, because poor people are unworthy weaklings (hello, Jesus). This is presented as an existential goal you must reach, and it is implanted in the Divine Soul. But the desire for success and wealth corresponds to the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, to the Animal Soul. In other words, you are handed false meanings and ideals. Suppose you do reach your goal, at least to some extent. What next? You discover that you have nowhere further to go. You have no meaning, so you find it at the bottom of a bottle, like so many celebrities.
Pseudo-spiritual teachings pull the same trick. They tell you how you will control this or that, how you will become a great and terrible magician, how you will learn to change your life with a snap of your fingers. But once again, this is all on the lower level of Maslow’s hierarchy, while it is sold to you as some kind of spiritual purpose. Personally, I find such things repulsive. This is spiritual filth and perversion, whose endpoint is an existential crisis and depression.
People become wealthy not because they think about wealth, but because they set the right existential goals. Someone invents a device that frees people from illness. Their purpose was to free people from illness. That is a great goal; it belongs to the level of the Divine Soul. Wealth comes as a consequence.
Ask yourself: why do you need this wealth? To build a factory that makes such devices, or to squander money indulging the base desires of the Animal Soul?
And here is an important point. Those who make wealth an end in itself cannot satisfy the existential hunger of the Divine Soul, so they become addicted to satisfying the Animal Soul instead. But this is merely a simulation. The hunger of the Divine Soul grows, and then something terrible happens. The “hungry spirits” arrive—that is what I call the insatiable desires to which a person makes themselves a servant. That is why the most important thing in life is to meet our needs as a whole. Only then can we become whole and happy, even without Maybachs and millions in the bank.