Whenever any of the senses is impaired,
It becomes a gateway to infinity.
Whether by deprivation, injury or age,
Obstruction of the senses
Invites awareness of the Soul.
The mind can no longer take the world for granted.
Attention spirals inward,
And touches the glistening emptiness—–
The reality behind appearance.
(from the Radiance Sutras)
The year 2020 has presented us with countless opportunities midst the limitations, and there are many lessons to be learned. The very fact that we’ve been so restricted with “obstructions of the senses” has allowed many to dive deeper within and cultivate an awareness of the Soul, that incorporeal essence of a living being. The spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson says “The soul is the truth of who we are.”
What is the Soul?
The Soul is the journey of attention throughout a lifetime. It is where we choose to put our focus, and the physical world around us is an exquisite metaphor for our inner beliefs and truths and perceptions of self. Though the Soul is not physical, what we call reality in life is actually a relative reality created by our Souls in response to our current perceptions of self and beliefs.
Your Soul creates your external reality based on how you perceive yourself in relationship to everything around you.
In other words, your Soul is your Creator, your piece of God within, and you are ultimately the master of your own destiny as your Soul is constantly telling you what to create.
When we say someone is a “lover of life, we refer to the feminine function of the Soul that receives life like a lover. A Soul experiences itself in the sunset, not in the taking of the photo. It's an inside job!
Why awareness of the Soul is important
The more connected you are to your Soul, the more intentional your creation. The more focused your intention, to connect to your Soul, the more you begin to experience joy and awe in your present world.
Your Soul is using your current emotional patterns and perceptions of self to create your present life circumstances. For instance, a woman staying home with three demanding children may perceive herself to be a trapped victim of an unfair culture where women don't get paid for their work, OR, she could perceive herself being one of the most fortunate women she knows, who doesn't have the financial pressure to work outside the home. Life will conform to the perception of the woman.
The same can be said for how we perceive this year of chaos and disruption. We can perceive the world going to hell in a handbasket, or we can perceive what is happening as the necessary birth pangs of a world in dire need of rebirth.
The external circumstances are the same, so what makes the difference? It is where we put our attention! Are we able to bring our Soul to realize the magnificence of the moment?
A collective PTSD has been dampening our connection to Soul
My dear friend Anyaa McAndrew has written a powerful series on the collective PTSD that we are all experiencing at these times. Says Anyaa, “Many people are functioning on the surface of things, fearful that the next shoe will drop and anxious about the future as if they will not be able to get through whatever surfaces.”
Whether it is the pandemic, the environmental crisis, corrupt politics, fear for our children’s safety, or the deep pain of personal loss that we all experience all the time, our human psyches and bodies are in overload. This inordinate amount of stress is causing people to experience trauma, which is the inability to process what is happening fully, and leads to emotional and physical breakdown, dissociation, and a disconnection from the Soul.
I have described the present day mental health crisis as a collective spiritual emergency, which will not be resolved by government programs, to be sure. Instead, what we need in this culture that has lost its Soul are more moments of connection to revelations of Soul in the present moment.
The reality behind appearance
The Radiance Sutras are timeless universal meditations that provide a way into the reality of divine embodiment. it says that awareness of the Soul “touches the glistening emptiness—–The reality behind appearance.”
Says the Yoga Vashista, “The world is nothing but a mere vibration of consciousness in space. It seems to exist even as a goblin seems to exist in the eyes of the ignorant. All this is but Maya: for here there is no contradiction between the infinite consciousness and the apparent existence of the universe. It is like the marvelous dream of a person who is awake.”
Maya literally means that which issuses forth, expands or arises from the source, ‘ma‘, the universal mother. Maya is also described in the Hindu scriptures as the play (lila) of God enacted through Her creative and dynamic energy or force (shakti). It is the web of deception weaved by the universal spider (Brahman) to envelop the worlds in delusion.
This illusion is the appearance of things differently from what they actually are, and the Soul is attuned to this, while the ego latches on to the illusion as real. Some concrete examples are thqt everything in the universe is in a constant motion, but we believe ourselves to live in a stable world because we do not perceive the motion, unless we pay particular attention to the planets and the stars and the movement of time. To our eyes the sky appears as blue, because of the reflection of the light by the molecules in the air, but in reality, the sky has no color.
It is the Soul that is able to remember the “glistening emptiness” without sadness that nothing is real, but rather, with the joy of the artist who creates a masterpiece out of seemingly nothing.
Creating the world we deeply long for
To the Soul, every day is an opportunity to create the world we deeply long for. The Soul is able to thrive, in spite of all the programming and control exerted by outside forces that are not actually real. That may be a difficult idea to get behind, given how many freedoms appear to have fallen away in 2020. But freedom cannot be taken from the Soul, for freedom is the nature of the Soul itself.
The ego balks at the idea of limits, rather than soaring above them with visions of the possible, as the Soul knows to do. How that differs from pie-in-the-sky thinking is that when the Soul longs for something from the deepest place within, by gratefully feeling into what is possible, a potent force is activated. This force impacts physical reality to conform to the vibration of that longing in the most magical ways that the mind rules out.
Nourishing the Soul
The Soul needs nourishment, just as our body does, and its staple food is being fully present in the moment. That attention is the Soul making its appearance.
Being human, our five senses can be doorways to Soul, rather than, as many religions preach, distractions from Soul. For Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist who introduced the notion of Soul into western psychology, life was not a series of random events but rather the expression of the deeper order of things, which he called the Unus Mundus, Latin for “one world”—- the Soul of the world.
The feather falling on our path in a moment we feel very heavy is an opportunity to connect to our Soul. Jung said that these experiences of synchronicity share characteristics of an intervention of grace, often spoken about in religious writings where beings such as angels appear to humans in order to assist them in their Soul’s quest for wholeness.
Because we are made of the same substance as nature, being fully present to a drop a drop of water falling off a leaf, a red sky on a winter morning, or the scurrying of squirrels in the Fall, can connect us to our Soul.
Being fully present to another human being, particularly as they are expressing their creativity or authentic feelings, can cause a well-spring of appreciation to rise up from your Soul.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said “Music is the universal language of mankind,” and can be one of the most direct and powerful ways to connect to your Soul. Poetry uses the language of the Soul, and dance can be a direct doorway to the deepest expression of our Souls, that cannot bear the weight of language.
Nourishing our Souls is the antidote to the trauma we inevitably experience. Prayer, praise, purpose, peace, poetry, play, possibility….the list is endless, When we consciously choose to experience Soul more and more often, combining intention with attention, we exercise our sovereign capacity for creation.
Connecting to the Soul for the sake of others
The Jungian analyst and author, Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, “One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show up.”
No matter where you are or who you are with, when you are connected to your Soul, you raise the vibration of the moment. People feel it, whether they are aware of it or not, for Souls resonate with other Souls.
The ego often views the moments of Soul connection as a waste of precious time. The wise person knows that the more he is connected to his Soul, the more light and love he radiates out to the world.
May I be wise enough to be present to the endless moments of Soul that permeate my life.
May I be brave enough to soar beyond the limits of my mind.
May I be kind enough to share my Soul with others.
