The Soul

The Soul
Diego Frigoli and Alessandra Bracci*

The one who delves into the inner secrets of his Soul
helps build the spiritual pyramid that will reach heaven.
Diego Frigoli

ANEB – Associazione Nazionale Ecobiopsicologia (The National Association of Ecobiopsychology) took part in the tenth edition of BookCity Milano, the initiative promoted by the Municipality of Milan and BookCity Milano (Corriere della Sera Foundation, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation, Arnoldo and Alberto Mondadori Foundation, Umberto and Elisabetta Mauri School Foundation for Booksellers) in collaboration with AIE – Associazione Italiana Editori (The Italian Publishers Association), AIB – Associazione Italiana Biblioteche (The Italian Association of Libraries) and ALI – Associazione Librai Italiani (The Italian Booksellers Association) moved by the desire to gather the Italian publishers to create an event shared among all the leading figures of the editorial system with the aim of putting the books, the reading and the readers at the center of a series of events spread  throughout the urban area, as the “engines” and the protagonists of the city's identity and its transformations in the past, present and future history.
In this context, we presented Materia Prima – The Journal of eco-biopsychological Psychosomatics, the house organ of ANEB. The idea of adding an online journal to the rich scientific publication of books responds to a number of needs: first of all, the possibility of reaching a large audience of potential readers both in Italy and abroad through the web (all issues of our journal are freely accessible from our site and some articles translated into English). Secondly, the contributions presented in the journal are thought to be a sort of open window on our scientific, cultural and clinical research laboratory: a look at the future of Ecobiopsychology that is constantly questioning, enriching and evolving. Thirdly, the project does not only aim to present contents based on topics of interest, but wants to share and propose a real method, the method of Ecobiopsychology characterized as the proposal and, at the same time, the invitation to build a New Science, a Science capable of recovering a complex reading of Life that recalls the metaphysical vision of the traditional philosophy with which Man has approached Nature finding his own soul and with it the awareness of his own unity with the Whole; a Science capable of integrating the ECO aspect (gr. ôikos=dwelling and by extension the world we "inhabit") with the BIOS, understood as the body of nature and therefore of Man, and with the PSYCHE considered both as the individual and the collective psyche.
Sill today many people believe that they can refer to a theoretical system represented by a reductionist approach, typically determined by the triumph of sign, scientific abstraction and theories that decree the empire of a civilization of disjunction, but we should open up to a "complex" reading of the phenomena as suggested by the modern epistemology of complexity that invites us to embrace an "open" thinking capable of creating continuous articulations between what appears to be disjointed; it invites us to "bring together" opposite dimensions opening up to a vision of totality and complexity. The term "complex" from the Latin complector, in fact means to intertwine, embrace, understand, hold together. It refers to concepts of relationship and organization and does not mean "complicated" at all. Therefore, the method of study will involve the need to consider phenomena as endowed with their own organization that can never be mutilated, simplified, fragmented in an unnatural way, but if anything, must be able to tolerate the doubt, the contradictions, the coexistence of opposite terms.
In a world like the current one that  presupposes reality on opposing fronts: body and mind, matter and spirit, the Ecobiopsychology - as a vanguard in the field of complexity sciences - reminds every human being of the importance of rediscovering his deepest identity, his soul understood as an essence which intermediates and intertwines body and mind, matter and spirit to the point of reflecting, in their unity, the entire universe; as many traditions underline “Man is a small universe and the universe is a big Man”. And, the moment the soul gains the awareness of itself, it opens up to the awareness of the unity of the world. It is evident that the moment we welcome the requests of the soul, we need to open to dialogue and, for the dialogue to happen, the first question that arises spontaneously is what language to use. What is the language of the soul? The language of the soul is constituted by the imagination, the use of the "vital analogy" and the symbols capable of grasping the relationships between the "infrared" of instincts and matter, and the "ultraviolet" of the archetypal images.
