Soul Speaking is a weekly session I run in the Silver Branch, hosted by The Walled Garden Philosophical Society.

Today in Soul Speaking we spoke about the inescapable phenomenon of having a dual perspective on Life and as a life. Here are some thoughts about how we stand in the heart of that duality and how the existence of that tension is not indicative that something is wrong, but rather that we are alive, after all

The secret aim of Tension is Transformation

The Tension of Literal vs Figurative

We all have both a Left and a Right brain way of thinking. The Left brain is our very literal language and ways of thinking and relating to the world on one side of that duality of experience, and our figurative language, our metaphoric, poetic and archetypal ways of standing in relation to all of life on the other. This is the tension between Logos (reason) and Mythos (imagination), and we discovered in our session today that we need both, we need to develop ways of holding the dialogue with emerging reality in both of those two languages at the same time.

The Tension of Being vs Becoming

In another sense, we are suspended in the tension of another pair of poles Astrologers refer to as our North Node and our South Node. These are the two forms of compelling and impelling that we recognise as soul calling, the ways in which we aim to feel ‘whole’ and ‘home’. These are the two ways in which we are drawn either to projects of healing, overcoming, processing where we came from and what we endured to get here, which we call South Node, or to projects of getting “There”, of Becoming and attaining, some star in the sky we are drawn to follow.

We begin to understand that our modern education and society normalises the idea that we need to choose one or the other, or that one is a more worthy project than the other. We of course need to do both, and the only way to accommodate both, to make room for both in a life is via cadence, rhythm, cycles of Being and Becoming, cycles of actualisation and integration.

The answer
to the riddle
of Being versus Becoming,
is stepping behind
our intentionality
of where
we would wish to be
and stepping into
an acceptance
of where we are now,
over and over and over again,
until we realise
it is a dance.

The Tension of Regret and Meaning

We can imagine getting to the end of our life and tallying up all our lived experiences, our investments of energy and attention into two columns: The one column is about everything we would do again if we had our time again, we can call this column Meaning. The other would be everything that we wish we had done or chosen differently. We can call this column Regret. That is what it comes right down to in the end.

The grand tally will be how deeply we were engaged in the Conversation of Life. If we are very honest and grown-up in reflecting on this analogy, we will have to admit to ourselves that there can be no life without some regret. The kind of regret we are talking about in the second column is where we are ultimately ashamed of the regret.

That has to mean that in the end, it comes down to the choices we make either from Love or from Fear.

Any cost or harm we endure in doing something we find great meaning in—like saving the life of a child or standing up for human rights—any sense of regret we might feel is not only negated but actually imbues the attempt and the outcome with a greater sense of meaning. As Viktor Frankl said: “A man that has a sufficient ‘why’ can endure almost any ‘how’”

Purpose is the antidote to regret.

The Invitation

At first, the caterpillar is like every other caterpillar, eating its way to a ‘fullness of oblivion’, a fullness for which there is no such thing as ‘enough’. In the end, the butterfly is the unique expression of life itself, the culmination of transformation, and profound surrender, which is itself a fullness of form and purpose, and therefore meaning.

The caterpillar has a greater purpose than it can attach to.

The inevitable Fate of the Caterpillar is Disappearance, but its Destiny is Transcendence, potentially.

In its first, unawakened state, the conversation our caterpillar is concerned with is around a ‘form’ of fulfilment, and in that concern is carried a kind of unspoken question or questions, one of which perhaps can be framed as “Where do I find more?”

The most accurate summation of the conversation of the caterpillar is best described in its essential nature as ‘a Will to Receive’.

The Invitation of Today’s session is to explore the kinds of questions the caterpillar might hold as its Conversation with life, without giving it human traits, that is understanding that we are not trying to anthropomorphise the caterpillar but rather to draw a parallel between our own state of assuming the ‘conversation’ we are having with life is as big, important and relevant to our destiny and our fullness of purpose and meaning that is yet to unfold beyond a horizon we have no context for and no language to describe.

We don’t know the questions the caterpillar asks, but we can be sure they are very small—limited to its current frame of existence, which is always, by definition, ignorant of the journey that will yet unfold and the transcendent destiny that potentially awaits.