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Head, Heart and Hara: The Soul Centres of West and East
Head Heart and Hara The Soul Centres of West and East Author:Peter Wilberg An ancient Daoist saying tells us "When you are sick, do not seek a cure. Find your centre and you will be healed." The centre it refers to is located deep in the sensed interiority of our abdomen, that abode of the soul known in Japanese as hara. Not being in touch with this centre is a sickness - the generalised sickness of our globalised W... more »estern culture. This social sickness is felt by individuals as a lack of deep inner contact with them-selves and others - a contact that can only be made from the physical and spiritual centre of gravity in our hara. Dislocated from this centre, we can experience it only as a black hole that pulls us down into states of depression. 'Depression' (a word with no equivalent in Japanese) is, in essence, a lack of hara awareness - the capacity to actively press down or 'de-press' our awareness into the inner soul depths of the abdomen or hara. With hara awareness we not only recontact our own innermost soul depths and soul centre. We learn to make inner contact with others from those depths and from that centre - to experience true intimacy of soul. Paradoxically, what passes today as scientific 'psychology' has no place for the soul or psyche - nor any understanding of its relation to our own inwardly sensed body. Hara awareness is both an alternative to medical and psychiatric 'cures' and the basis for a genuinely psychological medicine - an anatomy of the soul-body and its centres. Head, Heart and Hara not only contrasts the head- and heart-centred culture of the West with the hara culture of Japan. It also shows how hara awareness can unite the primordial wisdom of both East and West. Peter Wilberg brings together the dao of Lao Tse and the logos of Heraclitus in a spiritual science and cosmology of the soul - with all its multiple aspects, centres and spheres of awareness.« less