Instinctively and intuitively, our ancestors at Stonehenge and elsewhere recognized and celebrated their connection to the larger natural scheme of things. Although they expressed their beliefs and celebrated their connection to the natural world in a variety of forms, they were alike in the realization that they enjoyed a permanent place in a friendly universe. They gathered together to observe and celebrate the cyclical changes of the seasons and the abundance of nature. In difficult times, they sought guidance and protection from the stars, the plant and animal kingdoms and the earth itself.

Today, many people continue to let their instincts, intuitions and personal experiences reveal their connection to this larger natural scheme of things. Perhaps you are one of them. Or perhaps you are just beginning your own personal metaphysical odyssey. Wherever you are in your journey, this website has been created to provide you a place where you can join those of us who wish to share our connection stories and help each other discover our enduring place in the cosmos.

But first, you may wonder, what exactly does "soul-making" mean, and what is a "soul-making" story? What did world-renowned individuals like British author John Keats and Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung mean when they used the term "soul-making"? Most importantly, how can sharing our "soul-making" stories help us feel that we are a permanent part of a natural universe? Searching for answers to these question is one of the central challenges of this website, even if these answers are far from definitive or authoritative.

Cultural anthropologists tell us that our ancestors in cultures throughout the world discerned their connection to the universe directly through their own experiences and the feelings and emotions that resulted from them. They experienced and predicted the cyclical changes of the seasons by observing the movements of the sun, moon and planets. They celebrated and benefited from the consequences of these changes in the growth of edible plants and animals that sustained them. And they learned to respect and work with these patterns of change in ways that solidified their feelings of belonging to a creative, benevolent universe.

As time passed, civilizations became more populated and cultures were institutionalized. People ceased working outdoors to provide food for everybody and more time indoors working alone to feed only their immediate families. They become increasingly disconnected from each other and the rhythmns of nature. Gradually, people's instincts, intuitions and first-hand personal experiences of their innate connection to the cosmos were replaced by the second-hand views of institutionalized intermediaries and authorities such as politicians, teachers and clerics.

Instead of relying on their own experiences to develop their worldviews, people were required to learn and memorize the experiences and beliefs of other people. Growing up became more a question of learning the scripts of institutionally-prescribed roles than developing personalized belief systems based on direct experiences.

While these prescriptions were meant to integrate people into society, in many cases they actually alienated people from their surroundings. This alienation was due to the fact that memorizing the experiences and beliefs of institutional authorities didn't always ring true for everyone on an emotional and experiental level. They connected people to societal institutions and authority figures rather than the world of nature from which they derived sustenance. Instead of revering and celebrating nature's cyclical rhythmns and bounty, industrial societies began to try to obtain the essential things of life in ways that harmed the environment and interfered with its capacity to produce the things people needed to survive. Certain groups ofr people started to take more than they needed, leaving other people with less than they needed.

By the 19th and 20th century, the world views of many people had deteriorated to the point that Keats felt compelled to respond to those who argued that life had become a valley of tears and German born astrophysicist Albert Einstein wondered whether the universe is friendly at all. So many of Carl Jung's patients found their lives to be devoid of meaning, coherence and fulfillment that he wrote a book entitled Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1952). What he discovered in his psychotherapeutic relationships was that the inner workings of people's psyches are perfectly capable of developing healthy and happy human beings who feel themselves to be part of the larger scheme of things -- except when people are divorced from nature and each other and overwhelmed by internal and external conflicts and traumas they cannot overcome.

The main aspect of the psyche that assures this development, according to Jung and his like-minded colleagues, is the "experiencing self". This "self" is an overarching intelligence which they observed in their patients to play a pivotal, orchestrating role in integrating the experiences that occur at the different levels of the mind, body and brain into a coherent personality with a positive worldview.

Interestingly, they refer to this overarching, integrating self as the "soul". Even psychiatrists who were influenced by Czech-born Sigmund Freud rather than Jung came to similar conclusions, such as the American psychiatrist Elio Frattaroli, M.D., who wrote the book, Healing the Soul in the age of the Brain (2001). While it may sound odd to realize that modern medical doctors have identified in their practice of medicine the determining influence of what they consider to be a "soul", increasing numbers of them actually have. Many always have.

