The Education of the Heart: Readings and Sources from Care of the Soul, Soul Mates

by Thomas Moore

Overview

With their themes of restoring the soul, cultivating humanity and living a more harmonious and spiritual existence, Thomas Moore's classic books Care of the Soul and Soul Mates have touched and comforted millions of people across the country. The Education of the Heart gives readers access to the wellspring of wisdom that Moore drew on when creating these seminal works. 

Ideal for reading groups, the book includes a study guide that offers suggestions for discussion. Selected not only for their brilliance in describing the soul, but for the beauty and power of their language, the essays, poems, songs and passages included here make the book a truly rewarding reading experience. 

Arranged into chapters devoted to topics such as marriage and intimacy, common life, dwelling and home and life passages, these selections are taken from a rich variety of sources: from Greek tragedies and ancient magical texts; from the Renaissance philosophers such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola; and from modern archetypal psychologists such as C. G. Jung and James Hillman.

As Thomas Moore says in his introduction, "Meditate on the book, read the passages aloud, write them down for future reference, tell them to friends, commit them to memory; These are all ways of educating the heart."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060928605
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/04/1997
Series:	Harper Perennial
Edition description:	Large Print
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

Thomas Moore is the author of the bestselling Care of the Soul and twenty other books on spirituality and depth psychology that have been translated into thirty languages. He has been practicing depth psychotherapy for thirty-five years. He lectures and gives workshops in several countries on depth spirituality, soulful medicine, and psychotherapy. He has been a monk and a university professor, and is a consultant for organizations and spiritual leaders. He has often been on television and radio, most recently on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday.

Read an Excerpt

What Is the Soul?

Those who have written about the soul, both in the distant past and in the present, give the impression that the soul is something intimate, known to us more directly than anything else, and yet at the same time elusive, indescribably profound, not entirely knowable, not within our control, and not completely our personal possession. While it is tempting to define and sketch the structures of the soul, in the end it may be better to speak directly from our experience and intuitions. The descriptions that follow require meditation, not argument, and they invite us never to end our speculating, our search for language that might convey something of the qualities of this elusive aspect of our very being.
You could never arrive at the limits of the soul, no matter how many roads you traveled, so deep is its mystery.
heraclitus

Since the soul animates the body, just as the soul is animated by the spirit, she tends to favor the body and everything bodily, sensuous, and emotional. She lies caught in "the chains" of Physis, and she desires "beyond physical necessity." She must be called back by the "counsel of the spirit" from her lostness in matter and the world. This is a relief to the body too, for it not only enjoys the advantage of being animated by the soul but suffers under the disadvantage of having to serve as the instrument of the soul's appetites and desires.
c. g. jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis

If there were only two things in the world, mind and body, but no soul, then the mind would not be involved with the body, because it is fixed and emotionless and very distant from physical life. Nor would the body have anything to do with themind, because by itself it is inept and powerless. It is also far removed from the mind. But if soul is placed between these two, adjusted to the nature of each, then one will easily become involved with the other.
marsilio ficino, Book of Life

For the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceedeth obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceedeth.
ralph waldo emerson, Self-Reliance

But in order that a man's soul should quit his body, it is not necessary that he should be asleep. It may quit him in his waking hours, and then sickness or (if the absence is prolonged) death will be the result. Thus the Mongols sometimes explain sickness by supposing that the patient's soul is absent, and either does not care to return to its body or cannot find the way back. To secure the return of the soul it is therefore necessary on the one hand to make its body as attractive as possible, and on the other hand to show it the way home. To make the body attractive all the sick man's best clothes and most valued possessions are placed beside him; he is washed, incensed, and made as comfortable as possible; and all his friends march thrice round the hut calling out the sick man's name and coaxing his soul to return. To help the soul to find its way back a coloured cord is stretched from the patient's head to the door of the hut. The priest in his robes reads a list of the horrors of hell and the dangers incurred by souls which wilfully absent themselves from their bodies. Then turning to the assembled friends and the patient he asks, "Is it come?" All answer Yes, and bowing to the returning soul throw seed over the sick man. The cord which guided the soul back is then rolled up and placed round the patient's neck, who must wear it for seven days without taking it off. No one may frighten or hurt him, lest his soul, not yet familiar with its body, should again take flight.
james g. frazer, The Golden Bough

By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment—and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate—an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence—that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it by itself apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives one the sense of having or being a soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.
In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggested that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. These four qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.
james hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology