the eye begins to see

Walking will take a back seat for a day or two whilst I explore another of my wanders in the minds eye. What is the SOUL? Indeed does it exist or is it simply a poetic invention which helps us understand some deeper romantic attachment to an even great quest that elusive "truth".
Let me start by quoting from RD Laing's THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE.
" Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence, an empty white sheet of paper, are perhaps feasible. There is little conjunction of truth and social "reality". Around us are pseudo-events,to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now in less in what things are than in what they are not.Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.
What is to be done?We who are still half alive,living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism-can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?
The requirement of the present, the failure of the past,is the same: to provide a thoroughly self conscious and self critical human account of man.
No one can begin to think, to feel or act now except from a starting point of his or he own alienation.
We are all murderers and prostitutes-no matter to what culture,class,society,nation one belongs, how normal, moral or mature one takes oneself to be.
Humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities. This basic vision prevents us from taking any unequivocal view of the sanity of common sense,or of the madness of the so called madman.However,what is required is the more than a passionate outcry of outraged humanity
Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection of the present inter -human life. Viewed from different perspectives,construed in different idioms, this realisation unites men as diverse as Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,Freud, Heidegger, Tillich and Sartre.
We aer bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world.-mad even, from, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.
We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved by outrageous violence perpetuated by human beings on human beings" 1967/84/90