Soul & Ego: This Human Trip

What is this human earth-trip about, anyway? I found myself saying to a client today: We are souls on earth, here to unfold our potential from within. And we have no idea what that potential is. What are we to do? First we need to turn the spotlight of our attention inward, where that potential resides. We need to invite it to grow brighter and reveal its light and nature to us. We need to listen inwardly, so that we hear its impulse to act and express, hear and feel its messages to us, and sense its reality. It is subtle, it is quiet; it takes careful, attuned listening. We need to make a space for this in our lives. We also need to gradually dissolve the rigid walls formed by the structures of our ego, that keep us caught in believing we are less than our true potential. When those barriers are reduced, our soul can become more free to flow and express itself, in the way that it alone chooses. I sometimes think of this free-flowing soul-nature as colors, or music, or as a particular fragrance that carries your personal signature. Or I think of it as movement flowing in never-repeating forms and patterns you alone create. You can think of it as sculpted patterns of light and energy, intricate functions you perform in concert with others, supplying your special element that is needed to help complete the whole and move it forward. That and more is your soul’s potential; contained within it is every quality and capacity, in combinations unique to you, to be expressed through physical and non-physical means. How it will manifest is unknown until it starts to unfold, and even then is a continual revelation and surprise. Opposed to this fluidity and aliveness are the dense ego structures, where the fluidity of our soul gets caught in frozen, rigidified, paralyzing rituals of suffering and tedium. They are entirely predictable, hold us spellbound by their dramas of pain and blame, yet are ultimately boring and deadening, compared to the aliveness and delicacy of the soul’s potential. Drug-like, they stimulate but also put us to sleep. They are the soul’s sleep. Through the channels of the ego structures, the substance of the soul moves, but only in predictable, circumscribed patterns, repetitiously, over and over; like a tiger imprisoned in a cage, endlessly circling, instead of having the spontaneous powerful freedom it was born for. It is the same life force, the same essential substance of self, but imprisoned by structures built of impressions, memories, woundings, images, thoughts, feelings, concepts, fears, beliefs, expectations, and attempts at protection. And yet, within is always the potential to flow freely, without restriction, and to release into the world that true elixir which is uniquely yours to express and give. The work of development, of liberating our potential, must follow a double path. One path leads within, to connect to, invite, and encourage the energies of our soul; to become more present to them, allowing them to become magnified and to manifest more fully in our consciousness and our life. The other path allows us to step back from our ego patterns, to separate, so we can observe, understand, and through skillful means, start to dissolve them. We need to cultivate enough witness awareness and knowledge to do this. Gradually, following this double path, we will notice the structured, habitual self, the one we have come to call “I,” loosening its grip, until finally it no longer holds captive the true, luminous, infinite I whose life we have been waiting to live.