Caring for the soul on the mystical path

‘There’s a lot more Psyche (and its environments) around than most of us think.’ Douglas M Gillette

As a young person, Douglas Gillette read voraciously in cosmology, comparitive religion, philosophy and theology, and later became fascinated by depth psychology.

He realised that the common theme of his ‘adventures of the psyche’ was the expansiveness of consciousness. This was what he was after, progress through life from awe, wonder and exhilaration to the Divine, studying religion, and becoming a pastor and a pastoral counsellor.

From his lived experience, now in his 70s, he finds the human psyche is vast in scope, maybe infinite: ‘It is crammed with mental units of dizzying variety and proportions and, it seems to me, dwelling in and as multiple layers,’ Gillette says in Soul Making: The Realization of the Mystical Life (Inner Traditions, November, 2024).

In this work, his aim is to grasp the paradox of the spiritual journey: that those who are working on their souls to better manifest their divine nature are already reflections of the divine. His key tenet is that, ‘in the mind of the Divine’, every person has infinite, eternal and absolute worth.

Gillette tells his personal story of spiritual self-realisation alongside mythic accounts of soul development from Mayan…