Soul Driving: The 7 Insights

“Soul Driving: the Seven Insights” presents a seamless psychology of dignity, a philosophy of harmony and a description of a life path guided by the inspiration of the soul. The book provides a guide to achieving an effective balance between professional and spiritual needs, a guide as to how we may fulfil our potential yet avoid the obsessional striving that grips the modern industrial world. The insights detailed in the book provide the tools we need to source and express our true essence, to move away from limiting contemporary cultural beliefs and popular ambition and ground our thinking in the reality of our soul. Whilst the ideas expressed have been derived from extensive research of the wisdom of the most eminent psychologists and philosophers, the inspiration that is central to the book is a new insight, the idea that ‘dignity is the fuel of complex reason’. This insight expands upon a psychological dynamic central to the work of Sigmund Freud, the idea that ‘anxiety is the fuel of psychopathology’. It expresses Freud’s dynamic in positive terms, and applies the dynamic beyond the clinical setting to normal psychology in contemporary Western culture. It identifies that while anxiety leads to dysfunction, a sense of dignity leads to functionality, productivity, achievement and wellbeing. By identifying and explaining the role that dignity plays in our daily lives, this idea reveals a major new piece in the puzzle of human psychology. This new idea builds on the work of the psychologist Donna Hicks who identified that dignity plays a central role in human psychology. She stated that ‘[w]hat seems to be of the utmost importance to humans is how we feel about who we are . . . [w]e share a longing for dignity – the feeling of inherent value and worth’. Similarly, the Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote ‘[d]ignity not only sustains but also energizes and enables. It accomplishes great things. It lifts the fallen and restores the broken.’ Dignity is critical to us all. Dignity goes to the core of who we are. It is for this reason that the right to dignity is recognised in the preambles of the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Our sense of dignity impacts on our identity; it strikes at our essence. This focus on dignity represents a shift from earlier conceptions of psychology. It moves beyond a focus on whom we think we should be, to a focus on the essence of who we are. The psychology of dignity focuses on the reality of our shared human nature as a reference point for life. The psychology of dignity infuses current psychological theories with the conception of Buddhism that we must move beyond our ‘self’ construct and appreciate our connection with all of nature to achieve true happiness. In sum, "Soul Driving: the Seven Insights" unites ideas about human nature long since known; it promotes understanding by providing insight into causes: what causes us to feel how we feel; believe what we believe and do what we do. "Soul Driving: the Seven Insights" explains how we can be at once exquisitely rational and, at the same time, passionately possessed - it explains how and why we are all 'soul drivers'.