The Soul’s Code: Calling & Its Necessary Angels

In his bestselling book The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, archetypal psychologist James Hillman declared: ‘Each person enters the world called.’ Each of us, in other words, has a ‘calling’: we came into the world – to this particular place, at this particular time – for a reason.

Hillman’s notion of calling wasn’t original: it can be traced at least as far back as Plato, who expressed the idea in his ‘Myth of Er’. He suggested that before each of us is born, our soul selects a purpose for us to fulfill during our time on Earth. Hillman took up these ancient ideas, similarly suggesting that before we are born, the soul selects the pattern that it wants to live out. And so we bring into this world, and carry inside us, an innate vision – a kind of concealed invisible potential – which we are intended to express during the course of our lives. Although Hillman used many terms for this vision, his preferred way of imagining it was to think of it as an acorn. The acorn, like any seed, carries within it the image of, and the potential to become, the oak tree that it might eventually be – given the circumstances that would allow it to flourish.

In this four-week program, we’ll delve deeply into the concept of calling, and work with ways of revealing and remembering what it is that we’re here for. To express our calling is to allow ourselves to uniquely express one mode of being, one unique way of embodying what it is to be human, one facet of the creative life force of the universe. How might we uncover the unique gift that we each bring to the world at this time?