ABSTRACT
When I was young and growing up, I lived in what today can be called a medieval metaphysical world. For me as a child, there was no questioning: I lived in an immortal soul and everyone else did as well. Moreover, each person had something to do for which he or she was responsible, as each was eternally significant. Both the soul and the body were sustained at every moment by God. My great-grandparents who had died still existed somehow in spirit, though to me that meant something that was also body. We could associate with them in prayer; my mother’s mother prayed every day for a year after her mother died, for her soul to pass through purgatory. There was indeed a spiritual world. Members of my family, historical figures, and saints lived there. The unborn were rather vague and lived in a grey area. After I stopped speaking French as a primary language, spoke English instead, and left Catholic school, the sense of the immortal soul and the spiritual world became less vivid but was still present. I found Darwin very exciting to read, for I was also reading Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit who interpreted evolution as an emergence from God, a deployment and intensification of selfconsciousness through matter towards its Alpha and Omega. I studied Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and knew as C. G. Jung did that that critique could never be reduced to “the harmonious interplay of the drives of hunger, love, and power.” (Jung 1969: 341) Rather, Kant’s Critiques, especially his Critique of Practical Reason, reaffirmed in me the hope in spirit as “something” in and for itself, as having its own distinct character, not exactly as self-contained but more as communing with the rest of our world. I felt that each person I knew, or knew of, was an autonomous individual soul, despite whatever else they were. My medieval metaphysical perspective, however, got pushed to the background of my attention as divorce, work, and child-raising came to demand more and more of my energy. I had to learn the ways of the modern world through the daily rigors of my jobs. I had to accept the independent attitudes of my children as they were growing up and then living on their own. Soul and spirit were present to me then mostly in dreams. For many years after his death, the children’s father appeared in my dreams, and we both changed over the years. I recorded my dreams whether big or small, and I participated in Jungian analysis.
