Soul Care and the Tree of Mind

An Ecology of Cognition

A Natural Ecology of the Human Psyche

For the vast majority of human history, psychology was naturalistic: human experience was understood as an aspect of nature, as emergent from nature, and reflective of nature. Only in the modern period (the past 300-400 years, roughly) was psychology redefined as something extraneous to nature, something that needed a whole new vocabulary and theoretical framework to describe. And now, as a result of tens of thousands of studies of "psychology" conducted through this modern perspective, science has reaffirmed what Earth-based cultures have known forever: mind/psychology/cognition is as natural an event as birds flying, rain falling, worms tunneling, and seasons shifting. To understand the human psyche, therefore, we would do well to characterize the phenomena in natural terms.

Here, I'll use the analogy of a tree to help us imagine the three general dimensions of the human psyche: soul (roots), ego (trunk), and spirit (branches).

• Soul represents our connectedness with the larger community of life. It refers to our being rooted in the "soil" of reality: the Earth herself and the countless intersecting ecosystems that constitute the biosphere. Soul, in this sense, is not a spiritual or mystical matter but a tangible and functional matter: our unique place within and service to the larger community and story of life -- our "eco-niche," as the eco-depth psychologist Bill Plotkin defines it.
• Ego refers to our social identities, belongings, and roles. We all move through various spheres of society, including family, culture/subculture, politics, occupation, religious institutions, schooling, sports teams, clubs, etc. Here, "ego" is not a pejorative term, it is a descriptive term: simply the sociocultural dimensions of our being and experience.
• Spirit reflects our nature as manifestations of, and our connections with, the transcendent realms of reality, which has variously been named God, the Divine, cosmic oneness, Brahman, the Great Spirit, Allah, the Tao, etc. This is the transpersonal dimension, the timeless truths of existence independent of any contingent linguistic formulation of those truths.

A robust, mature, and adaptive human psyche requires all these dimensions, just as a healthy tree depends on functioning roots, trunk, and branches. If any one part of a tree is damaged or absent, the whole organism suffers. Indeed, it is rather strange to imagine a rootless tree! What would that even be? It would be a tree statue, if anything, and not a real, living tree. Just so with human existence: a holistically healthy person depends on all three of these dimensions being cultivated simultaneously, as they are all part of the same unified organism: the human/the human psyche.

Importantly, when I say "psyche" here I mean the entirety of human experiencing, not just the "psychological" or "mental" realm, for what we call psychological/cognitive/mental is a set of tangible, literally embodied phenomena. Everything in human existence is a cognitive phenomenon. Said differently, everything that happens to us happens to us holistically and inclusively: there is no sense in which an experience is "purely physical" and not simultaneously "mental." There is no experience that's purely "inner/individual/internal" without some influence of the relational/social. Everything in human life, and life as such, is an ecological matter.

***more coming soon