In our hearts, all of us know that the human spirit is so much more than a ‘me' that recurrently feels threatened and dissatisfied, that endlessly seeks to find happiness while feeling that somehow, something is wrong with us. We intuit that we have the capacity to reconnect to the source of our own beings.
The Soul and the Now
Soul, for me, is our capacity for self-awareness. It is the ability to ask ‘Who am I?' in a way that silences the thinking mind and opens us to immediacy, to the Now. The soul imbues all that we are and, at the same time, can lead us beyond where we are, even to oneness with the source of our beings. For the soul, each moment is a new starting point from which it can take the next step to greater awareness.
Who we really are, always begins Now. None of us will become our true selves at some fortuitous moment in the future. Our real identities never originate from the remembered glory or traumas of our pasts. It begins anew with the attention we offer to ourselves and to life in each moment. The Now is not an ultimate state to be realized but rather a continuum to be lived. We can hide in the shallows or risk diving deeply.
Wavering between fear and love
At this evolutionary moment, humankind is wavering between fear and love, focusing on survival and yet beginning to touch the infinite potential of being. In brief moments we know the undeniable rightness of all things; we come home to ourselves and understand that we are already that which we have been seeking. Yet at the slightest threat, we revert to distrust and control, once again losing confidence in who we were. Simultaneously, we unconsciously externalize this inner breach of faith and perceive a threatening world. Instantly we are back with both feet in the dominion of fear.
In recent years, a crescendo of fearfulness and polarized opinions and judgments has been reported and promulgated in the popular media. Blame is ceaselessly thrown back and forth. We are inundated night and day with stories that in their repetitive, hyperbolic reporting are designed to heighten our reactions of fear, outrage, and judgment. Whether the focus is on terrorism, rogue states, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, global warming, the next pandemic, other health concerns, pollution, government and corporate corruption, economic catastrophe, human rights abuses, pornography, or immorality, everywhere we look it seems that we thrive on telling ourselves the stories that keep us anxious, afraid, outraged and discouraged.
Are we morbidly fascinated with fear, aggression, loss and suffering? Are we addicted to angst and adrenaline? Or are we perhaps unconsciously inundating ourselves with fear because we are actually reaching the threshold of the collective understanding that fear is the god we can never defeat at its own level, and beginning to wake from our fearful dreaming? To begin a relationship with life in which fear is not our god, we must start from the place in ourselves that may well feel fear, but is not itself afraid. If we want to reach greater wholeness, we must start from the place in ourselves in which we are, and have always been, whole.
We have a choice about what we let determine our states of being, always, as we live closer to our beginning, we gradually drink more deeply from the fullness of our souls, and the world and everyone in it changes before our eyes. Then we notice that we have less fear, less anxiety and less urgency: life is good right now. There may always remain the unsettling taste of the unknown, and our lives will inevitably invite us to greater humility, but this begins to fill us with wonder instead of fear. A sense of how loving our universe is begins to grow until, eventually, we trust that we are flowing in harmony with life and are always supported, buoyed by a great and gracious current.
With both feet firmly on the terrain of love, we find that life is not about survival, it is about thriving. It is about consciously embracing each moment, aware of our parts in a great wholeness. In the ecology of love, all things have their rightful place and purpose, including our most difficult feelings. In the wisdom of love, we gain the energy to encompass what we formerly fled.
What is needed now
What is needed now, what evolution itself is demanding, is that we experience the self-transcending power of the soul. We do not have to change our world. We need only reclaim the fullness of our beings that is ever present and always seeking to awaken in us. In so doing, we become transmitters of a profound faith in life, and the world begins to change.
You can test this from your own experience. When we live with true intelligence, we build our worlds moment by moment from a sense of our own wholeness and thereby always invite wholeness. There is nothing more important, now or ever. Wholeness is where our hearts want to go and where our souls are leading us.
Join me now, and let's dive deeply together.
From The Mandala of Being © 2007 by Richard Moss, MD, published in the USA by New World Library.
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