For the sake of simplicity, I use the terms “Image,” “Body,” and “Desire” throughout this course. But for each of those terms, I mean something different than the common usage. I hint at this in other pages, but I want to include a full, direct accounting here.
In my personal practice, I use specialized terms for each of these ideas, rather than the more commonly understood terms. I use them as follows:
So while you won’t be seeing my personal terms in the rest of the course (at least not often), it feels helpful for you to be aware of what I’m “translating” from when I use the simpler terms.
An eikon is a full multi-sensory impression of an experience in its wholeness. It’s not just the visual, not just the audio, not just the emotions or the background information you have access to, or the smells and feels and memories that come up — the eikon is all of it, the entire gestalt experience.
I talk a bit more about this aspect of eikons/images in Beyond Visualization
The soma is the full, multi-sensory experience of the wholeness of embodied experience. It’s not just the usual 5 senses and the internal feeling of your skin and organs and so on — it also includes harder-to-define experiences that we tend to ignore. For example, close your eyes and notice the space behind you. The space above you. Put your hands a few inches apart, and notice the space between them. Feel the deep interior of your torso, and notice any sense of space, heat, movement, buzz, color, whatever’s there.
I don’t have nerve endings behind me, or in the space between my hands. There’s no sensory apparatus for sensing a “slow purple-ish swirl beneath my ribcage.” And yet, all those things were in my awareness, along with the emotional tone of the moment, the sights and sounds around me, and so on.
All of this together, the entirety of ones embodied experience, recognized and unrecognized, is the soma. And more, most people come to recognize the soma as a living presence underlying their ego. It’s a constant companion, and a wise one at that.
Eros is a deep, powerful, embodied sense of what is driving you through the world, what you’re here to do. Other people might call this drive, mission, purpose, libido, psychic energy, or meaning. I use the terms “desire” or “urge” in this course, to capture how Eros feels when we start to get in touch with it. It often feels like one more competing sense of urges, wants, desires, put on top of all the other competing interests inside us. But as we spend time attending to these new sets of desires, they start to become something more. They become a trustworthy guiding light.