In fact, following in their footsteps, British depth psychologist Lionel Corbett ascertained through his therapeutic practice that our psyches perform quite naturally a religious function throughout our lifetimes that enables us to use our own experiences to connect our lives to a larger natural scheme of things that he considers to be of divine origin. His findings are described in his book, The Religious Function of the Psyche (1996).

Interestingly, his views are shared by those of contemporary U.S. astrophysicist Victor Mansfield, who explains them in his book, Head and Heart: A Personal Exploration of Science and the Sacred (2002). Mansfield also used his scientific and philosophical tools and first-hand experiences to investigate the experiential processes of the pysche. He concluded that people can naturally and directly acquire a unique kind of "transformative self-knowledge" that makes them aware of their unique interactive connection to the cosmos and to their fellow human beings.

What is most remarkable about our experiencing selves is that they are constantly at work trying to help us make the most of our experiences, whether we are aware of their work or not, whether we are awake or asleep, or whether we agree with their slant on things. One of their main tasks is to bring to our attention things that have escaped our awareness, things we have consciously decided not to think about or rejected outright and even things we have unconsciously decided to push under the rug of our consciousness. They relentlessly bring up topics and issues that we need to address, whether we are awake or asleep and dreaming.

As those of us who remember our dreams recognize, it is often difficult to figure out their meaning, especially when they consist of fragments of images and situations and contain mysterious symbols that do not seem to be relevant to our dreams or our lives, for that matter. And yet this content deserves our attention because it reveals our connection to dimensions of reality and types of causation that are quite out of the ordinary. They take us beyond the material world to which modern science has confined our perceptions to inner worlds that many of us have yet to acknowledge and explore.

Corbett provides a glimpse into one person's inner world that was unknown to her until her "experiencing self", her soul, if you will, produced an unusual dream. The woman in question was a young psychiatric resident who had just begun her career but who had never before paid any attention to her dreams. In the dream, she and her two siblings were sitting on a bed. A quilt with a design of intersecting circles was covering the bed. (According to Corbett, intersecting circles were symbols used by ancient goddess-worshipping cultures.) She felt a liquid dripping from above. The color of the liquid was golden. It was honey. The honey was dripping down from a magnificent lioness suspended in the air above.

According to Corbett, the dreamer had no previous familiarity with the symbolism of lions or honey. She had no familiarity with Greek or Egyptian myths relating to lions, which view them as a "symbol of fierce maternity". Nor did she have any Biblical training or recollection of Biblical stories pertaining to honey or lions, or leonine mother figures symbolized in ancient history in the form of honey bees. And yet she had a dream containing these classical archetypes, a dream that was personally and professionally resonant on an emotional level to a young woman who came from a family dominated by a very powerful mother figure and who was embarking on a daunting career as a caregiver.

As Corbett points out, while the symbolic content of the dream was specifically relevant to the young resident, the poignance and universality of its symbols could have been grasped by many young women facing similar challenges elsewhere in the world. In antiquity, honey was served in initiatory meals. In the case of the resident's dream, it symbolized the initiation of her career as a female who would be practicing her craft in an archetypal feminine mode rather than a patriarchical mode. The dream used classical images and archetypes conveying ancient wisdom to provide positive encouragement to a young woman who was about to begin a professional career in a field that is still largely dominated by men.

What makes this dream significant to the soul-making and story-telling mission of this website is that Corbett views the dream as the combined work of the woman's experiencing self/soul and a "larger consciousness" beyond the woman's own personal consciousness. The content and purpose of the dream extends beyond summoning up her own knowledge and consciousness to provide her encouragement as she embarks on a new profession. It discloses personally-significant but ancient symbolism and wisdom of which she was previously unaware, which demonstrate the connection of her life to a larger realm that can manifest itself in an illuminating, symbolic and protective way, without her knowing or willing it. That the connection is expressed through classic symbols of a wild animal, a lion, and a bountiful natural system that produces bees and honey, provides a symbolic link connecting her life to a larger, benevolent natural scheme of things that extends well beyond the confines of her own consciousness, material life and profession.

The dream and the sharing of the dream is an ideal example of the soul-making and story-telling that this website seeks to foster. The woman's participation in a dream group enabled her to share her dream experience with her peers, weigh her own insights and other people's interpretations of the significance of the symbols contained in the dream and come to her own conclusions about its meaning. The experience opened up the possibility that she would simultaneously feel encouraged in her new professional undertaking and recognize that throughout her lifetime her psyche would be capable of revealing in a direct and natural way her connection to a larger scheme of things. In other words, she was embarking not just on a new career but on a soul-making journey that would continue throughout her life. While we do not all have dreams as poignant as this woman, or at least we do not remember having them, we all have the potential to have them and to see in them the soul work of our experiencing selves as well as our own personal connection to the larger scheme of things as we interpret it.