In the modern scientific knowledge, analogy is still today disdained by scientists despite having been scientifically rehabilitated after 1950 by the cybernetics of the American mathematician and statistician Norbert Wiener who demonstrated how it is a regulating factor, a mental tool that if applied correctly, allows to establish a comparison among "natural machines", "human machines" and "artificial machines". Analogy, which means proportion, balance of homologous quantities, is present in all our ways of knowing except for calculation and is always controlled and corrected by its comparison with the logic of rationality (Morin, 2017, p. 103). Therefore, from the point of view of neuroscience, we could say that the analogical thinking belongs to the right hemisphere because it connects in exact proportional terms what appears as unknown in the primary psyche of the human being. In this regard, some years ago Giorgio Cavallari suggested the reading of The Line and the Circle. Logical-philosophical Study on Analogy by Ezio Melandri. In the text, considered one of the most important works of the 20th century in the philosophical domain, the author does not hesitate to affirm that in the processes of knowledge, analogy is responsible for a "circular" trend of thinking because «it borders to the South with the Thematics, to the North with the Dialectics; between a West which is Science and an East which is Arts» always involved in an internal struggle with the logic of the consciousness (Melandri, 2004, p. 3). What does it mean? The Thematics represents our ability to orient ourselves towards the topics of discussion; the Dialectics must deepen them through a discussion open to other dialectical fields. There is therefore a comparison that sees at the "center” the relationship between the scientific thinking - the thinking linked to the left hemisphere, to the criteria of cause and effect, and to the principle of non-contradiction – and Arts as the possibility to experience the functioning of the right hemisphere and to create connections among the world of the individual, of Nature and even of the Universe.
We know that analogy has often been overshadowed because it frequently leads to illusions and errors and, from a scientific point of view, does not take to collectively validated demonstrations. However, scientists like John Wheeler, one of the giants of 20th century science, looking deeply into the still unsolved mysteries of quantum mechanics, affirmed that the ultimate notion according to which we can understand the world, is not that of "matter". or "energy", "space" or "time", but it is the notion of in-formation. The world and the universe do not exist except as the in-formation that each element of the universe has on the others. If the universe at its root is relationship and reciprocal in-formation, in psychological terms it will be analogy, coherence and synchronicity. He claimed: «We once thought that the world was out there, beyond a pane of glass... This is not how the world works: we have to break the glass, slip in there» (in Gefter, 2014, p. 493). To "slip into the world" we need to have a tool that can make us experience the world within us. This experience is constituted by the correct application of the analogical thinking that once become capable of connecting the networks of relationships it aspires to know, the scholar's world "collapses" into the current universe of space-time dimensions, but that collapsing world is the world that precedes this space-time dimension. In the analogical thinking, this function of collapsing is referred to as the "symbol", a true and proper collective experience capable of making the relational network of vital analogies, on which the world and the universe itself are built, "collapse" in our subjective experience.
The great cosmologist Ervin Laszlo[1], known as one of the greatest systems theory theorists and two-time Nobel Peace Prize candidate, did not hesitate to state that «as the particles are related by the hologram as a whole, as molecules and cells by the hologram of the organism just as human brains and minds are related by the hologram of the species, so the planets, the stars, the solar systems and the galaxies are related by the hologram of the universe» (Laszlo, 2002, p. 138). What is the hologram? It is a small part in which the Whole is condensed. So if Man explores his own internal world with the analogical and symbolic instrument; and if this internal world is in turn harmonized with the world of nature, knowing the world is knowing nature; and if Man's psyche is able to expand more and more until it even escapes its own subjectivity, through humanity it can get to experience the whole universe. We know very well that this passage no longer concerns science and perhaps does not even concern psychology, unless psychology enters a much broader, more dilated relationship, that contemplates the relationship that the psyche has with a dimension we would call spiritual. But we need to understand the exact meaning of the words, the concepts of "spirit" and "soul" are often confused: the "soul" (gr. ánemos=breath) is the vital breath that, if we were capable of perceiving its depth that vibrates in our heart, in our body and in our psyche, would take us back to the breath of creation; the "spirit", on the other hand, hides the radical "p?r" that opens up to a transformative dimension. So the relationship between "soul" and "spirit" is the same that exists, from a deeper point of view, between the matter of the psyche and its transformation dictated by the "internal fire". When the two parts integrate with each other through a reciprocal relationship, the human psyche and perhaps the psyche of humanity enter into a relationship with their own most archetypal dimension and therefore with the dimension of the Self.
