 Soul,
the Captain
Take time to listen to the song of your soul...
And see where it leads you.
(Soul) is the indirect presence
of your spirit and in your soul sleep all
the possibilities of your human destiny.
(John
O’Donohue)
“We all
come to earth with field orders.”
(Søren
Kierkegaard)
Consider that all harm to
the body and mind comes from a starvation
in the human ego—a spiritual starvation.
Call, then, on that part of self that knows
its divine Source—your soul.
In HOPE Groups and SoulCircling
workshops, where we help people establish
a dialogue with their soul, people often
ask me what soul is and if it isn’t
the same as their spirit. Have you ever
wondered what soul means?
What is the soul?
The
Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that the soul has the following
five qualities:
1. Soul is the “immaterial essence of a human
being.” Soul is not material—not of the body—and yet its presence
is vital to our being, our essence.
2. Soul “confers individuality and humanity.”
Soul is “considered to be synonymous with the mind or the self.”
This creates an identity between mind and self. The Self is our
individuality—those unique qualities that distinguish one person
from another and that comprise both the ego and the soul.”
3. Soul is “considered to be synonymous with
the mind or the self.” This creates an identity between mind and
self. The Self is our individuality—those unique qualities that
distinguish one person from another and that comprise both the ego
and the soul. Mind, our collection of conscious and unconscious
processes that influence behaviors of all kinds, becomes
transpersonal thereby—greater than the brain.
4. Soul is “that part of an individual which
partakes of divinity.” It knows The Source and Truth—that
which cannot be interpreted.
5. Soul is commonly “considered to survive
the death of the body.” It has eternal aspects—it precedes me and
succeeds me.
Our
Western spiritual traditions believed that The soul was one of the
four essential parts of every human (the other three are body,
mind, and spirit). Our belief in the existence of the soul and its
process of reincarnation enriched our lives for about 2000 years
from Plato (died 486 BCE) to Descartes. When the Age of Reason
came along and subjected The soul to the test of objective reason,
it failed and was left by the wayside.
As Plato’s thoughts on the soul are considered
fundamental to Judeo-Christian beliefs, so, René Descartes’
thoughts on the body and mind are considered fundamental to
contemporary, Western philosophy of science. Descartes did us all
a favor by not throwing the soul in the garbage—he
hid it from the rest of the rationalists by putting it in the brain.
The
soul could never stay in the recesses of the brain; it
is endowed with the spiritual
power that created the physical brain. Even Hitler had to have
a fragment of soul hidden deep in the
recesses of his incredible, evil, ego-directed being. The soul’s
patience will always be rewarded … evil
is ephemeral.
John
O’Donohue tells us that the soul comes here to love and beloved.
A
Course in Miracles
tells us that we can always perceive others as extending love or
giving a call for help. Neither statement explains why some souls come to inhabit bodies
directed by evil egos
— egos that define love in their own
narcissistically self-satisfying, corrupt, destructive ways. These souls
collect their energy from the human experience of
“flight-or-flight” responses to fearful
situations and ego’s use of fear to control and dominate others.
As the soul’s home is the heart, its attitude is love and its
function is compassion and forgiveness. Our soul has been holding
our ego in its loving, compassionate arms, waiting for the time
when the ego can open a dialog with the soul.
The
soul knows to let the ego run its own race—and fall in holes that
are apparently not of its own making. The soul knows that the ego
makes these holes in order to learn
lessons of the spirit; so it bides its
time. Now, when the ego gets out of the hole, it is ready to
engage the soul in dialog.
Meet
the soul. The soul is our divine Self, the essence of who
we are. When we express concern about
who we are to a SoulCircle or a
HOPE group, the group
usually responds with, “Have you asked your soul lately?”
The
eternal soul, preceding and succeeding each individual life, comes
to find truth and love. We have certainly made many mistakes in
our lives, both individually and collectively, and the soul’s work
is to make lessons out of mistakes—the lesson is always love in
the context of truth. The soul’s ways of going from mistakes to
lessons, from problems to possibilities, are far more powerful
than the ego’s ability to control things. With eternity on its
side, the soul can, indeed, direct many
lifetimes to learning the lesson. It would seem today that our
souls have devoted many lifetimes to this transformation, and at
this time in human history, we move, under the soul’s direction,
toward one of the great transformations of our species and our
world.
