Part 1 of 7 in the Soul Reboot Series, each post exploring a different aspect of what we mean when we say “Soul is what is missing when Life feels wrong.”
In this post, we explore an idea we get from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language define the limits of my world” and what it means to enter into and really participate in the Great Conversation.
What is the Great Conversation?
I watched a powerful TED talk once, by a renowned poet called David Whyte. Up until that moment, the place that poetry itself had in my life was ambiguous. I liked it, I had written some poetry, but like so many of us, I had never been properly initiated into what the project of poetry actually was. There was a part of me, when hearing some poetry that spoke an off-the-cuff critique saying “If you have something to say, just say it.”
The flaw in that critique, I discovered, is that we have been taught to be ever so literal about everything. In the modern world, we have helped to create, there is too much happening all the time, too much context and demands on our energy and attention for us to be anything but precise and direct and literal. Inversely, our modern lives are also overwhelming, and there is too much happening, too much context and demands on our energy and attention for us to process at all, in order to work out which bits we need to integrate and which bits we can safely ignore. Steadily, after so many alarming news cycles, around COVID, bushfires, the war in Ukraine now Palestine, and all the other drama and ugliness we have to constantly process, has taken its toll.
Once upon a time, we used to gather on the playground at school, around the water cooler in the office and we could share about what our thoughts and experiences were, about the movies that had come out and the biggest news stories that dominated the conversation. We used to listen to the radio, hear the same crappy ads, the same top 20 songs. We used to live in the same world. And in that shared world, we had a shared language to describe what we were experiencing.
Now we binge-watch our own private streams. Our social media platforms provide us a feed that does not look like someone else’s. We listen to our own streaming music playlists, and social media is a terrible gathering place to discuss and share what we are experiencing in the world. The internet is such an insidious and dividing force that even when we run the same Google search, the results you and I get are not the same, each being designed by an algorithm based on analysis of your browsing and shopping history, as is mine. We live in different worlds without a shared language to explain what we are experiencing or understand what is happening to us. Now with political correctness, social justice and cancel culture, we have been scared off of saying what we actually feel at times, afraid of the costs of speaking our mind, well or badly. We shaped our environment and now our environments have shaped the lives we life in them.
The world is changing too rapidly, for us to keep up and it becomes easier to withdraw than to remain vulnerable to having our words misconstrued or be thought of as something we are not, simply because we do not have the skill to explain ourselves and hold our ground. We no longer feel as though we are surrounded by a society that wants to make allowances for human fallibility. We don’t have adequate shared language for redemption, apology, or even for walking away.
The TED Talk by David Whyte introduced me to an idea he calls The Conversational Nature of Reality. At its essence, his thesis is that reality is not a fixed or static thing that we observe and interact with from a distance. Instead, it is a dynamic interplay of relationships and conversations — not just with other people but with all aspects of our environment, including our work, our ideas, and the natural world. The language we hold the conversation in, determines the way we see the world and ourselves.
The premise of this idea is that whatever we expect of the world, our heartfelt desires we have in the context of our relationships, our children, our careers, our health even, are expectations that almost always are challenged by what shows up in reality. Equally, we live under the tension of expectations our relationships, our careers and even our identities demand of us—expectations which we invariably fail at.
In between these two territories of expectation is a frontier that is always arriving, and ourselves caught at the raw and livid edge of what is unfolding. In this unfolding is where we encounter the truth of ourselves, not when we are in autopilot mode, but when caught unawares by what is arriving, and how we always seem to be disappearing and arriving ourselves. And only when we stop to consider an idea like this do we begin to understand how little time we spend present at this unfolding edge, and how illiterate we feel trying to hold that conversation. Perhaps a better way to say it, is that when we try to engage with Life and our key relationships, our expectations of the world, and the expectations of the world on us, in the paradigm of the literal, we inevitably become overwhelmed.
“Poetry is a language for which we have no natural defences.”
David Whyte
During that same TED Talk, it dawned on me how a language like poetry can speak in a figurative, non-literal, way, and say things that bypass a lot of technical minutiae, and a lot of practised dishonesty by which we attempt to hold the conversation of Life. We are afraid of being honest, not so much because we are dishonest in ourselves, but because there is such an enormous price to speaking your truth, and we find discretion the better part of valour. It is easier to say nothing than to face the outrage and judgement of people who cannot make room for us saying something badly and being curious about what we actually mean.
Songwriting, art, dance even, and especially poetry are languages that people resort to, to bleed out what ails them, to express some aspect of their discomfort of being, which they can no longer suffer holding inside themselves. Poetry for me is not just about flowery metaphors, it is a kind of journalism of the soul, a way in which we can speak the truth, or hear it spoken, which bangs the gong of a feeling we hold inside that we never knew someone else also felt too.
WILD GEESE by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Our left-brain mental processing does not have a view of the world and its place in it. Instead, the left brain is designed to break wholes into parts, analysing and abstracting, categorising, naming and theorising, then passing the results of its analysis to the right brain to be integrated into lived experience. The problem is that the left brain is prone to imagine it “knows” things it cannot possibly know, usurps its role and projects its own partial, definite vision of the world onto the world's essentially ambiguous reality. Poetry, myth, symbolism, metaphors, colour, music, archetypes—these are the language of the right brain’s way of making sense of the world and of itself. It is this part of us that provides our primary connection to the world.
