The “animal soul” represents a fundamental aspect of human nature, reflecting our primal instincts and spiritual challenges.
The animal soul is characterized by its fixations and desires, driven by wants and needs that seek gratification. While allowing and accepting these desires is essential, it’s not enough for the animal soul to let go of them. The animal soul can dominate an individual, leading to a focus on gratification rather than truth. The rejection of and catering to animal desires can become barriers to the love of truth, making the animal soul a primary obstacle to spiritual development. This challenge is often exacerbated by dealing with a damaged or distorted animal soul rather than a healthy one.
The animal soul’s drives and instinctual appetites are not inherently destructive but can become so when disowned or repressed. Society’s attempts to civilize the soul by controlling and splitting off its animal dimension can lead to distortions and extreme aggression. The animal soul’s aggressive and libidinal drives, including survival instincts and desires for connection, can manifest in various forms during the spiritual journey. These drives can transform into greed, craving, rage, and heartless destructiveness, revealing the primitive potential of the animal soul.
However, the Diamond Approach also emphasizes the potential for integration and transformation. The bringing together animalistic impulses with the angelic sacredness of spiritual nature can contribute to the journey toward wholeness. This integration allows for a harmonious existence as physical beings on Earth, inseparable from the transcendent truth of the spirit. The animal soul is not separate but one of the dimensions of the soul, reflecting the unified and indivisible nature of human existence. The potential to unify our nature’s animal and angelic aspects is seen as a path to realizing the nondual condition of Being.
The animal soul is not a cruel human who has lost her heart. As we come to understand this manifestation, we begin to see that its exaggerated destructiveness and hateful quality are actually reactions to frustration. Because the instinctual self is not allowed to be powerful and effective in getting its way, its power turns into destructive hatred and heartless reactivity. The particulars of this structure connect with one’s early history in relation to power, control, destructiveness, as well as the need to protect the vulnerable and loving heart. When we are finally able to experience this animal form without either rejection or judgment or acting out, it transforms into its original animal form. This turns out to be an animal kind of power and energy, calm and confident, peaceful but ready to act with full power and energy. The opening of this experience removes the negativity associated with frustration. This is the time when one may experience oneself as a tiger or black leopard—strong, muscular, full of vigor and power, but calm and collected. – A. H. Almaas, The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality , Ch. 14