Living True to Your
Soul
In one of my recent lectures, I was explaining
the interconnectedness of spiritual thought with biology
and physics, and how it all comes together into a unified
whole. I explained that, in order to understand what
it means to be human, one needs to understand how human
beings are expressions of a deeper mechanic, a mechanic
of physics, a mechanic of the structure of the universe.
And the universe is an expression of one, self-interacting
dynamic of the unified field itself. However, to understand
that unified field, it has to be experienced directly.
To have that direct experience is to begin to understand
the connection of the unified field with the human heart,
spirit, and flesh, and how it relates to one’s
communion with divinity. It was a fairly long talk and
I went into some detail. Everyone in the group seemed
enthralled.
In that moment, I saw an opportunity
to take another tack. I invited anyone to repeat conceptually
the essence of what I had just said. No one volunteered.
I told the group I found it intriguing that not a single
person volunteered to summarize, when I could see they
followed what I had said. Then I called upon a very
intelligent student who had been involved in my classes
for a long time. This man had traveled coast to coast
countless times, taking numerous courses with me. What
I had just said was certainly not new to him. I asked
why he hadn’t put up his hand. His response brought
out my point far more beautifully than I had hoped.
He uttered, “I can’t completely believe
it.”
To get some insight, we could say people
function on two levels. The more superficial level is
the level of indoctrination. From childhood, we are
spoon fed attitudes, beliefs, philosophies, and convictions.
That indoctrination determines the tone of our psyche,
the nature of our comfort and trust. For most of us,
it is the determining component of how we think, what
we feel, and how we live our lives. Yet it is not really
who or what we are.
The other level lies much deeper. It
is the fiber of our being that is one with the unified
field and the mechanics of nature itself. It is the
source of truth, but not truth as a set of facts. It
is truth on an abstract, sensing, feeling, and intuitive
level, a level more closely connected with common sense
and wisdom. It cannot be acquired through the more superficial
forms of conditioning that tend to run people’s
lives.
Though the more superficial level is
the one we tend to align with, the deeper level is that
of our spirit, our soul, our passion, and our longings.
As people evolve, those two things come together. Shakespeare’s
quote, “To thy own self be true,” takes
on a deeper meaning—allegiance to the deeper aspect
of our being and freedom from more superficial conditioning.
So the man’s response was significant.
He would not have been studying this for so long and
with such great dedication if he didn’t sense
the truth of it deep within his soul. Yet it was so
foreign to his conditioning, he couldn’t quite
bring himself to speak it out. On the superficial level,
he couldn’t fully accept it.
Most people live their lives torn apart
by this sort of inner conflict. They feel, they long
for, they aspire to the truth within the depth of their
soul, but have difficulty following through on the surface
of their life. This is because living from that place
is not something you can just decide to do. It is really
a physiological culturing process. There is a double
bind here. You can’t really live it until it is
awake in your physiology. But it doesn’t awaken
in your physiology until you start living it. As you
work with it over time, the sense of deeper knowing
becomes clearer and stronger, while the grip of childhood
and social conditionings soften. Emanuel Lasker, mathematician,
colleague of Albert Einstein, and world champion grandfather
of chess, described it. “I spent the last half
of my life trying to forget what I learned in the first
half.” A great saint I knew from the Himalayas
challenged a group with it in an intriguing way. “If
any of you had a bit of courage, you would certainly
be enlightened by now.”
What is courage? Some equate it with
foolhardy risk taking, but it is far more. Courage is
stepping forward to live your life in service to that
deeper level of your being. Most people do it here and
there to varying degrees and then fall back upon their
superficial relationship with life. It’s like
a sticky throttle.
You would do well to explore your life
in this context. In what ways do you live in service
to your conditioning? How, when, and where do you stand
up and live in accord with your soul? What is the dance
you do between those two things? This is so thematic
to human existence. We love to hear about Joan of Ark,
Gandhi, Martin Luther King — people standing up
and living true to their inner being. In Hollywood,
the opposition is played out as the bad guy. In life,
the opposition is the conditioning that dwells within
you. It prevents you from being the great being you
truly are, all in the name of being safe, smart, successful…
(Fill in your own adjectives here.) This is an appeal
to rise up beyond the confines of the narrow world of
conditioning and live in accord with the great being
you truly are.
Who you are is an embodiment of the
totality of all existence, the unified field, the oneness
that is not only your soul, but the soul of the universe.
To live in accord with that is the only thing that brings
fulfillment, support of nature, and a life that you
will regard as great.
© Michael Mamas, 9/06 |
