“The soul is the truth of who we are.” ~Marianne Williamson
The Soul is almost like an endangered species these days. Showings of Soul may seem to be rare and precious occurrences, rarely caught on iphone, the same way you would take a photo of your Thanksgiving dinner. But that is the point—these showings of Soul are not in the taking of the photo of the magnificent sunset, but the taking in of the sunset into the Soul. A Soul experiences itself in the sunset, not in the taking of the photo. It's an inside job!
People pay lots of money to attend concerts and events that could possibly connect them to their Soul and inspire awe of some kind, when they may not have recognized the countless opportunities in their daily lives. If you are lucky, you may have found a church where you can count on some moments of Soul connection every week.
The truth is that the opportunity to experience the Soul knocks all the time. Opportunity calls us up, send us emails, and almost always shows up in gatherings of good people. All acts of love and kindness reveal the Soul. All feelings of deep gratitude rise up out of the Soul. All moments of awe and praise remove the film that settles on the Soul. All moments of courageously rising above the cement of culture are glorious expressions of the Soul. Moments of deep joy and pleasure are laden with Soul.
The question is, do you have the eyes to see, and the ears to hear the beauty, music and majesty of the Soul.
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 physical reality based on how you perceive your self in relationship to everything around you.
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 victim of an unfair culture where women don't get paid for their work, OR, she could perceive himself 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 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?
When we say someone is a “lover of life, we refer to the feminine function of the Soul that receives life like a lover.
What is soul made from?
Before conception, your Soul was in non-physical form. The soul substance is composed of adamantine particles, taken from the Greek word adamas, meaning invincible and referring to something extremely hard or unyielding. It could also be indicating something clear and brilliant, like a diamond.
When the term “particle” appears with adamantine, it derives from quantum theory and describes all fundamental, subatomic particles that form all the elements in the Universe. These particles assemble the atoms of all the original substances such as oxygen, hydrogen, and iron and are the basis of everything that exists. Imagine that! They are the smallest particles that cannot be divided any further⎯crystalline particles of infinity that store the potential to manifest any original element or substance.
The exchange of adamantine particles is the exchange of life, which goes on throughout existence. They are particles of infinity that are irreducible, fundamental, and utterly elemental. Not only do they comprise our body, but also the wind and the ocean and everything about us, under the guidance of love. There is an ongoing exchange of these particles throughout eternity. They belong both to the infinite world and the limited realm of physical existence. We are actually made of light.
What this means is that every manifestation in the third dimension of form emerges from the infinite expanse of Source energy or Light composed of unlimited potential. It is another way of saying that before you were born, you were with God—you were one with God/Spirit/Absolute Being. It is so important to see that the essence of who you are is under the command of love, in all dimensions.
Pursuits of the ego can block the connection to the Soul
The ego often gets a bad rap, as something you don’t want to have too much of if you are to be liked. In spiritual circles, the ego is something you want to let go of, which is impossible if we are to live in the world, and this causes a lot of confusion for those on a spiritual path.
In Western psychology, to have a healthy ego is highly valued, and gives us the capacity to navigate an increasingly complex and demanding world. In a sense, we cannot let it go until we have a strong enough ego.
Tibetan monk and scholar Chögyam Trungpa in his book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, says, “It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego. This means stepping out of ego’s constant desire for a higher, more spiritual, more transcendental version of knowledge, religion, virtue, judgment, comfort or whatever it is the particular ego is seeking.”
Rather than this constant seeking, if we could begin to see and hear what is already here, the ego could relax and connect to the Soul, which takes the edge off its constant dissatisfaction with the moment.
Here is an excerpt from a Washington Post article from April, 2007, which was two months before the first iphone was released. (the video is worth watching)
It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.
Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?
For one thing, the Soul is not concerned with the moral mathematics of the moment, but you get the point. The constant pursuits of the ego can block out the moments of Soul that are strewn across our path ever day.
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 environmental crisis, corrupt politics, fear for our children’s safety, the epidemic of immune-related health crises, 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 choice to revive 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, 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—really, 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.
The choice to revive 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.
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.”
May I revive my Soul this very day as I take in countless moments of love expressing itself.
May I be grateful for these moments, expanding my Soul even more.
May I reveal my Soul more often!
