Soul brother

>> Thomas Moore's Original Self investigates the prickly mysteries of the soul

by JULIET WATERS

The soul has been a pretty hot commodity for more than a few years now. From the millions of dollars made from feeding it chicken soup, to Oprah's "Spirit" segments, to the Indian soul treks of Alanis Morissette and Ricky Martin, everyone seems to have a desperate finger in the soul pie. Yet anyone naive enough to suggest that we've actually become a more spiritual society would--and probably should--be greeted with some degree of derision.

While the world seems increasingly corrupt, the grasping of ordinary people for their "soul" seems increasingly clueless. Simplifying our lives, positive thinking, focusing on our "wellness" and tuning out from that scary materialistic, cynical world are some of the consoling strategies that promise relief from our malaise.

Of all the writers making a lucrative living off the soul, Thomas Moore has generally been considered the most intelligent and reality-based ruminator on what ails the modern spirit. About a decade ago, with Care of the Soul, Soul Mates and The Soul of Sex, Moore, an ex-Catholic monk and Jungian therapist, started expanding on a theory that most of our modern day neuroses are symptoms of a disconnection from our spiritual selves. And so began, for many thinking people, a journey towards a well-nurtured, well-read, well-designed soul.

While I've often picked up Moore's books in the bookstore, I've just as often put them back on the shelves because, frankly, something about these books has always made me a little queasy.

It's not the quest for a deeper connection with the soul that puts me off. Let's face it, if I wanted to flee the prickly mysteries of the soul I'd be a TV critic, not a book critic. It's the self-consciousness of any spiritual quest that announces itself in the title that makes me wary. There's an implied journey towards a place of higher consciousness that will set us apart from the rest of the mundane, "corrupt" world, that I find--paradoxically--somewhat soulless. Then there's the elegant aesthetic to these books that gets under my skin. Whether Moore intends this or not, his books seem marketed to relatively affluent, educated professionals who can't understand why, even though they know they're smarter, richer and more successful than most of the world, they still feel bad.

Finally, after reading Original Self, Moore's latest, I wouldn't call it in any way a bogus inquiry into the soul. There's a lot in here that goes against the grain of most new-age soul questing: his belief that the more we try to self-consciously chart out a path to self-actualization, the farther we actually veer from the soul; that simplicity is something that is dangerously sentimentalized in most self-help literature; that there is also a danger in trying to cure our neurotic symptoms since "the healthier we become the more our humanity recedes."

As intelligent, thoughtful and interesting as Moore is, however, there is still a disturbing subtext in this book--the assumption that discovering the soul has something to do with withdrawing from our tainted, trashy, capitalistic world. You can't market a book about the soul without convincing the world that they have a desperate need for one, and this theory is still Moore's strongest selling point.

Moore argues that to find what is original in our selves, we need to turn off the television and simplify our relationship with the external world.

But if a deep compassionate acceptance of our own neurotic symptoms is part of connecting with our soul, then shouldn't we also have the same compassion for the collective neuroses of contemporary culture? To find out what is original about ourselves, should we turn off the Oprahs, the Ricky Martins, the Morissettes and the Chicken Soup guys? Or should we learn to humbly see our own desperation and limitations in them? And learn from that to just relax and let the soul take its own natural course.

Original Self by Thomas Moore, Harper Collins, hc.,150 pp., $32.95