Iris: We Move Towards What Is Good

The movie Iris about the life of Iris Murdoch, played by Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, portrays the extraordinary journey of Iris from a vivacious young woman to a highly admired author and her descent into the darkness of Alzheimer’s disease. Here are some words spoken by Iris in the movie: “Every human soul has seen, perhaps even before their birth, pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honor. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms, simple and calm and blessed which we saw once in a pure clear light form, being pure ourselves”

Iris captures in this paragraph three eternal truths:

First, that consciousness exists independently of the flesh, in that the spirit was before and will be after the appearance in flesh.

Second, that qualities fashion an energetic form, so that whenever a human anywhere awakens to justice, care, courage, and compassion, their individual experience may be uniquely personal but the pattern and the energetic signature or form is recognizably the same. When you or I embody and become these or any other qualities we fashion a fractal of the universal pattern of that quality.

Third, that the human story consists of the journey of a spirit/soul compound coming into the flesh to experience, feel, discover and make choices and thereby refine and fashion the inner formation into an indestructible gem, a gem that makes a value added return to life itself, to consciousness and to the evolutionary process.

© Aviv Shahar