That is evident in the ecobiopsychological approach when we open ourselves to the "reading" of a patient's history and to the transformation of his biography into a lived novel... but lived by whom? First of all, by the therapist who, by linking the analogical references present within the biographical history and making them alive and pulsating until they become a "novel", begins to build a therapist-patient dyad whose center is the transformation of the narrated events into a more meaningful history. «This is the degree of "openness" offered to the psyche of those who try their hand at the experience of the symbol: it allows to penetrate the time of the arche, where the priests of a lost rite, perhaps the poets, were able to "sing" Man's ideas by revealing their secret warp and weft, hidden in the inner space of the heart. In other words, it is a question of reaching a condition of aisthesis much deeper than that commonly understood in the West by the modern aesthetics, because, as the etymology itself indicates, it refers to Man’s perception of the outside world extended as the horizon of the sensation itself is wider. In the spiritual domain, the sensation becomes infinite" (Frigoli, 2019, pp. 43-44): then, the therapy will no longer be just a therapy aimed at solving the complex and painful problems of the theme of the Ego, but it will have the ambition to place in the correct direction the expressiveness of the patient's Self which will begin to become evident.
As far as the human being is concerned, if we think that this type of path is favored by the conscious use of the analogical thinking, when we enter into a relationship with the vastness of nature, the analogical thinking, which is created by our subjective mind, must switch to another mode defined by Ecobiopsychology as "vital analogy", or even better "homology"; this means that while the Ego complex is analogical, the symbolic code of nature is homological or vital analogical. What is the difference? The analogical thinking is the concrete thinking that unites in terms of relationship, the elements that have the same purpose: for example, a dragonfly has wings like a bird, but this is an incomplete analogy because the language of nature does not move in this way. Nature constructs homologies and highlights, for example, that the wing of a bird, structurally speaking, is analogous to the hand of a man, to the fin of a whale. This possibility of finding a common ancestor among the different forms that perform the same function is defined as homology. Science has already confronted with the dialectics between analogy - vital analogy and analogy – and homology: just think about the domain of the comparative anatomy where homology is fundamental because it orders the forms of the living world in natural terms. The moment we apply it to the psyche, we will see that the leg of a horse that runs, the wing of a bird that flies, the fin of a whale that swims, the hand of a man that works, etc. Even if they appear to be different structures, they are united by an identical function, namely the movement that takes place at different levels of the natural world, on earth, in the air, in water, in humanity. This is why scholars have always been fascinated by the theme of analogy and homology, it is an indirect way of being able to summarize within an ordered path the elements and the "formed forms" that life has carried out in the dimension of nature and of the universe itself.
