Drawing Water

In his recent Atlantic essay, “What Were My Dreams Trying to Tell Me?,” Akhtar remembers becoming aware, at twenty years old, of an emptiness somewhere within himself. The sensation was sufficiently concrete that he sought medical explanations for it, but physicians could find nothing physically wrong. Akhtar knew that he was experiencing something. What he lacked was a language adequate to describe what that something was.

That problem eventually becomes more important than the dreams announced in the essay’s title.

Akhtar begins recording his dreams and discovers an interior world considerably richer than he had imagined. Freud offers one vocabulary for understanding it, Jung another. He reads widely and eclectically: psychology and philosophy, Sufi and Jewish mystical traditions, Vedanta and Meister Eckhart. He meditates. He attends more closely to Shakespeare. Eventually an old word begins to seem useful again.

Soul.

Akhtar does not offer an argument for the existence of an immortal, immaterial substance. He is asking a prior question: whether the word “soul” might name dimensions of human experience that our more familiar psychological and neurological vocabularies describe incompletely.

That is a revealing question for our cultural moment.

We possess increasingly sophisticated ways of describing what happens to human beings. We can identify neurological processes associated with meditation, trauma, religious experience, attraction, fear, grief, and love. Psychology provides another set of descriptions. These descriptions can be enormously useful. But usefulness is not the same thing as exhaustiveness.

We could presumably describe in considerable neurological detail what happens in the brain while someone listens to Bach. That would tell us something true about listening to Bach. It would not tell us what Bach means.

Akhtar repeatedly encounters this distinction. Some of his dreams appear to anticipate later events. Meditation produces unusual states of consciousness. He experiences light, spaciousness, and altered awareness. Yet he does not insist upon supernatural explanations. Perhaps coincidence explains more than he realizes. Perhaps some experiences have straightforward neurological causes. Perhaps years of meditation have simply trained him to manipulate his brain’s reward systems unusually well.

He leaves such possibilities open.

What he resists is the assumption that identifying a mechanism has exhausted the meaning of an experience.

Paul Ricoeur’s account of symbols helps explain what Akhtar is discovering. For Ricoeur, symbols and metaphors possess a “surplus of meaning.” They cannot simply be translated into propositions and then discarded. They continue to mean.

One of Akhtar’s dreams presents a friend as an abandoned dog. It would be easy enough to translate the image: the friend’s difficult behavior conceals wounds produced by neglect. But an abandoned dog says more than that. It is vulnerable and dependent. It has been excluded from the house. It may remain loyal to people who have failed it. It waits to be admitted.

The image holds these meanings together.

More importantly, the dream changes the way Akhtar sees his friend. His irritation gives way to a capacity to recognize the suffering beneath the behavior.

The interesting question, then, may not be whether the dream supplied supernatural information. A better question is what kind of person this way of seeing makes Akhtar capable of becoming.

That question would have been familiar to the Christian traditions of spiritual discernment.

Akhtar says that he wants a language for the interior life that does not reduce experience to either piety or diagnosis. The frustration is understandable. Religious language can explain away an experience almost as quickly as reductionist psychological language. “God told me” can end discernment just as effectively as “your neurons did that.”

Yet the contrast also reveals something about the place of Christian language in contemporary culture. Christianity possesses an old and remarkably subtle vocabulary for the territory Akhtar is exploring: consolation and desolation, temptation and illumination, contemplation and attachment, discernment and self-deception. The desert tradition, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross did not assume that an intense interior experience was trustworthy simply because it felt spiritual.

They learned to ask about its fruits.

Does an experience make us more truthful? More loving? Less captive to ourselves? More attentive to another person? More capable of receiving the world as gift?

Those questions matter because Akhtar’s essay is finally as much about practices of attention as it is about dreams. He keeps a dream journal. He reads. He meditates. He learns to notice. Over time, these repeated practices alter what he is capable of perceiving.

Religious communities sometimes speak as though practices simply express convictions we already possess. We pray because we believe in God. We receive the Eucharist because we believe certain things about Christ and the Church. We read Scripture because we believe it to be authoritative.

Formation also works in the other direction.

Practices teach us to perceive. Repeated over time, they make us capable of noticing things we had not previously learned to see.

This is what makes the imagery of Akhtar’s essay so compelling. He begins with a hole. Over time the hole becomes less a wound than an opening. At the end of the essay, it appears again as a well.

A well is still a hole. It remains an opening into darkness. Its depths cannot be seen from the surface.

What has changed is the possibility that something is there.

The hole had represented absence. The well contains water.

Akhtar then gives the dream one final detail. People are gathered around the well. They can see the water below, but there is no bucket.

It is tempting to explain the image. Perhaps the missing bucket is religion. Perhaps it is poetry, psychology, spiritual practice, or the very word “soul” that Akhtar has spent the essay recovering. But explaining it too quickly would violate what the essay has taught us about symbols. The well means more than any single interpretation can contain.

There is, however, another change worth noticing.

The hole at the beginning belongs to Akhtar alone. It is inside him. It threatens him. The question is, “What is happening to me?”

At the well, other people have gathered.

The question has become, “How do we draw the water?”

That movement from “I” to “we” suggests something that Akhtar’s recovery of the soul does not quite articulate. His soul remains largely a name for interiority: dreams, imagination, consciousness, creativity, mystical experience, depth. It is a richer account of the human person than reductionism permits, but it remains recognizably modern. The soul is something deep inside me.

Christian anthropology makes a stranger claim.

The human person is not an interior self hidden somewhere inside a body. We are embodied creatures whose life is received from God, creatures made for communion with God and one another. Augustine certainly turns inward, but the movement does not terminate there. He encounters the One who is more inward than his innermost self and higher than his highest. The journey inward becomes a movement beyond the self.

Perhaps, then, the contemporary crisis of the soul is not primarily that people no longer believe they possess souls. It may be that we have lost some of the language and practices by which human depth becomes perceptible.

What cannot be spoken eventually becomes difficult to notice.

If so, recovering the soul will require more than winning an argument about whether souls exist. It will require practices that teach attention, communities capable of discernment, and symbols capacious enough to bear more meaning than our explanations can contain.

A hole.

A dog outside the house.

A well.

Water in the darkness.

No bucket.

The Christian tradition may have something important to say about the water. But perhaps the Church’s first responsibility is not to explain the well. It is to preserve and hand on the practices by which generations have learned to approach it, discern what they encounter there, and draw water together.