A study of the soul, by Krista Moore. For those who are struggling on the path of awakening, and wondering why you don’t feel good, or if you are doing it “wrong”… Hopefully this will give you comfort and faith for the journey.
I have never questioned the existence of a soul. One has only to spend a little bit of time with me while I am brooding on the meaning of it all to know the depths the soul can live. A scientific mind too has a soul – it simply finds its answers in the known universe, which even then, boggles it from understanding anything at all. But it is not just answers the soul seeks. It is experience. A feeling of fullness, wholeness, freedom from any questions.
The soul is the part of us that exists within and beyond the body. It cannot be contained, which is often why it causes us such misery in contemplating its deeper wants and existence. If our life, in comparison to the soul, is somewhat contained, and contrite, and deals in shallow, known waters; if it does not surface to explore the depths and chooses to remain hidden from us, we will feel as if there is a hole in our very being, a vacuous tent with no furnishings, no music, and no food to keep it from starving. This too is an exercise of the soul, to awaken us to something deeper. It may be painful, but it is a necessary step in showing us the difference between meaning, and a world without it.
What does the soul love more than anything else? To know itself. To extinguish the false, and to disappear into the blazing light of truth. It is a difficult master, and has no mercy on those who cling to childish things. There is no joy that does not come at the cost of giving up the meaningless. True joy is what the soul feels, when we are washed in its light, free to do its bidding, and share the gifts only spirit brings. True joy comes from union with God, its creator, Source of all things. When the soul is lit, it is capable of great joy, and wants only to share itself and experience all with great abundance and clarity. It is wise, expansive, jovial and alive. Not every soul experesses itself this way, but I believe, in its truest light, unguarded and unbounded, every soul is capable of this.
How does one, who has not yet had this feeling, come to experience the soul? If they have cried or lost anything, they have experienced an opening of the soul. The challenge is not to shut down the tiny crack that has been opened by heartache or disappointment, and instead to feel even more what that heartache or disappointment is pointing toward. If it is a loss of love, or death we have experienced, the soul teaches us that we have loved and lost to learn something. In the absence of that love, we feel torn apart. Any separation on the earth plane from those we love feels like the separation from God, even if we don’t believe in Him. If you have ever experienced loneliness so deep you thought you were going to die, you have experienced this separation, which all humans suffer at one point or another. It is a temporary condition of our corporeal lives, a trick of the body that says we are separate from one another, and different from everything we see in the physical world. Our bodies seem solid and real, while our minds seem able to go from one unrelated thought to another. While we sleep our minds visit other places and dream of unknown things. We never realize that the mind never sleeps, and is the shepherd of the soul’s deeper longings. Hopefully it is a good sheppard, and we can keep what is important to us close at hand, if not close in our hearts.
In our vulnerability and loss, we can find the key to our soul. Like a child finding a seedling in the garden, and planting it in a deeper hole so that it will grow, we can dig a little deeper and find true shelter for our soul. Our hearts can open even wider, stretch us even more profoundly. Where we thought it was time to walk away from such “negative” feelings, we must examine the deeper longing underneath the belief that we are alone or that we will never love again. To be loved is the natural state of the soul. To be in a constant stream of consciousness which is ever reaching and expanding itself, is the natural state of the mind. This is only painful-seeming to us as humans who have limited ourselves to what feels comfortable and certain, rather than be faced with the uncomfortable reality that we don’t know anything. Better to not know and ask a deeper question, then to bury our dreams and let them pass us by. If instead we plant our hopes, our intentions, even our pains, by digging into the heart and feelings, we will be rewarded with happy tears as well as hope springing from the soul’s eternal ground.
So our job is not always to feel pleasant and happy – though we may end up there after the work is done. Our real job is to find everything standing in the way of that happiness, and admitting to ourselves where we have fallen short of the soul’s natural unfettered state of joy, and asking ourselves why we have done that? If we feel we are undeserving of such happiness, or that such freedom is impossible in the world, we will continue to suffer, and the soul will or will not keep showing us the other way. Let us hope it continues to push us deeper and away from our comfort, and out into the open where life breathes, and love is self-renewing. And the world is but a temporary playground where we can learn our lessons and become more and more acquainted with our soul.
What can we hope to expect if we do not give up? A window into the soul is a window indeed into another universe of things. Past, present and future seem to meld into an eternal mix of possibilities. What seemed broken and inconsolable can now mend. Hearts once closed and swept so clean they seemed hospital sterile can be flooded with new love as green and productive as a wild spring. Rushes of hope can lead to unexpected visitors and companions on the journey back to our true self. What felt lonely and uncertain, now feels warm and inviting, a great source of material for bonding with our fellow humans. And courage comes, too. Out of the depths of all that lay waste, pale yellow fruit pops from the ground and raises itself up to the light above, filling with the juicy stuff of life that one can simply taste or share with the whole group. We discover that we have been grown in the process, and taught to live. And if we are very “lucky” (meaning willing and ready), we may even break the bonds of the earth for a time and, experiencing ourselves as pure soul, take flight.