Over the years, through Materia Prima, we have proposed this openness: many issues have been dedicated to apparently opposite elements such as, for example, Origin-End, Inertia-Transformation, Pleasure-Pain, Love-Hate, Feminine-Male, Courage-Fear, Past-Future, and so on… and in this dynamic in which the egoic mind would like to extract the won and the winner, right or wrong, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, etc. the TAO, one of the best-known symbols in any part of the world, brings them together in their eternal movement in an all-embracing totality. In the symbol of the TAO, the opposites, which are united by a border, by a sinuous line, by a spiral line which suggests a movement, by a line which continuously wraps around itself, the opposites become two fundamental aspects of life that allow the becoming, the evolutionary process through the continuous exchange and interdependence of each other. Ecobiopsychology teaches us to investigate the opposites starting from the border area between the yin and yang area, the Taoists would say, to explore that intermediate area where there is no longer a clear distinction between the two opposites that, on the psychic level, correspond to the "intermediate world" of Henry Corbin's images, and that Ecobiopsychology takes from the reflections of ancient Zoroastrianism with the concept of the state of mag. The latter describes a perception of the intermediate world that manifests itself every time it is possible to unite in a concordant way the sensitive data of the "infrared" with the corresponding "ultraviolet" images; the resulting psychosomatic state is completely internal and is the one in which the real "spells" occur where bodily emotions are connected to mental events in a single whole. This "intermediate world", defined by the Persian Platonists as âlam al mithâl or malakût, corresponds to the unreal, mythical and marvelous world. It is the place where not only the visions of prophets and mystics are manifested, but also the deeds of heroic epics, of liturgies with their symbols, of the "space" of prayer, as well as of the "esoteric" mystery of alchemical operations (Frigoli, 2017). It follows that in the process of knowledge of reality, one must distinguish between ordinary learning that often does not eliminate doubt and that, on the contrary, draws continuous strength from the progressive acquisition of notions (rational knowledge), and true knowledge that leads to a progressive certainty highlighted in the Islamic tradition by three stages of knowledge: the first, called "knowledge of certainty" ('ilm al-yaqîn) comparable to hearing a description of fire, the second is called "eye of certainty" ('ayn al-yaqîn) comparable to seeing fire, the third is called "truth of certainty" (haqq al-yaqîn) comparable to that being burnt that can be assimilated to the study of complex phenomena that can transform the person who faces them, because their knowledge implies a circular and synchronic strategy of thinking and not only rational one. This means that the one who has managed to enter the relationship with his feeling burnt, has completed his journey as far as his cognitive experience is concerned.
Therefore, through the state of mag, the Ego goes beyond the limits of space and time of daily existence and the conscience "imagines" reality not only through sensitive data, but also through data from the dreams, the myths, the emotions, etc., thus feeding the superior faculty of the Soul that is that of intuition. This means that the deep place of the irrational becomes an "image" and allows the passage from the invisible to the visible, thus favoring that transformation that, on an individual level, occurs when the human being orients himself in the direction of the discovery of the Psychosomatic Self, in the direction of a much vaster planning compared to that offered by the narrow egoic vision.
On this premise, when we approach Materia Prima, we encounter the words of an ancient alchemist: «The Investigators of Nature must be such as Nature itself is, truthful, simple, patient, constant, etc; and especially pious, God-fearing and not harming). Ecobiopsychology, recovering the ancient teachings of hermetic philosophy and the alchemists, integrating them with the recent discoveries of science and psychology, invites us to "follow Nature", that is to be able to welcome even the most subtleties of the laws of nature, treading in his own "footsteps", as symbolic steps of a progressive, constant, patient, humble path of identification. This "process" that finds in its development the possibility of proceeding towards the construction of a personality aware of its own resources and aspirations, capable of integrating the conscious part with the unconscious one, capable of expressing itself in the vast network of known relationships with the expression the "Network of Life", allows us to evolve from an EGO vision referred to an ECO vision until we become increasingly aware of our belonging to a much vaster community: we are all an integral part of the "Earth family" and as such, we should behave as the other members of this family do – the plants, the animals, the microorganisms that form the vast network of relationships where we should be able to develop our projects, free our creativity without however interfering with the Nature of life.
For this reason, we have chosen the term Materia Prima to designate the writings of this journal which represent the attempt to distill the expressive code of Life. If Prima Materia represents the dark mass, the primordial chaos of the primary elements not yet become order, in the theory and practice of alchemy, Materia Prima is the transformation of Prima Materia; it represents the transformation in the "subtle" light of a consciousness that is gradually amplifying. The reader is therefore stimulated to try his hand at a sort of "intermediate" art, a real art of metamorphosis which, not disdaining the rational rigor of the left hemisphere, tempers it with the immense knowledge and intuitive sensitivity of the right hemisphere trying to make tangible, sensitive, the fruit, the gold of the transformations of Nature.
The search for the soul is always the result of an individual journey in which rational thinking "consciously" surrenders to the discovery of intuition. To access this discovery, the mind must know how to explore the secrets of amazement and wonder, that consist in suspending the mind from all judgments and preconceptions. Only when the mind reaches this condition, it is possible to understand what the alchemists called the Materia Prima of images, made up of that humus made up of sensations and representations, in which the body and the mind dialogue with each other. At that moment the individual mind relates to its own history and can access infinity.
