Kafiri posed this topic to me recently in an e-mail, and at first I thought it was just a matter of semantics, but as I started to think about my own differentiation between and definitions of soul and spirit, I realized that this little semantic problem holds a great deal of psychological significance. Even for an atheistic bloke like me who isn't very keen on "ghost in the machine" notions.
Of course I still think there is a high degree of arbitrariness in the definitions of spirit and soul, but I can see now that one's definitions of these things end up saying a great deal about the way one thinks and relates to data, whether psychic or material.
So, I'll give this a shot.
Soul. Non-ego psychic contents that behave like matter. That is, we are perceiving our non-egoic psyche egoically, and therefore symbolically and narratively, but the specific contents that can be described as "soul" appear to abide by natural laws of matter. For instance, these soul contents might exhibit libido, energy, force. They might seem to seek equilibrium; this is, they might compensate oppositional (egoic or social) forces. They may be perceived as intelligent, but only in an instinctual or "animal" way. That is, their perceived intelligence is reflexive and seeks to survive or achieve equilibrium with a specific environment. They might "know" intuitively, but do not think abstractly with intellectual paradigms. Their "thoughts" feel tangible (willful and directed at matter or action in the world) are directed by libido and put toward an instinctual, living action like emergence, healing, growth, evolution, adaptation, aggression, altruism, empathy.
Soul is instinctual and never loosed from the biological materiality of instinct. The archetypes of the unconscious are soul. They are willful and likely to appear very complex at times . . . in the way nature expresses its complexity. With elegance and purpose.
The perception of soul is often very difficult, because we will always personify it, project our egos onto it, anthropomorphize it. When soul is at its most complex, it will seem divine and mysterious to us, perhaps even seeming far beyond our capacity for comprehension. Although this anthropomorphism is inevitable, it tends to misrepresent the soul, making it at times appear very much like spirit.
This is where the need for a differentiation between spirit and soul becomes important. This differentiation allows soul to be soul without the ego's excessive spiritualization or making over of soul in its own image. We can see this kind of make-over easily in Christianity. The Old Testament Yahweh behaved instinctually, rashly, willfully, often irrationally. He did not make sense by the ego's terms. But the Christianization of God involves the re-representation of God by a man, Jesus, the Son. Jesus becomes a more approachable, more human, more egoic face of God. He can think rationally. He is more concerned with human needs and feelings. He is also largely stripped of the chthonic, instinctual, willfulness of Yahweh. That is, he isn't compensatory. He is an ego facilitator (as used by tribal Church dogma . . . archetypally, Christ represents the super-adaptive individual or Logos principle, a problem the Church has addressed with a combination of the totemic taboo against individuality as represented by the crucifix-scarecrow and the abstraction or totemic deification of the godman . . . enforced with totalitarian brutality and propaganda and systematic purgings of heretics and infidels).
The symbolic alchemical process of extracting the spirit from matter is, I believe, equivalent to making a differentiation between the soul and the spirit. The soul is "purified" of the spirit (in my opinion . . . rather than the other way around), and the spirit is reformulated into a separate extract that is then consciously directed at the soul out of curiosity, attraction, and a sense of religious devotion.
Spirit. The contents of the ego that respond to and are directed at the soul or instinctual, unconscious psyche. The spirit, then, is initially very mythologically inclined. As the ego perceives the soul only hazily, via non-linguistic, instinctual willfulness that compensates and balances ego-strategies and pours libido into the ego's pursuit of soul ("spiritual pursuit"), the ego is largely responsible for bringing words and abstract form to what it senses. The initial impulse of the ego is to project the urgings of the soul's instinctuality out into the world, into objects and other people and animals. This results in animism.
A later stage (perhaps driven by increasingly large societies where diversity demands that the reality function of human consciousness adapt by recognizing that more animistic or totemized people and objects don't have true power over the individual or tribe) would involve an abstraction of the gods. The gods are no longer in trees and rivers and forests, but in the sky, in heaven. They are incorporeal. But the attitude toward the gods is the same. I.e., they are Other. They are powerful. They are "out there". And we must still cater to their wills in order to survive or prosper.
The spiritual drive, that drive that encourages us to turn toward the gods (the soul) even at the sacrifice of our well-being, at times, constructs a symbolic path or spiritual quest. On the spiritual quest, the ego is restructured in accordance with the perceived will of the gods. But the spiritual quest tends to produce substantial abstractions as part of the mythos it sheds as it moves along. Laws, hierarchies, disciplines and the minutia of belief. In general, the more of these abstract products there are, the more the ego is "contaminating" the soul. All too often spiritual pursuits bog down when the abstract products of spiritualism become the objects of worship and motivation . . . instead of the gods/soul themselves. In fact this "spiritual mania" is a constant with all spiritual pursuits . . . and it's a bitch to work through.
Most spiritually-inclined people never learn how to deal with the problem of mistakenly obscuring the gods behind the totems of belief and egoic abstraction. The totemic beliefs are more attractive than the gods. They are easier to relate to and easier to control . . . because the Otherness of the gods has been subdued. In fact, the subduing of the soul's Otherness is often seen as a positive aspect of the spiritual quest. "Get thee behind me, Satan!" and so forth.
