many elements that suggest that other transpersonal paradigms such as Teilhard de
Chardin’s noosphere, Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance and even Carl Jung’s
collective unconscious might well be merely different aspects or constructs of the
same phenomenon. All are non-spatial, non-temporal and non-substantial and
seem in some way to be embedded within or connected to the places we inhabit.
Jung called it the spiritus mundi or World Soul (Jung, CW, Vol 8, Par 931)
and we see that it has transcendent aspects that manifest in both the physical and
psychic dimensions but it is eternal, its existence independent of time; a realm we
enter with our thinking. I f by ‘spiritus’ Jung meant that which exists independently
of space, time and matter, including the human psyches, then the I maginal Realm is
that of the eternal timeless truths: the laws of number, of logic, of space and of
time, of life itself and therefore of the archetypes of everything that has the
potential to exist. Jung also tantalizingly suggests that all reality might, indeed, be
grounded on this mysterious substrata (Jung, 2002:125). This suggests a reciprocal
relationship between the places we inhabit and the human psyche, a relationship in
which revelations and epiphanies occur and synchronicities too but that a part of
each one of us, psychically, dwells not only in the spiritus mundi but is embedded in
place.
I t might be argued that in this discursion on soul, consciousness and the
significance of place beyond materiality, that the importance of an embodied
response to place is being diminished. This however, is far from the case. As we
have discussed, in Keneally's work there often appears to be a gratuitous dwelling
on the body and its fragility. McCullough and Malouf also reflect this in a much
more subtle way, essentially referring to what I would term 'the suffering body' in
response to place.
The Australian writer James Cowan, in tones reminiscent of the earlier
quoted perplexed meditation of Pato Dooley, provides us further insight into this
relationship, by analogy, when he has Fra Mauro say:
The world and the spirit are somehow conjoined. They both thrive
on one another as a seed does in the earth. Who but someone
who has quit home and journeyed to distant lands would
understand? .... I have been too willing to remain where I am
rather than to take leave of this place and journey to where I am
not (Cowan, 1996:133).
That ‘someone’ who has quit home and journeyed to distant lands may well
be the mythopoeic writer and their readers who may readily quit the security of