The Name of the Soul's Purpose in Creativity and with the Holy Spirit by F. Christopher Reynolds Berea City Schools & Ashland University Berea, Ohio 44017 A paper presented for the Holistic Learning Conference, Toronto, Ontario October 30, 2005

TITLE: THE NAME OF THE SOUL'S PURPOSE IN CREATIVITY AND WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT

ABSTRACT: Holistic education, in it’s deepest sense, is rooted in the Divine. It is helpful to study the rites of passage of traditional cultures for ways in which such knowledge was taught and learned. However, as teachers in the West, we are called to find ways within our own culture to educate in that same spirit. This paper shares methods for making a conscious connection to the reason we were born or the Name of our Soul’s Purpose. In particular, how it is done in creativity classes at Ashland University and Berea High School and also how it is done in prayer in relation to the Holy Spirit.

THE NAME OF THE SOUL'S PURPOSE IN CREATIVITY AND WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT

Picture a gathering of students in a creativity class in a room. There is one seated and the others stand around her. Near her is an installation of her paintings, sculptures, poetry, writings, important symbols, song lyrics, favorite books, and photos of ancestors. Moving around the semi-circle, each student responds to the installation with a naming:

The naming goes on until the seated student has a feeling of being seen for who she is. Sometimes, there are tears. Sometimes, she feels like she is hearing people talk about her at her funeral. Always, the response to the installation with naming offers an opportunity for the students to enter more deeply into their lives.

Picture another kind of gathering. It is in a sacred space, a prayer space in the upstairs of a garage. There is a Christ candle burning and a Bible. The smell of sage is in the air and there are prayer ties, cosmological symbols on the floor. The people sit in a circle. There is a man seated, in a deep trance addressing the group with a helper sitting next to him. The Voice of the Holy tells the individuals the Names of their Spiritual Essences:

The naming with the Gift of the Spirit goes on until the individual feels seen. The helper gives a prayer bundle that symbolizes the Name. Sometimes there are tears. Sometimes, there is laughter. Always, the Naming offers the individuals to move more deeply into their lives.

The first scenario represents an activity of feeding back the Soul's Purpose that I have used teaching creativity to secondary students in the Berea City Schools the past 20 years and to teachers at Ashland University for the past 9. The second scenario represents a ritual of obtaining the Soul's Purpose through the Holy Spirit. The ritual is 3 years old and is done through a friend with a prophetic gift. Both methods of naming are based on the holistic view that humanity and the cosmos are body, soul and spirit. Both methods work with 4 notions. First, that every individual born into the world was invited here and comes with a Purpose. Second, that each Purpose is experienced and known psychologically, spiritually and physically. Third, the Soul's Purpose shapes Spiritual experience, individual creativity, and perception. Finally, that life has the best chance of being whole and joyful when we live aligned to our Soul's Purpose in a community where that sacred capacity is invited to enter into service and nourished.

The work concerning the Name of the Soul's Purpose reported here is a furthering of my writing on the orphan archetype (Reynolds, 2005a) in chapter 19 of Holistic Learning and Spirituality in Education. There I described the one-not-good-enough-to-keep in 5 different ways: as biology, symptoms and secrets, as history, culture and cosmology, as the iconoclast and chosen one, as trickster and elder, and finally, as carrier of planetary consciousness. I noted in the essay that having no rites of passage separates us from a living culture and cosmology. The information here represents effort to restore rites of passage in the intent of a cultural restoration and renewal, rooted in the cosmology of the times.

THE NAME OF THE SOUL'S PURPOSE IN CREATIVITY

In Creativity Inc. in Berea City Schools and in ED654 Creativity Studies at Ashland University, we study creativity by doing it. We paint, sing, dance, write, invent, muse, paint, sculpt, journal, engage the creative process as much as possible. Over the years, I have seen how precise themes guided not only the students' creative output, but also their lens of perception, what they suffered, what they found pleasing, and what they described as true, good and beautiful. This is not a new observation. The Myers-Briggs' Type Indicator, the Enneagram, more recently, the CAPT archetype indicator, show numerous guiding patterns that run through lives. However, what I found that the guiding themes can be perceived more specifically than in those commercially available tests. The guiding themes, seen up close and personal are repeating images.

It is as if a life is the living out of certain images. It is like living out a painting, a poetic image or a scene of a play from all points of view. I noticed that the students found it helpful to become conscious of the repeating images that were their own. Edna St. Vincent Millay is famous for saying that in this life it's not one thing after another, but the same damn thing over and over again. She is writing of a similar observation. The same damn thing over and over is an aspect of what I mean by the Soul's Purpose. It is like the North Star around which our lives, like the heavens, apparently turn. It is both a unique perception of things as well as a one-of-a-kind capacity for activity in the world. An individual who knows the Name of her Soul's Purpose, and how it affects her life is quite beneficial to all of her relations. She knows and seeks more of the deep experience of being alive that Joseph Campbell talked about so often.

