My usual thinking does not inform me objectively enough about myself and about reality, and even less about my life. The Living Soul is a reality within reach of the soul, but not within reach of the body. Yet it is in life, in the present of the body, that everything is played out.
Who is my soul?
What relation do I have to my soul?
I was trying to comprehend my being as a body animated by thought and psyche. But I found out that there is more inner richness than what I thought.
There is “my” soul, deeper, more vivifying than what I supposed. By trying to know myself through the exploration of my past, my inheritance, my unconscious, my psyche, I was turning around its mystery. But there are many layers, like an onion that we peel. May I reach its heart?
And even my body, the body so well “charted” today thanks to recent devices, my body which is not always fully able to regenerate, do I know its inwardness, the functioning that happens, minute after minute inside of me, allowing my life?
The levels of those questions make me perceive that this odd way of feeling and thinking of human beings hides essential data on themselves. Yes, my usual thinking, articulated with my feelings, does not inform me objectively enough on myself and reality, and even less on my life. I want to pass this limit and find an approach of myself more consistent with reality.
This soul in me unveils itself differently than what I imagined. It has several dimensions. One is the immaterial aspect of the body phenomenon that is my life. Yes, it animates my body. It is my biological life in its movement, its fluidity, its subtle energy, its incarnated animation (in carne = in the flesh).
It is also my life by its quality, its way of being; it is mine, my quality of being, and my singularity. My strengths and my weaknesses, my unicity. It is concerned about reality and sensation; it animates my body interface with the world, with my peers. It throws itself upon upper reality, upon immense skies that my senses do not talk about. Then, it is tension, helplessness, missing. It stumbles over the walls of my body, my reactivity, and the limits of my thought that cannot grasp its true essence. More serene, it proposes other paths to me, other ways to perceive and be.
Emotions effects and preoccupations nourishing or nourished by my thoughts make it heavier, stuck. But it can rise towards a more blazing reality. When its “own” individual light is irradiated by a more powerful light, and a more universal, grander life, it changes its nature.I feel, I see, that nourished and connected to a spiritual dimension, it acquires more universal characteristics. And that affects my life. The soul is an organ; it has the quality of the one who bears it, and that organ has a more essential purpose. I discover that my questions have a goal; pushing me towards the conscious becoming of my soul.
The soul has its own future, at the heart of my life. Born as a biological soul, it heads towards being a conscious and living soul. And all the ideals that I like make sense around this absolute aspiration: freedom, autonomy, perfection, power, connection to others, beauty, sharing, ideal collaboration, and love…
This necessity cannot be taken for granted in life’s course. It is more consuming for some than others. It is so distant from the survival needs of the body. It comes from the soul. A specificity of the human being that aspires to what it cannot be. The more consciousness gets deeper into the discovery of these needs, the more what separates us from them becomes perceptible.
I realize that it is a spiritual path, and that it has nothing mystical, obscure, or easy. The Living Soul is a reality, within reach of the soul, but not within reach of the body. And yet, I know more and more clearly that it is within life, within the present of my body that everything is played out. This connection to a superior force that I create at the heart of my life, of my being, is the link between my soul and its reality. It is a prerequisite to go further, and my body fights back.
My way of appreciating, disapproving, welcoming or pushing away, that comfort my connection to more reactive aspects, my way of confirming to myself the reality of the ego, is in contradiction with a soul possibility. This paradox, I hadn’t seen it coming. It becomes crucial, unsolvable, conflict, inner renegotiation of what is acceptable and comfortable. Denial and discovery. Growing, dazzling, refusal. Discovery, disappointment, and all the ways of the being weaved in the thread of the story of a life and its episodes.
With these crossovers between the soul, personality and the ego, I learn the place and role of each of them. Through these movements, selections and articulations, another element arises: the soul is not alone. By essence, it is something more than individuality.
All these questions, including that of solitude, sense of abandonment, of sought love, are embodied in a unified reality: for the soul, nothing is separated. Its thread of being is another way of life. It now knows how to make me feel it. And this reality of being does not belong to me. To accept the absence of limits, we must give up the perception of a separated soul, for it connects to universal life. We must even give up the question of the lack of love.