Closely related to dreams as soul-making experiences are synchronicities, which provide us another poignant example of the interactive nature of our connection to the natural universe. They typically consist of an observable event that occurs in the empirical world that is of profound significance to an individual despite the absence of any observable causal connection between the person and the event. Although few definitive explanations have been offered as to how synchronicities occur, they do occur to many people and have been amply documented.

Jung wrote about a striking synchronicity that was combined with a dream. The sychronous event occurred when a young woman whom he was treating was describing to him a dream in which someone gave her a piece of jewelry, a golden scarab. Jung's view was that the woman had an excessively rational view of the world that was hampering her imagination and creativity. She was relying too much on the hemisphere of her brain that engaged in rational at the expense of the more playful, inventive side.

As she was talking, Jung heard the sound of an insect flying against the window pane of his office. He opened the window and caught in his hand an insect that closely resembled a scarab beetle. Contrary to its habits, the creature felt an urge to get into the room at the particular moment that the woman was talking about the scarab she had received in the dream.

The woman was so struck by the synchronous nature of her talking about a scarab that appeared in her dream at the same time that one chose to fly into the room that she broke out of her confining hyper-rational worldview. As Jung points out in his account, the scarab is a classic symbol of rebirth from Egyptian mythology. In a metaphorical sense, the woman was reborn into a more expansive worldview in which she recognized that there are undeniable albeit unexplainable links between her inner world of dreams, the outer world of events and a mysterious dimension of reality that mediates between the two.

Astrophysicist Mansfield delves into Jung's work on synchronicities, the work of his collaborator, Marie-Louis von Franz and his own experiences. What they appear to conclude is that it is the mission of our experiencing selves/souls to make us aware of the connection between our inner worlds and the outer world in which we live. They carry out their mission by continually staging unusual experiences like dreams and synchronicities throughout our lives that capture our attention and focus it on our connection to the larger scheme of things.

As you can read in the summary of one of Mansfield's own soul-making stories on this website, by paying attention to one particular dream he had and the telephone call he received after the dream, he received encouragement about a manuscript he had written and and deepened his understanding of how our souls work in conjunction with the universe at large. Mansfield's analysis of the "double nature" of the soul, which recalls the work of the Greek philosopher Plotinus by suggesting that the soul plays a dual role, is quite interesting.

On the one hand, it is the intelligence guiding our lives that creates phenomena like dreams and synchronicities that help us become the unique individuals that we have the potential to become. As such, it appears to be "finite, divisible, and temporal", as Plotinus argued. On the other hand, when it demonstrates our connection to levels of reality beyond the material world, to the larger scheme of things, Mansfield believes it is functioning on an "infinite, indivisible, and eternal" level, as Plotinus also argued.

According to the insights that Mansfield gained from his own personal experiences, his study of the fields of astronomy and astrology, as well as his observations of the visible universe with its mysteriously unfolding tapestry of stars, planets and galaxies, each of us is capable of using our life-long soul-making experiences to deepen our awareness of the unique ways in which we fit into the larger scheme of things.

Needless to say, each of us should decide for ourselves what we believe this connection to be, on the basis of our own experiences. On the other hand, there is every reason for us to delve into other people's experiences and knowledge, bring other people along on our journeys of discovery and accompanying them on theirs. This website is devoted to that purpose.

An additional phenomenon that testifies to our connection to the larger scheme of things are well-documented near death experiences that have occurred to thousands of people who have disclosed them. What is common to these experiences of people who were close to dying is that their experiencing selves/souls were conscious of leaving their bodies and in many cases actually observed their physical bodies from a distance. They then felt themselves drawn through a passageway towards a brilliant light, sometimes hearing harmonious sounds. They then had the feeling of being welcomed and protected by ancestors, friends and relatives who had already died.

Subsequently, they realize that they are going to return to their bodies. While many of the documented cases report that the people regretted having to return to their bodies, we have also learned from personal recounts that the rest of their lives were more tranquil and peaceful because of the experience they had of being connected to another dimension of reality.

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