One day out of the blue, something unexpected happens that starts the journey back to the soul. Usually, it´s something very dramatic: an accident, an illness, a divorce; something that throws us into chaos, that breaks us down and turns our life upside down. We fall apart at the seams.
Cracks appear in the ground that we believed we stood firmly on. We fall down through the cracks inside our bodies. It is dark and painful. We didn´t know it could be so dark. We didn´t know it could be so painful.
For what seems like an age, we wander, alone, in a cold, desolate landscape. The person we once believed ourselves to be has shattered into a thousand pieces. It seems as if our life has come to an end. There is nothing to hold on to. We feel naked; raw. The road ahead looks bleak. Frightened, we continue to wander, not knowing where we are going.
Then, all of a sudden one day, we find ourselves in a new place, a place vastly different from anything we have ever experienced before. It is beautiful, peaceful. We are weightless, like air. We are expansive. We are boundless, free. We don´t know what it is, or where it came from. We know where we are; we see the physical world around us, but we are not part of the physical world. We are separate from it. We are in the state of pure awareness, the awareness of the soul.
The instant we start to think, pure awareness disappears. When we stop thinking, pure awareness returns and again we are like air: expansive, boundless, free. And again, as soon as we start to think, pure awareness disappears.
We discover that we can move back and forth between pure awareness and thinking as if we are turning a light switch off and on. We discover that pure awareness and thinking are two different things; that they are separate from each other; that we can´t be aware, and think, at the same time. We are either aware, or we are thinking.
We discover that thoughts and emotions can not affect us as soul; that nothing in the physical world can affect us as soul because the soul is impenetrable. In the very moment we see this, we know that, as soul, we are always safe.
We might also see light: white light, silver lights; we might see the world around us bathed in crystal clear light, or we might find that we are at the very bottom of ourselves in a wam, golden glow. We might feel at one with the natural world, with the sky, the mountains, the trees; with animals, birds; with other people.
The experience of pure awareness, of light, of being at one with nature, or people, might be brief, or it might last for some time. But no matter how brief, or long lasting, the experience is unmistakable. It is our essence, our real self, soul: beautiful, peaceful, powerful; free.
As beautiful as our experience of the soul is, it´s still very new, very strange. We don´t know what to make of it; we don´t know what it means. We wonder if we can talk about it. Will others understand, or will they think we´re crazy?
But, we know that we have experienced something unique, something that lies beyond the everyday world that we see with our physical eyes. The experience was deeply profound, and it has changed us. We are no longer the same. And, because we are no longer the same, we know that we won´t be able to go back to being how we were before. In a sense, this is all we know – how we were before, and how we are now. It´s unsettling, because here we are, having had an extraordinary experience, and we don´t know where to go from here.
The experience of our soul – of what we are – is so exquisitely beautiful that we wish to stay there forever, but, at this stage, we do the only thing that we can do. We go back to the mind. We do so because, up until this point, living from the mind is what we´ve always done; we´ve spent most of our lives thinking and reacting emotionally to the world around us. And, even though the mind is where fear resides, even though it causes us suffering and pain, we feel safe there because it´s familiar. It´s what we know. At the same time, we don´t want to be back in the mind. We long for beauty and peace. We long to be free.
We continue to move back and forth between the soul and the mind. This movement is imperceptible: we don´t notice it happening, but we do know when we´ve moved from the one to the other because the mind and the soul are so different that it´s like being in two different worlds.
At times, we feel frustrated because it seems so difficult to remain in the beautiful experience of the soul. Even when we´ve experienced it several times, the soul seems elusive, it seems impossible to hold on to. We love its beauty, its softness, its gentleness, it´s where we want to be, but, in the blink of an eye, we are suddenly back in the restless, noisy chatter of the mind. It happens so quickly that we don´t know how we got there. There is no beauty, no peace to be found in the mind. Thoughts feel hard, dense, heavy like concrete and the constant interplay between thoughts and emotions is a never-ending roller-coaster ride.
We regret that we can´t remain in the beauty and peace of the soul. We think that we should be able to stay there; we don´t know why we can´t. But we don´t need to be frustrated. We´re not doing anything wrong, it´s just how it is. We can´t expect to remain in the beautiful experience of the soul straight away. Before we can do that, we have to heal our wounds and let go of fear, guilt and shame. We have to let go of all the things that pull us back to the mind and keep us stuck there.