I have used the terms, gift, and Incurable Mad Spot, to describe the Soul's Purpose as a spiritual, psychological and physical irritant, impetus of creative perception and production. (Reynolds, 1992, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c) Jane Piirto, (1998, 1999a, 1999b, 2004) in her seminal work on the pyramid of talent development used the term, Thorn, to describe the ongoing passion necessary for a particular talent to be developed over others and for creativity to be developed in a particular domain. Jennifer Allen (2003) uses the term, Sacred La, to describe an inner sense of guidance, like a note, tone or sound, with which all aspects of life seem to be in tune. This interior guidance was attributed to the Self and given many images taken from alchemy as well as personal experience by C. G. Jung (1953). They included, Archeus, Celestial Man, Daimon, Genius, Arcanum, Son of the Philosophers, Lapis. James Hillman's (1996, 1999) Acorn Theory in the book The Soul's Code is in this family of ideas. Maildoma Some (2002, 2003), whose name means, Makes friends with his enemy, describes not only the importance of a person's Name, but also how initiation among the Dagara brings the individual into relation with that Name. Michael Meade (2005) is most articulate concerning what he calls the Self, the Big "I", the deep soul, and the spirit. Portions of his CD Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements in Life, bear repeating here: In west Africa, before birth, the soul enters into an agreement with a heavenly, otherworldly double. Certain aspects of one's life are written in this agreement made in the Other World. One the way to birth, the soul passes by the Tree of Forgetfulness and in order to be born, must embrace this tree. The moment of incarnation and embracing the tree, the agreement made with the noble character in the Other World is forgotten. In our life, we have to live up to the agreements we made before birth, but we forgot about…There, they say, a person's life is the re-writing of the agreement made before the soul's birth and because of that, there are special moments of remembering when that Sacred Other in that agreement comes present. It can happen in a dream. It can happen in a room like this, talking about an image.

Also:

There is a small tribe along the Amazon, the Etede, who say that everybody is born with the Good Word inside them. They are not Christians. They call it the Good Word. The use "word" very close to the way it's used in the Bible, where it means language and sound. The Word has its image and the sound of it. Everybody has inside them resonating a sound connected to an image and it's good. Each person is hear to give that Good Word to the world, to echo that deep resonance within themselves. And, everybody is born with the Word Crosswise that stops and cancels that. the third thing is that everybody dreams and their dreams are called, the Word-trying-to-come-through-now. Every night, we go to sleep, resting on the Good Word and the Word Crosswise and the dream tries to come through and separate the two.

The notion of the Purpose of the Soul is the tacit assumption in Robert Sardello's (1996) insistence that creating a future for Earth involves individuals taking up the full world -creating capacity of the human "I". It is assumed in Anna Wise's (2002) work in brain waves in creativity and spiritual experience that she calls the High Performance Mind. Finally, it is the inner agent of positive disintegration and the shaper of the emotional, intellectual, imaginational, sensual and psychomotor overexciteabilities so well described by Piechowski (In Press) in his magnum opus expanding the Dabrowski Theory.

Below are 19 activities from my work in creativity and naming that have worked best to bring out the guiding images that shape lives. If you are going to use these activities, it's important that you do the work with the students.

•  1. First image - this is the first story that caught your imagination as a child, the one you asked to hear over and over again. It may not be a story, it can also be a video, a song, a game. The indicator that you are looking for is the constant return to the image. You may have been attracted by desire or by fear to this image.
•  2. Earliest work - some of your creative works from nursery school, kindergarten, even earlier.
•  3. Soundtrack of life - what is the song that you speaks to you the most? Bring a copy of the lyrics, the CD/tape or what you need to perform it. It’s ok if there are no lyrics.
•  4. Life changing book/concept - bring a book that has had a strong influence on your life. Be prepared to read a page from it.
•  5. Ancestor story - bring a photo of one of your ancestors and be ready to tell a story.
•  6. Film/drama - bring your favorite film or play. Be ready to share/perform a section from it.
•  7. Poetry - bring in a piece of poetry you love, bring in a poem of your own.
•  8. Most recent work - bring in what you have been working on over the years, bring all of this.
•  9. Dream - bring in a dream or vision that was important for you, or one that has recurred over the years
• 10. Unexplainable occurrence - share an experience of mystery from your life
• 11. Your nature - bring in a story of some place on Earth that "takes care of you", which means that you always feel better after being there.
• 12. Pieces of you - bring in several objects that are symbolic of who you are, what/who you are passionate about, any awards, video, celebrations of you.
• 13. Unexpected - bring or prepare something unexpected to share for the good of the group.
• 14. The Endless Struggle - what part of your life comes up when you think of this title? Come ready to share it in some way.
• 15. Stilled and Chilled - create a work based on a time when you experienced something that gave you the chills (the good chills) and/or made you feel awe, stilled by the deep feeling from beauty, truth, or goodness.
• 16. Humor - share something that made you laugh hysterically
• 17. Unanswered questions - what information have you been driven to find?
• 18. Inside Out - using finger paints, put all of your emotions out onto the paper. Don't worry about anything but getting the whole inside out.
• 19. What Matters Most and What's the Matter? - using clay, think on the two questions, letting your emotions move through your hands. Let the images come as you shape the clay. Try to keep working until you arrive at one image that answers both questions.

