Stunned...

This excerpt about knocked me off my chair this morning: "Philosophy, from Plato and his Neoplatonic followers (especially Plotinus) and from Hegel and his neo-Hegelians, also supports this idea. Its tradition is that even if psyche refers to an individual soul here and now lived by a human being, it always refers equally to a universal principle, a world soul or objective psyche distinct from its individuality in humans. However, of these notions, psyche and human, psyche is the more embracing, for there is nothing of man that soul does not contain, affect, influence, or define. Soul enters into all of man and is in everything human. Human existence is psychological before it is anything else--economic, social, religious, physical. In terms of logical priority, all realities (physical, social, religious) are inferred from psychic images or fantasy presentations to a psyche. In terms of empirical priority, before we are born into a physical body or a social world, the fantasy of child-to-come is a psychic reality, influencing the 'nature' of the subsequent events. But the statement that soul enters into everything human cannot be reversed. Human does not enter into all of soul, nor is everything psycholgical human. Man exists in the midst of psyche; it is not the other way around. Therefore, soul is not confined by man. The soul has inhuman reaches. That the soul is experienced as my 'own' and 'within' refers to the privacy and interiority of psychic life. It does not imply a literal ownership or interiority. The sense of 'in-ness' refers neither to location nor to physical containment. It is not a spatial idea, but an imaginal metaphor for the soul's nonvisible and nonliteral inherence, the imaginal psychic quality within all events. Man can never be large enough to possess his psychic organs; he can be reflect their activities." [Pg. 173, Re-Visioning Psychology]