God I love James Hillman!

I was looking for something uplifting to read the other day and found James Hillman's book,'The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling' on the shelf with all my other 'spiritual-type' books. I bought it in 1996 when it first came out but haven't looked at it since. I should have, because it has influenced much of my thinking. According to Thomas Moore, the author, whose books I also have on my shelves, and who owes a lot to Hillman, 'The Soul's Code' 'restores passion, uniqueness, destiny, and childhood to every human life' and shows us how to be 'creative eccentrics instead of benumbed normals'.

James Hillman is an archetypal psychologist, a visionary who is not particularly popular with traditional psychotherapists because he disputes the parental fallacy that much of who we are and what we do in life is determined by the genes we inherit from our parents, their conditioning and behavioural patterns.

In the 'Soul's Code' he proposes what he calls 'the acorn theory of the soul'. He believes, like the many great philosophers, poets, artists and alchemists over the centuries and present day indigenous peoples, that we all have a particular destiny and calling. Such a belief is found in the kabbala and held in one form or another by Hindus and Buddhists. He believes that just as the acorn has within it, the pattern of the adult oak tree, so we all have a unique energy and purpose contained within our soul and that this is revealed in childhood and throughout our lifetimes.

Archetypal psychology is a polytheistic psychology based on recognising our soul in the many myths, fantasies, symbols, metaphors, images and dreams that shape and are shaped by our own psychological lives.

To Hillman, our psyche or soul is not a thing but an imaginative possibility. It does not resides inside us, in the brain or head or heart. We are in psyche.

I love these quotes:
'Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path . . . this is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am.'
'
The circumstances, including my body and my parents, whom I may curse, are my soul's own choice and I do not understand this because I have forgotten.'