Part I: A Soul is Born
You are not who you think you are. Not really. You may hold many of your beliefs dear—beliefs being those thoughts you breathe in, breathe out, every day. You may identify with various parts of your story, some parts that feel weightier than others: your gender, your sex, your religion, your likes and dislikes. Some parts of your identity may feel less heavy, but still are characteristics of your tale: your hair color, your body type, your way of laughing, whether you snore or not, which side of the bed you sleep on, if you love or despise animals, if you wake early or sleep in late. All of these characteristics give texture to the life you’re living, but they are not summative. They cannot even begin to paint the picture of who you really are.
You are the energy within the body. You are the quivering flow. You are beneath, betwixt and between all of these other characteristics. You are tangible, liminal space—that spirit, that soul, that pulses through the skin, that sees with a third eye, that can fly above treetops and sink into the community of tree roots within the soil. That soul within you is not of this world, and simultaneously, it is everything in this world.
The Birth of the Soul
Our souls come from the source—from that collective, powerful mother entity that is the universe, the planets, and the stars–that is everything. Not tangible, but omnipresent, this source is with us now, as our souls are one and the same with their creator. Beyond this earthly plane, our souls commune in quite a different way. We are the hive mind, the water cycle, the minerals and the air. Our souls know every thought, every fear, every hope, every joy. There is nothing left unknown, because everything is shared.
I imagine this place of ultimate communion to be a golden orb with all of our souls swirling around, loving each other and being loved. Sometimes, it is a whirlpool in the dark purple sky with stars spinning together. And sometimes, the source is a field of flowers in a meadow that grows without end. It’s where we—the deepest sense of ourselves—come from, and where we glimpse when we feel disconnected, where we return to remember that we are all of the same. That is the soul’s mission of course: connection.
Why Do Souls Come to Earth?
From this birthing place of energy, our souls can decide where to live out their missions. They could live in the astro fields, hopping from comet to comet. Or they could inhabit galaxies unknown to us, on planets where life is defined differently. They could choose to live on Earth, assuming the body of an animal, a tree, a flower, a body of water. They could choose to be human. This is the mission for only the bravest, the most curious, of souls because to live here, on this planet, as a human, is to choose to live disconnected from others while constantly striving to connect deeply. It is a perpetual state of stress.
On Earth, the human construct has been created and sustained as a method of preventing us from truly being with one another. Our soul, tethered to a human body, must battle daily to be connected to other sources of life. The skin is a barrier, though porous, but the mind is the greatest obstruction, as well as our greatest resource. Knowing this, that it will not be so easy to feel connected to the source on this planet, the souls that do decide to come here, to live out a life here, must be warriors.
A Sacred, and Scared, Contract
And so, the soul descends with its adventurous spirit, signing a celestial contract to be with family, friends, lovers, mentors, children, others on this world. I imagine them gathering together in that meadow, or in that golden orb, a cluster of souls about to journey to a new world. “See you down there,” they say with a smile. “Don’t forget about me!” They laugh, hold hands that aren’t really hands, and nod their non-heads together as the journey begins.
And then, the soul is born into this world, a baby with memories of that golden place of nurturing still etched in the mind. It opens its human eyes and for the first time realizes how skin suffocates its desire to be everywhere. There are lungs to capture breath, and eyes that give a narrow view of can be seen, and hands that try to touch but can never really feel. How strange it must be for our souls as they squirm around inside this human casing, getting used to the heat of blood, the pumping of intestines, the neurons that transmit messages all the time, and the weight of those three pounds of brain. Always talking, reading, anticipating, fearing, predicting, the soul must feel entirely overwhelmed. This is what it signed up for?
Yes, it is. With time, the soul begins to understand this world a little bit more. It begins to be curious, to marvel at the fragile existence of these lives: the sweet milk given from mothers, the strengthening of muscles in an infant body, the swell of a full stomach, the first sound of laughter from the mouth, the recognition of other souls that have signed onto this life contract together. As the body grows, learning the practices of humanity, the soul too begins to better understand how it can feel connected to others and how it can move through the limits of this human form.
Take a moment to consider…When do you feel most connected? To whom? Doing what?
(To be continued)