When we look at the world, our jobs, our relationships and ourselves in the language of the literal, the world can seem a very troubled place. Without realising it, we all carry, very deeply, secret prayers for Meaning. We want to know that the suffering we see, the loss and dysfunction in the world, and the lack of kindness and joy are not the result of us all being cast adrift in a cold and meaningless universe. When we watch what is unfolding in the world and think that there might be no meaning to any of it, when we feel a call to do our part in the world, but we cannot find an authentic sense of purpose inside of ourselves, the most natural response in the world is anxiety and depression. When we realise so few of our friends and loved ones are able to sit with this kind of existential discomfort it is the most natural response in the world to feel isolated and lonely. When we are expected to show up in our relationships and at work, with enthusiasm, unwavering energy and creativity, we become depleted.
It is impossible to feel that you belong when this is your real truth.
Here is The Remedy
From the very modern clarity this reveals to the very old, the ancient Greeks, believed there were two languages with which we might hold the Conversation of Life. They used these two languages to describe the world, their place in it, and the experiences that this created. They called these languages Logos (Reason) and Mythos (Imagination). They lived with the idea that Wisdom was the ability to hold the Conversation of Life, and with Life, in both Languages, at the same time. They called this being Double-Minded.
Myth is a way of saying things that are not literally true, but which nevertheless conspire to illuminate something fundamentally true about life and the world. Conversely, our modern culture enshrines facts and details that are all literally true, but somehow are welded together in a way that creates a lie.
Hearing stories, myths and poetry restores us to a mythic state where we can become open again to ways of understanding the chaos and overwhelm of life—the only way we can become authentically oriented again to a context of meaning.
The invitation of this post is not for us to abandon our sense of reason, and simply ignore all the facts and details, but rather to simply not make that the whole of the conversation. Our sense of meaninglessness and overwhelm is a product of that left-brain reductionist logic left unchecked. When this happens, we mistakenly apply a mundanity to our own story and we can be fooled into believing that our journeys are meaningless and we regard the miracle of ourselves as trivial.
If left unchecked and unchallenged, this notion is inflated to the point that it can drown out and eclipse its natural equalising force: our sense of soul, our sense of symbolism, myth and metaphor; Our sense of Meaning. The way to claim our place in the great conversation is to orientate ourselves back into the mythic heart of our own adventure.
We don’t need to know how to hold a conversation to allow ourselves to belong to a conversation. The learning how to hold it, is part of the conversation. We all have internal chatter going on all the time, holding furious internal debates. We all wake up in the morning and go to bed at night holding the shape of troubling questions on our hearts. We simply need to practice speaking them, and to make space for the idea that we are in a conversation with life, not simply rudderless passengers in all of this.
Here are two ways you can claim your place in the great conversation:
REDEFINING YOUR STORY
Here are some questions we can sit with, and really allow our soul to speak, to allow an overdue challenge to the smallness of the narrative we currently hold.
What is the narrative of my story? Is it a dry account, a child’s fantasy? Is it epic?
What is the genre of my story? It is a redemption arc, a comeback story, or a tragedy?
How near or bold are the limits that define my horizons? What is the scope of my story, does it cover me, my loved ones, or something larger?
Where do I stand in all of this—what role do I play in this narrative? What archetypes define my identity?
Is this the beginning, middle or the end of my story?
PRAYER
Most of us think of prayer as something that religious or superstitious people do to entreat God for clemency, forgiveness, blessings or good health. As David Whyte said, “…whatever context or horizon we feel is beyond us and that is beckoning us, is in an essence our spiritual invitation in the world.”
The invitation is to see prayer, as a sacred conversation between you and whatever context or horizon you feel is beyond you, beckoning you forward towards growth, change, acceptance, healing and ultimately actualisation.
Through this, we learn that to encounter the ground of our own being is so often less about what we say, but about the presence we embody when speaking and when listening. We learn how necessary and how profound silence is, in holding and belonging to, the great conversation.
We do not need to kneel, press our palms together or believe necessarily in any god or any book, to simply hold on our lips the troubles we already carry in our hearts. Prayer is not expecting the world to answer us directly or immediately, but to be not tired in waiting, to speak our truth into the world and also then to be courageous and hear what is echoed back. It means to be fully present with what is. It means to not just train our ears to the corner of the field where we want to hear an answer, and then only the one we want to hear, but rather listening with our whole bodies, for whatever is spoken back.
What is prayer if not this?
Sacred, does not need to have anything to do with shared ideas about god, or religion, or spiritual whimsy. It is simply the answered wish to find something deep, foundational or perhaps simply something beautiful about this world, and the very private sense of gratitude and belonging we get from that encounter.
PRAYER AND MEDITATION Prayer and meditation, two ways which start in the same valley floor taking different paths; one letting words fly up like doves released from the ark of a pleading heart, the other riding the wings of the breath by seemingly impassable ways up to lofty heights where they meet together above the tree line and mingle —out of reach of the small cares and trivial dramas, locked as these are, below the cloying smog of thought and the brambles of emotion that had seemed so close as to bar the way, and in the clear sky, welcome our lightened hearts into the great secret of belonging. - Rocco Jarman
You have done an incredible job of describing the state of our human disconnect as a casualty of the internet and overwhelming but curated individual information. I found your four questions challenging and I will have to reread to fully process them. I appreciated this post very much.