It is not necessary to do all of the activities in order to start seeing the guidingimages. You should do at least 2 of them. Many times, activity #1 around the First Image gives the whole life in symbolic form, right off the bat. Children seem drawn to the images that brought them into the world. Ideally, you should do 10 of the activities, being sure to save everything.

To do the naming activity, give each student an area in the room to set up his/her installation. They are allowed to bring in any extra touches that they want. Once the installations are set up, the class moves as a group from installation to installation. The person's whose life's work the students are observing can sit in front of the collection. S/he can take time to describe the parts of the installation before the naming begins, though it is not necessary. It also works for the student to lie down, and as gruesome as it sounds, listen as if s/he was at her/his own funeral. The circle keeps giving names until the person being named feels satisfied. (See the first scenario above for examples of how to name.) As the teacher, I usually go last and give the student a name that I feel is expansive enough to contain all that was said. Over time, names will come to you spontaneously, perceived with intuition.

THE NAME OF THE SOUL'S PURPOSE WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT

Three years ago, at the Art and Soul Conference at Baylor, I met Michael Olin-Hitt. He put together a panel on creativity and spirituality and had invited Jane Piirto and me to share from our work and art. He had recently gone through a spiritual transformation (Olin-Hitt, In preparation) that resulted in a spiritual gift of prophecy. We became friends and have met once a month, every month, ever since. We meet for a prayer time in a ritual space we call, Hunting the Holy. As we expanded the circle outward to more persons, a naming ritual slowly took shape.

When Michael enters into prayer, which is a deep trance, a Messenger of the Holy Whole speaks through him. It offers another kind of seeing into a person's Soul's Purpose. The Messenger, who we call, the Holy, uses a vocabulary of Its own for the Name of the Soul's Purpose. It uses the terms, Spark, Spiritual Essence, and the Self-within-the-self, interchangeably. Additionally, the Holy is able to see, identify, and confirm where the connection to Spirit is felt in the body. It can describe the feelings quite specifically. The Holy can give a color of the Spark. It is able to see, name and describes the presence of Spirit helpers, be they Protectors, Comforters, Guides, Messengers. It also has a sense the number of life-cycles a particular soul has lived. It calls this the Spiritual Inheritance. The Holy can offer healing of the relations between the living and the dead, seeing quite clearly the circumstances of how an individual died, how the passage into the Holy Whole happened, and his/her current condition. It was healing for us to learn the Names of the Soul's Purpose of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents and to find out how they were fairing in the Otherworld. Finally, the Holy is able to see the Names of those coming to be born.

Our ritual is a blending of Christian, Lakota, and shamanic elements. What has guided us is that we each bring to the ritual the best gifts of Spirit we can offer. Generally, before we begin, I set the space by symbolically bringing the heavens to the Earth. I place an image of the heavens on the floor, marking constellations that symbolize knowledge of Purpose, Community, and the Deep Center. Sometimes, I will perform a song on the guitar. Michael begins with a teaching and/or prayer from the Bible. He invokes the Spirit of the Christ, which he considers the incarnation of Sophia. He lights a Christ candle. We smudge with sage or use water if there are persons allergic to smoke. I sing the Lakota 4 directions song, placing tobacco for the 4 directions, above, below and the Creator. In that way, we enter into the prayer. As a rule, the Holy reads the hearts of those gathered and will give a general message or teaching. Then, It will move from person to person. As the Holy describes the person's Spiritual Essence, I make symbolic prayer bundles that are given as gifts.