Thus, through the various articles, our wish for the Reader is that the Artist, hidden in his soul, in the constant search for "awareness", stimulated by the words and images proposed by the Authors of Materia Prima, can go further to follow his own way, represented, for all errant knights, by always remaining Faithful in all humility.
In other terms, in the synchronic experience which characterizes the life of every human being, there are often events that can surprise us and arouse in us that sort of astonishment in which the Ego, suspending its judgment, finds itself confronted with the planning of the Self. In these moments which can be more or less vast, depending on the importance of synchronicity in action, the human being learns to modify the axis of his life, to perceive an inner need which does not always coincide with the choices and desires of the Ego, to go beyond the needs in which the existence is imprisoned, to understand that already in this life there is a link with the infinite but, for all this to happen, as Jung said, the individual must have «the moral faculty of πιστς, of fidelity» (Jung, 2013, p. 13) and our life must become a true declaration of Love to be understood in its deepest etymological meaning α-mors, i.e. deathless, immortal. Love understood as that internal "fire", that force that can make life not an episode but part of a whole in constant evolution that represents the concrete need for transformation of the human being as it allows the awakening of the superior conscience in the direction of discovery of the Self.
And it is precisely on the wave of this openness that we dedicated one of last year's Materia Prima issues to the current theme of the pandemic, entitled The Pandemic and the Sleep of Reason, as well as this issue featuring a variety of contributions and highly significant experiences thanks to the ANEB project entitled Listening to the Discomfort of those who dedicate themselves to caring during the COVID emergency period; this project has offered its contribution with the activation of a free psychological listening desk aimed at all healthcare personnel: doctors, nurses, rescuers, healthcare social workers, etc..
Considering what we have said so far, it clearly emerges that in situations like the current one in which we are led to lose our certainties, we need to prepare ourselves to recognize the infinite, to recognize the meaning of what is happening; we need to make an effort of awareness to reconnect in us what appears to be unknown and threatening, so that with our research we can go beyond the mere survival by opening ourselves to what the archetype of life is communicating to us through this pandemic. Ecobiopsychology wonders about the reason for the current pandemic; we are faced with a very curious phenomenon: an entity - the virus – that is neither living nor non-living endowed with a protein coating called capsid, inside which there is only genetic material, the DNA or the RNA, as soon as it comes into contact with a cell becomes alive and takes over so much that it is called "intracellular parasite"; that is, it enters a cell and places it at the service of its own specific dimension. In these terms, the virus "knows" the world according to its ability to specify one, through the modification of the DNA or RNA of the invaded cell. This behavior towards the cells of the human body, corresponds on the psychic level, to those collective experiences that "parasitize" the conscience, directing it towards solutions that are no longer human, but only destructive.
What are the mental viruses that apparently exist in an individual psyche as "viral" aspects that, as soon as they colonize the psyche, become "alive"? One among many is consumerism that can be considered as a collective drive to "introject" the need for needs that are not essential to survival, thus causing irreversible environmental damage and general diseases such as tumors and immune system disorders. The glorification of material consumption has deep ideological roots that go well beyond the sphere of economics and politics, because they concern the loss of the symbolic function in favor of the sign experience. If we can no longer process a "virus" but a careful reading of "vital" experience, then perhaps we have the tools, a sort of collective vaccination that allows us to bear the viral dimension with suitable tools drawn from nature. In this way the human being can rediscover his identity and his ability to relate and his collective approach to the world. «Our soul is waking up from a long period of materialism and, enclosing within itself the seeds of that desperation which arises from the lack of faith, purpose, goal, it still feels prey to the nightmare of nothingness. It can only glimpse a faint light, like a point in an immense black circle, but it is precisely that point of light that adequately amplified by the study of the depth of the heart, allows that movement of knowledge that is not limited to being an echo and a reflection of its own era, but becomes that prophetic force of the spirit capable of exerting a broad and profound influence on the heart of humanity» (Frigoli, 2018).

