Spirit, soul, illusions, stars - and Eros?

The process by which experience arises is the same whether we are dreaming or awake. The world is a dream, the teacher and the teaching are a dream, the result of our practice is a dream; there is no place where the dream breaks until we are liberated into pure rigpa. Until then, we continue to dream ourselves and our lives in both the dream and the physical dimension. Wangyal, Tenzin.

As far as I know there isn't really much to say about spirit and soul in Tibetan Buddhism. There are many terms for mind, and one of them - probably sem - could be analogous to soul? In the Tibetan view, the body is full of channels (tsa), and mind (tigle) rides on air-currents (lhung) all through the body. So how one sits, one's posture matters, and exercises such as prostrations stretch out the channels making it easier for mind to flow through the body.

In Tibetan theory, during sleep there is little or no input from the body, therefore to observe dreaming is to observe - in Jungian terms - one's spirit process practically without soul. Dream yoga is the practice of lucid dreaming - being awake inside your own dream. The term Rigpa is, in this way of thinking, spirit unruffled by any input; spirit radiant, vibrant, beyond the structure or concept of thoughts. In Tibetan Buddhism this is freedom. Freedom is achieved by understanding that everything we perceive, including our conventional sense of self, is only a projection of mind. Or put another way, freedom is to live without grasping, without fearing loss, without fighting to hold on. Freedom from attachment and aversion.

Perhaps one could say, that in this system freedom is gained when Eros is lost? 

But in my experience....a story to be told in in the future, such freedom is no freedom at all.

Things are much more interesting in Ficino's writing, where spirit is described as a pure veil:

Souls descend into the bodies of the Milky Way through the constellation of Cancer, enveloping themselves in a celestial and luminous veil which they put on to enter terrestrial bodies. For nature demands that the very pure soul be united with the very impure body only through the intermediary of a pure veil, which, being less pure than the soul, and purer than the body, is considered by the Platonists to be a very convenient means of uniting the soul with the terrestrial body. (Ficino - Amore, V1,4)

And falling in love is due to the stars.

Those born under the same star are so disposed that the image of the most beautiful among them, entering through the eyes into the soul of the other, conforms absolutely to a certain image, impressed at the beginning of procreation onto the celestial veil of the soul, as well as on the soul itself. (Amore V1, 6)

Ficino describes Eros, as a completely unconscious process, a selection made by the soul, as it recognises the beloved. 

Meanwhile, Eros in the psychotherapy world, present during therapy, is separated from love by calling it erotic transfer and positioned as arising from the client's unconscious attachment needs, unmet during their childhood.

I think I find the idea of people gaslighting each other with complex and untestable theories, harder to accept than lies told out of shame!

In either case, creating a common preference instead of looking for reasons to invalidate each other is the only way both people will get to something better.

Time to be tangential - today I came across the idea of SAPA Bions for the first time! To be honest, the SAPA Bions made me think of Caesium 137 and Cherenkov radiation. Which means that though I have spent considerable time thinking about spirit and soul, perhaps I should start paying more attention to the symbols....and follow the blue sun.