At the end of the time with the Holy, Michael moves through a period of dis-connection during which I sing more prayers and load my sacred pipe. We sing until Michael is back to being himself. Then, passing the pipe clockwise, held in the left hand, each person is invited to pray, making the words of the Holy his/her own. I give the prayer bundles at that time. Michael is able to share the visionary aspect of each person's reading, as needed. After everyone has prayed, we smoke the pipe, letting our prayers rise to the Creator. The space is always infused with sacred energy at the end, so we often remain their talking and sharing. When the Christ candle is extinguished, the ritual is completed.

CARING FOR THE CARETAKERS

Judith Gabor (2005) insists that nurturing the nurturers, which by definition includes ourselves, must remain a central tenet of holistic education. Learning to take care of myself has been a hard-fought and ongoing lesson for me. It seems to be a dilemma of those called by the orphan archetype active in these times. As holistic educators, there is a trap of over-reaching in our loving. Part of the trap is a form of what has been called the achievement by proxy syndrome (Tofler, 1999). In the same way that coaches and parents of child athletes become addicted to living through their success, holistic educators can become relentless in driving others toward wholeness. The trap is in the noble appearance. Teachers and healers can appear to sacrifice their lives for everyone else. Though it looks altruistic on its face, the relentless driving of others toward wholeness is the shadow side of a deep, unmet desire for wholeness in themselves. We require a large amount of ecstatic spiritual experience. When unable to lose ourselves in what Rilke (Bly, 2004) called, the Winged Energy of Delight, we tend to lose it on others.

So, in the spirit of helping the helpers, hopefully grounded in our wholeness, Michael and I offer our ritual naming space for those here today. We offer you a chance to receive back some love in response to love you have been sending into the world. May you feel this, not just in our session, but also with those who see you most deeply.

In closing, we offer you symbol in the night sky for when you are home as well as a bit of Great Lakes prophecy. The symbol is the ur-constellation of Recollector, a deepening of our inherited constellation, Orion. To form the ur-constellation of Recollector, add the 4 stars of the Orion Trapezium, place of a nursery of stars, to Orion. Historically speaking, this part of the night sky, especially around the 3 stars we call Orion's belt, has been associated with restoring broken life to new wholeness. The seasonal disappearance and return not only reflect the seasonal death and rebirth of nature, but also allude to a psychological, spiritual fact. In Lakota cosmology, the constellation was called the Chief's Hand. In their myth, the recovery of the hand by the chief's daughter restored the life of the tribe. For the Maya, it was the Turtle of Rebirth from which First Father was reborn through the intercession of his sons. In Egyptian cosmology, those stars symbolized the fragmented body of Osiris that was collected and resurrected through the love of Isis. The ur-constellation of Recollector says the same for our times; what was seemingly dismembered and dead can be restored to wholeness and renewed.

There are several ways to understand this. First, our own lives, families and culture periodically suffer fragmentation. The ur-constellation during its months of absence is the recognition of loss, the lament for what was lost, and the deep desire to be whole again. During the months of its return, the symbol is a confirmation of wholeness regained. Second, the lament for our loss, the longing for wholeness, and the celebration at that achievement doesn't belong to us alone. It is as if there is a mythic mover of the personal and cultural soul, often feminine, who because she loves us, faithfully intercedes on our behalf. When we seek or celebrate recovery, we know Her. When we are lost and broken, there is a Holy voice crying out for us. In this sense, Recollector reminds us, opens the door to an inner transpersonal horizon (Irwin, 2005) of psychological and spiritual help that come through prayer, meditation, dreams, ritual, therapeutic spaces, creativity, flashes of insight, and mergings with the Holy. Third, the Orion Trapezium is a birthplace of stars, some of which are surrounded by prolyps, rings of material from which solar systems are formed. The ur-constellation reflects the Great Story, (Barlow & Dowd, 2005) creation story of the Age of Magnification (Reynolds, 2002, 2004, 2005a). Our 4.56 billion year old solar system orbits within 13.6 billion year old galaxy within a 13.7 billion year old abundant universe. Such grandeur, never before imagined by our ancestors, mirrors a grandeur of Soul and Spirit we bring into harmony the moment Recollector becomes lived experience. That lived experience IS the individual and cultural renewal that this ur-constellation invites, confirms and sustains. As for the Great Lakes prophecy, the Holy (Olin-Hitt, 2002) offers:

"It is a time of convergence of sight, of seeing the connections. It is not a new awareness. It is an ancient awareness cycling through experience. The time is coming for receptivity. In the ancient traditions, the people shall find new life, new direction. They shall realize the lost can be found. What is taken can be given back. What is broken can be healed. That which is evil can be redeemed. That which is in bondage can be delivered. The world ends. The world is re-born, again and again and again and again and again. Why should the Holy want it to end?"

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