References
Biava, P.M., Frigoli, D., Laszlo, E., (2014). Dal segno al simbolo. Il Manifesto del Nuovo Paradigma in Medicina.Bologna: Gruppo Persiani Editore.
Bracci, A., (2020). Dottore, il mio nome e? Gaia..., Materia Prima, n. XIX, Ottobre 2020, Anno X, 69-71). Milano: ANEB. https://www.aneb.it/media/165/covid.pdf
Bracci, A., (2020). Intervista al Dr. Diego Frigoli. La Pandemia e la patologia dell’in-formazione, Materia Prima, n. XIX, Ottobre 2020, Anno X, pp. 8-17. link
Bracci, A., (2020). La Rete della Vita, https://www.aneb.it/pubblicazioni/la-reted ella-vita/
Capra, F., (2008). La rete della vita. Milano: BUR.
Frigoli, D., (2016). Il linguaggio dell’anima. Fondamenti di Ecobiopsicologia. Milano: MAGI.
Frigoli, D., (2017). L'Alchimia dell'anima. Milano: MAGI.
Frigoli, D., (2019). I sogni dell'anima e miti del corpo. Milano: MAGI.
Frigoli, D., (2020) Il contagio psichico. La preghiera è l’arma che abbiamo a disposizione.
https://www.ilsussidiario.net/news/il-contagio-psichico-la-preghiera-e-larma-che-abbiamo-a-disposizione/2001935/
Frigoli, D., (2020). L’archetipo del Sé e l’Ecobiopsicologia, Ricerca Psicanalitica, Rivista della Relazione in Psicoanalisi, n. 2, V. 31, Anno XXXI, pp. 339-355. Pavia: PAGE press, https://doi.org/10.4081/rp.2020.278
Gefter, A., (2017). Due intrusi nel mondo di Einstein. Un padre, sua figlia, il significato del nulla, e l’inizio del Tutto. Milano: Cortina.
Jung, C.G., (2013). Coscienza inconscio e individuazione. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.
Laszlo, E., (2 002). Olos. Il nuovo mondo della scienza. Milano: Riza.
Melandri, E., (2004). La linea e il circolo. Studio logico-filosofico sull'analogia. Macerata: Quodlibet.
Morin, E., (2017). Conoscenza. Ignoranza, Mistero. Milano: Cortina.

*Diego Frigoli – Founder and promoter of the ecobiopsychological thinking, Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist and Director of the School of Specialization in Psychotherapy ANEB Institute. Innovator in the study of imagery with particular reference to the element of symbol in relation to its dynamics between individual and collective consciousness.

*Alessandra Bracci – Manager at a multinational automotive company and winner of national and international marketing awards. Head of the ANEB editorial area. Editor-in-Chief of the journal MATERIA PRIMA. Author of scientific publications.

Translated by Raffaella Restelli - Human Sciences scholar, linguist and psychologist enrolled in the British Psychological Society with which she actively collaborates. Graduated in Modern Languages and Literatures at the Catholic University of Milan and in Psychology at the Newcastle University, UK. Ecobiopsychological counselor. Collaborator of ANEB Editorial Area as a translator.

[1] The reference is to the book From Sign to Symbol. The Manifesto of the New Paradigm in Medicine in which the authors Pier Mario Biava (physician and researcher in epigenetics), Diego Frigoli (psychiatrist, psychotherapist and founder of ecobiopsychological psychotherapeutic theory and practice) and Ervin Laszlo (philosopher and two-time Nobel Peace Prize candidate, with a preface by Giorgio Cavallari (psychiatrist, psychotherapist, Jungian-trained analyst psychotherapist and Scientific Director of ANEB Psychotherapy Institute), "dialogued" on the deepest sense of the term on the need for transdisciplinary collaboration based on a holistic view of Man and Nature and with the goal of overcoming the mechanistic view in favor of a treatment that places the person and not the symptom at the center of attention.