If we’re not bewildered by the mysteries of the soul, we’re not thinking clearly, to paraphrase the scrawling on the subway walls. For the soul’s mysteries compress the most profound mythic questions that have always intrigued human beings: Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where do we go when we die?
But there is some consolation built into consternation, as the Sufi mystic Mevlana Rumi knew when he wrote seven centuries ago that “Bewilderment is intuition.” From pharonic Egypt to Delta blues clubs, from the marble-marveled agora of classical Athens to the vast white tundra of Arctic hunters, belief in an uncanny fore at the heart of things has been intuited, a sleep-strange feeling rooted in a presence of tremendous impact that circulates through and animates all of nature.
Uncanny, strange, unsettling, but not ineffable. Every known culture has taken upon itself the naming of this force, usually after the words for wind, shadow, movement, smoke, strength.
Phil Cousineau in his Soul: An Archaeology
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