Indeed, historically rich concepts of soul are rushing back
into our consciousness. Book sellers enlarge their sections on
spirituality to make room for books about the soul written by
physicists, theologians, and psychologists, to name but a few of
the professions (re-) discovering the soul. The soul always works
in such grace notes and the soul of its
author wants to be close to your soul. The soul’s inherent
qualities of passion, feeling, relating, sharing, and tenderness
are feminine. As a tragic result, billions of us have grown up in
high-tech, low-touch, ego-rich, soul-poor societies whose
heart-less minds have no conscious awareness of their own soul.
Mind and heart, ego and soul must come to work together for our
advancement.
When
we blind the eye of the heart, our soul, we allow our minds to
corrupt thought, and we misapply our knowledge. A respected
teacher of our young in recognizing and correcting the application
of knowledge, lost two lovely sons, one due to self-inflicted
drug use, and the other to the bullets of a stalker. She saw that
each had lost his life because of the misapplication of knowledge.
The first had died because he misapplied his own knowledge and the
second had died because of another person’s misapplication of
knowledge. Without heart, the mind is capable of dehumanizing
people. We need our souls to guide us back to love, the way of the
heart. We must remember that the soul never left us; we left it.
Reflect
now on the idea that your soul carries with it the reason for your
existence here on earth... the reason that gives your life meaning.
Friedrich Nietzsche had this to say about life’s meaning: “it is
more important to find out why
you live than how you live.” Viktor Frankl’s experience in
Nazi concentration camps fully substantiated Nietzsche’s
statement. You live because Life, itself, wants your experience of
It. That is your work—your
soul’s calling. Your soul came here to
encompass your entire life with its love—to experience how you
love, were loved, and showed others the way to love.
Your
soul, in its eternal wisdom, chose to move into the background and
become invisible to your finite, ephemeral ego. A cloud of the
ego’s perception came across the shining of your soul’s vision and
dimmed your sight. The supreme challenge of a lifetime is to first
convince the ego of the existence and presence of the soul,
and then to encourage it to move into a
dynamic relationship with the soul.
Soul: a
holographic fragment of Creation:
We
have life because The Source is Life. The Life is in us, and we
are in It. It is us
but we are not It. We are but fragments of It—
holographic fragments—fully dimensioned,
but slightly fuzzy images of The Source’s experience.
Sacred
time, sacred art
A
soul lives only in the sacred time of the present moment. Secular
time comprises the historical past and the mysterious future—the
time of memory and projection—time that does not exist except in
the thinking of the linear, masculine ego. Keep in mind that all of
us, women and men alike, have both masculine
and feminine attributes. When we choose to live in the
present moment, we choose to live in God’s time. In the
time of the Beloved, we can make our lives a collaboration of our
personal ego and individual soul. In this way, our lives become lives
of service of the universal spirit—consecrated lives. The soul’s
journey begins in the glorious, passionate birth of the stars.
That soul swam the
primordial seas with the first single-celled organisms. Each one
of us writes a unique life story, a single volume in an
encyclopedia of the experience of one soul.
Popular wisdom maintains: "We are
spiritual beings experiencing the human condition, rather than
human beings merely trying to be spiritual." The name of our
spiritual being is “soul.”
Body, mind, soul and
spirit:
In
many ways, mind resembles spirit. In many ways, body resembles
soul. As
we reach out to our spiritual nature, the mind evolves into the
spirit and the body evolves into the soul. In short, we transcend
our old, limited nature and discover the wonder of a creative life
without limits. The
discovery of neuropeptides has revealed the connections between
the mind and the body. These remarkable chemicals render feelings
tangible and measurable — they are part of the tangible soul.
Of
the many neuropeptides and their emotions, only two are necessary
for raw, immediate survival: fear and its stepchild, anger.
Because of their importance, the ego uses these emotions to
protect us from harm and thinks it is essential to life.
Love, on the other hand, is essential to life and is
capable of taking the projection out of fear and anger and turning
them into awareness and presence.
Love is the attitude of spiritual life common to all great
religions. This single attitude contains a remarkable
constellation of emotions that evaluate our life-giving
experiences: happiness, joy, bliss, serenity, and inner peace —
the emotions of the soul. Today, ever more people are becoming
aware of the wonder of experiencing these emotions. This awareness
leads us out of the way of ego and into the way of soul.
Soul is, then, the essence of life, whereas
spirit is the source of life; and, as soul encompasses an
individual body-mind, spirit encompasses that body-mind-soul.
