I often suppose that the physical body is something like a prosthesis for the soul. I suspect that the actual nature of the soul is too astonishing to encode in anything like a description (including that one) and this suspicion is based upon long experience. In any case, it seems common that the prosthesis would like to know the soul. In other words, it would like to have a deeper experience of its own nature.

Of course, this happens all the time in dreaming. But in our waking lives we live as though in a strange set of trances which inhibit our intelligence, our insight, and our capacity for intimacy with ourselves and others. Contrary to popular belief, intoxications rarely do more than complicate these matters. All of these capacities (though they change from person to person and moment to moment) are explosively profound, again, beyond all possible description. What we receive of them, ordinarily, is nearly nothing in comparison to the available depth. This is, in part, because the prosthesis confused itself with the soul, and began telling itself stories about itself and the world instead of …

… something a lot more interesting.

Suppose you had the kind of a car that always wanted to drive you around on its errands, which you could clearly see were based on illusions refracted from hyperbolized myths about its origins and purposes and proper goals in development. In its desperation to chase and accomplish these illusions, it will sacrifice anything and everything, often unconsciously. This is my own ordinary state. And, given access to my soul in this state, I would attempt to ‘drive it’ toward my human goals, and would endeavor co-opt its gifts to fulfill them, which would be approximately like the public prostitution of my own child.

A soul is more than all the human minds. To experience it while incarnate is, in a meaningful sense, to exceed one’s humanity entirely. Which of our delicate and exaggerated egos is prepared for such an experience? Mine isn’t. I’ve had a deep draught of it, and it astonished and remade me. But my ego underwent extremely dangerous inflations; I was unprepared, even though I felt my motivations were compassionate.

Something must fundamentally change in the balance of power in the mind and heart before the soul may be drawn safely into direct contact with its human extension. The vessel must undergo preparations. Without making too much dogma, it must, at the very least, be brought to an experience of humility and attention which is ‘passionately settled’ and rinsed of all of ego’s fantastical aggrandizements of self.

This is not precisely what happens in dreaming, but it is often closer to such a way of being than our waking experience is.

There is so much more to say… but all in silence wrapped.