Regrettably, at this point spiritual systems are no longer adaptive, because they are not in true contact with the soul. In Jungian terms, the shadow has been repressed. When Jung stated that individuation was a movement toward wholeness rather than perfection, he was saying (in my interpolation) that the individuant must decide to seek the soul at the expense of spirit. This is an act that requires consciousness. Spiritual pursuits that lack a soul dimension do not require consciousness. They begin in unconscious instinctuality, but they tend to plateau in belief systems.
The process of transmutation described in hermetic alchemy is a shifting of intentionality from spiritual beliefs onto soul pursuits. But the entirety of the first alchemical opus is a development of spiritual consciousness (albeit soul-directed spiritual consciousness). The learning of the Logos (a language that accurately reflects the Will of the Self/soul/gods) is the goal of the first opus, and the Logos is an egoic creation. More accurately, it is a co-creation between the ego and the Self . . . but the ego constructs the language, and must learn how to construct a "temple" of language in which the Will of the Self can be recognized (by the ego) and responded to. That is, the Logos is a gnostic, spiritual pursuit. With it, the ego seeks to know the Self/soul more and more precisely and intimately . . . by paring away the unnecessary beliefs and projections. But the gnostic drive is entirely fueled by the spiritual instinct, the instinctual drive that pushes the ego into increasingly healthy relationship with the instinctual Self. In other words, to seek gnosis, to know, is compatible with spiritual pursuits. The spiritual endeavor need not end in belief . . . and, in many cases, such an end marks a reneging on the "spiritual pact" between the ego and the soul. Gnosis reveals and revitalizes the soul, whereas belief mystifies and obscures or totemizes the soul.
But despite the egoism innate to spiritual pursuits, such pursuits are not entirely egoic or projected, imagined, or abstracted. The drive to pursue the soul, to know the soul intimately, is as much an instinctual drive as any soul drive. This spiritual instinct is basically the same thing as what I call the super-adaptive instinct, albeit at a slightly earlier, more mythologized stage. That is, when we think of spiritual drives or pursuits, we are still perceiving the soul and its Will entirely egoically (even as our Logos has become increasingly refined). But when I use the term, super-adaptive instinct, I am trying to see this instinct from outside, more scientifically . . . not as a character on the stage sees another character in the play, the fiction . . . but as a member of the audience sees the character (i.e., as both the actor and the part played in the fiction of the theater).
What this means is that the spiritual pursuit taken far enough will run into a problem: even the will to pursue the soul or the gods is itself a will of the gods. The instinct that seemed so personal, so heroic, so much a piece of conscious personality, so much an "attainment", turns out to be partially Other. At this point, a further differentiation is required, as is a sacrifice by the ego. The ego must learn (should it choose to pursue gnosis) to reattribute the heroic, spiritual Will that fueled its quest and achievements to the instinctual unconscious (the soul). The soul, in essence, acted through the ego in order to draw the ego into a reciprocal relationship with it (the soul).
This is the process described in the second alchemical opus. Here the ego is "de-spiritualized", and the spirit (via the super-adaptive instinct) is re-infused into matter. That is, we recognize that the spiritual drive that guided this process is instinctual and Other and it behaves like matter. It is libidinous and willful. It wants to adapt, to live in equilibrium with the environment. It is not a Calling to withdrawal from life and toward some abstract, heavenly, egoic paradigm of the spiritual . . . some place where the ego that has followed the spiritual path is rewarded by being reabsorbed into the soul or primal unconscious. There is no heaven, no nirvana, no attainment of a higher plane of existence, no transcendence at the end of the spiritual journey. All of this must be sacrificed in order to recognize that the Will of the Self wants to adapt to and reciprocate libido with the material environment.
So, whereas the first opus draws the ego deeper and deeper inward, toward the instinctual source of libido . . . the second opus is concerned with the ego learning to channel the soul's libido outward into the world, into the act of adaptive living. The very idea of reward for one's spiritual achievements must be thrown on the flames for this to take place . . . and that is no easy sacrifice to make. But the spiritual quest leads one to the understanding that the ego is meant to facilitate the instinctual Self and not vice versa. The idea that the Self provides for the ego (in relationship to the ego's "goodness" in abiding by the Self's Will) ends up being a fallacy. The ego is the provider for the Self . . . and only as an organ of the Self does the ego find sustenance in its Self-sustaining actions.
Of course this is much easier said than done, and I want to reiterate the enormity of this sacrifice, which may sound all too simple in words.
Generally, when we talk about spirituality, we are not talking about the second opus. The vast majority of spiritualists wouldn't even recognize the Work of the second opus as spiritual at all. It will generally be perceived by them as anti-spiritual, even atheistic, and perhaps even a descent into rationalism. That is, the second opus cannot be easily differentiated by people who are immersed in a muddied Logos of belief and blind faith and projection. This generic spiritualist will only see shadow in the description or portrayal of the second opus.
As Useless Science is in many ways dedicated to making sense out of the second opus (or constructing a Logos for it), I can only say that I am all too familiar with this phenomenon.