The
marriage of body and mind, ego and soul:
The
great Sufi mystic, Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273 CE), experienced the
shift from intellectualism and reason to intuition and ecstasy and
wrote about it. He stressed that the way of the heart was not to
negate the way of the mind, but that the two were to work together
in balanced relationship. The resulting balance would be, as he
put it, the Perfect Man.
Whereas the ego believes that might makes right and that judging
is a power that reflects might, the soul knows what is right
without needing to judge anything. Consider that the soul uses
that word, “right,” as Buddhists use it in their eight-fold path.
As Thomas Merton said,
Conscience is the
face of soul.” The simple and yet profound truth in these words
sing deeply inside of me, touching my soul.
When people ask me about the soul, I like to tell them that soul
lies at the heart of everything, encompassing the entire
body-mind, including the ego. What
matters is the experience of the journey, but in our world of
intellectualism, the ego does not know that. It does not know that
the soul is a piece of the ever-present divine Spirit that comes
here to be an individual who creates a unique volume of life’s
experiences. The soul is, then, the essence of any one life,
whereas the spirit is the source of all life; and, as the soul
encompasses an individual body-mind, so the spirit encompasses
that body-mind-soul.
Soul and
personality:
Each
soul comes into a genetic environment that contains all of the
elements of personality. The physical being that will be its home
will be born into a family which will respond to its gifts of
personality with their own personalities. In this way, the
environment of the older persons will begin to exercise an
influence on the form, thought, and behavior of the new human,
creating a new individual. If that environment is ego-centered, it
will try to control the newcomer. If the totality is
ego-centered, it will defend the person. If it is
soul-centered, it will empower the person.
Soul and
creativity:
Soul
comes through to our consciousness in many ways. The soul of a
playwright comes through to us in his plays. The soul of a mother
comes through to us in her nurturance. The soul of a composer
comes through to us in his compositions. The soul of an artist
comes through to us in her landscapes. The soul of a
teacher comes through to us in how she
helps us inform our lives. The soul of a physician comes through
to us in his healing ministry. The soul of a worker comes through
to us in the quality of the product of that work. The soul of a
portraitist comes through to us in her brilliant ability to
portray the soul of her subject in the painting.
When
a skilled musician plays a piece
written by someone long dead, the soul of that musician
joins with the soul of the composer,
and the resulting product is a distinctive, wondrous performance.
Can we find the soul of Bach, von Karajan,
or Baumgartner by looking at the plastic disc? Is the soul of the
composer in the electronic instrument? The soul of the performance
lies in the spacing and power of the notes. Rudolf Baumgartner’s
soul adds yet another dimension to Bach’s composition—and
my appreciation of Bach’s soul grows
when I hear this new performance.
The
great men and women of music pour their souls out to us in their
work. Where do these notes and performances come from: ego-driven
men or soul-directed human beings responding to spirit’s presence?
Was The Source not wonderfully inspired
to create the Universe? The work that you and I are here to do
flows from the Soul of the Universe as an unencumbered gift to our
own soul’s creativity.
Soul and
eternity:
“(Soul) often is considered to survive the death of the body”
(Encyclopedia Britannica, op. cit.). This fifth quality of Soul
speaks to its ability to endure beyond the limits of
time, as we know it. We must use them in order to
understand and appreciate this fifth quality of soul.
Whereas reason tells us that there is no evidence of a “soul” that
occupies a series of human bodies, intuition appreciates the
anecdotal story of the little girl who asked her baby brother to
tell her about The Source because she was “beginning to forget.”
That same intuition can lead us to appreciate the work of
scientifically trained professionals like Raymond A. Moody, Ph.D.,
M.D., Kenneth Ring, Ph.D., and Brian
Weiss, M.D., all of whom have written eloquently about their
experiences with people who have either experienced life before
their life or after it. Each of these three
heard stories from their clients/patients that challenged their
scientific, rational minds to the core and lead them to an
awareness of the non-rational, mystical nature of life—the life of
a soul.
Soul and
the heart:
Why the heart? It is central to us and
to The Mystery that gave us its life in perfect love. It is
impossible to define The Mystery or any of its expressions such
as: love, grace, truth, life, and soul.
With all that I have said before from
my non-rational mind, I offer you this description of soul:
Soul
is loving and kind; passionate and compassionate; patient and shy;
courageous and persistent. It is an instrument of creativity and
transformation: a non-judgmental energy moving
effortlessly through space and time gathering experience of
unfathomable, universal value. It is the essence of life.
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