September 2001
…ideas to help you foster collaborative
innovation
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The
soul plays an extraordinary role in the course of human development and is an
integral element in our work lives. It cannot be hung at the door to our place
of work, to be picked up again on our way out. We cannot separate ourselves
from the life of the soul.
We
each seem to carry a dream of life within us. We have aspirations for the life we
would ideally like to live. The soul speaks to us daily this way. We get
pictures and images, whispers and intuitions of a more complete and full life.
We are drawn to that life. When the groups we join resonate with that vision,
we gain energy. To awaken collaborative genius, these dreams, passions and
visions must also be awakened.
There
is a heroic inner journey underway for all of us—a journey to our own
potential. The call to allow our full potential to emerge, to allow the deeper
self to find expression in life, is always with us. It is a journey of passages
that requires effort, struggle and movement to attain the next threshold. As
Joseph Campbell (The Hero With a Thousand
Faces) wrote, “But whether small or great, and no matter what the stage or
grade of life, the call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of
transfiguration—a rite, or moment, of spiritual passage, which, when complete,
amounts to a dying and a birth. The familiar life horizon has been outgrown;
the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no
longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.”
When
we deny the soul’s journey and attempt to compartmentalize our lives in some
narrow and obedient social pigeonhole, when we avoid this call to growth, we
suffer disintegration. We separate our conscious lives from an integrated life
with the soul. Our integrity with this inner call is askew.
Writers
from fields as diverse as physics and psychology have noted the necessity of
living an integrated life. As physicist David Bohm (Wholeness and the Implicate Order)
noted, “All of this indicates that man has sensed always that wholeness or
integrity is an absolute necessity to make life worth living.” And from Jungian
analyst Thomas Moore (The Care of the
Soul) we hear, “The great malady of the twentieth century, implicated in
all of our troubles and affecting us individually and socially, is ‘loss of
soul.’ When soul is neglected, it doesn’t just go away; it appears
symptomatically in obsession, addiction, violence and loss of meaning.”
The
place where we work, no matter what the purpose of the enterprise, can
stimulate this integration with soul, or it can suppress it. When work brings the soul to life, the whole and replete
person shows up. A life integrated with
soul delivers sustaining inspiration and enthusiasm. Mathew Fox (The Reinvention of Work) has said that
we all yearn to make a contribution in life, “Every heart longs to be part of
something big and sacred.” The work that allows people to more freely express
their own heroic journeys—that engages that inner urge to make a meaningful
contribution—also generates collaborative genius.
__________________________________________
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