The Soul Problem of Modern Life
Ever since I was a kid, people have called me an “old soul.” Growing up, it seemed I was rarely interested in connecting with kids my own age, preferring instead to converse with adults and people with more life experience than myself. Now, in my late twenties, most of my friends are many years older than I. As I get older, I realize that this has nothing to do with age, necessarily. I’ve come to understand that my soul—my Being and my Consciousness—connects very easily with souls that are similar to mine. This is true of all people. As spiritual Beings living a human experience, our souls are meant to connect with one another. They are meant to experience one another, for a time and for a reason to help each other on our collective journey. Despite living in a social age through hyper-connectivity, the problem with modern life is that many people have forgotten that they are Divine Beings. The root of many of the world’s problems is people’s dissociation from understanding themselves as eternal souls. Therefore, this leaves people to interact with others as objects in a single space and time.
Let’s dissect the concept of a human being for a moment. Human refers to form, that is, the body. Being refers to presence or soul energy. Together the term human being means soul energy in the form of a body. We come to this earth for our souls to experience a physical existence and learn lessons from the time we spend here.
Souls experience one another. A problem with modern life is that people treat one another as static beings and not Souls. Rather than experiencing one another, we simply interact with one another. Words might be exchanged among friends but true connection on a Soul level is missing. The ills of our society such as ever-climbing rates of divorce, growing frequency of mass shootings, increased diagnoses of mental illnesses (particularly among youth), and great social inequalities are all evidence for this. We dishonor one another by not seeing ourselves and others for what we really are—spiritual Beings—or Souls.
Your soul is your conscious (and subconscious) Being. Souls want to connect. In fact, they are all connected: as One. However, souls do not connect the way human egos connect—with labels and expectations. As a result of ego connection, we struggle to remain truly present with one another and struggle to allow ourselves to experience life in its fullness.
In the modern world, we repeatedly neglect to honor the souls that we encounter. Living life through screens—connected from afar on social media but disconnected in real life—it is easy to think of people as pawns in the individual game that we call life. We swipe right to connect with people near us but ignore those that are sitting right by our sides. Though people occur for us in our worlds, they are somehow separate or apart from who we are. This is not how souls are intended to connect.
Most people interact with one another out of ego consciousness, or mind consciousness. Souls operate out of living consciousness—out of Being. Instead of experiencing what is actually occurring when we are present with another’s soul, we often let our thoughts, characterizations, and opinions of others control our experience. Primarily, we let our experience of others be dictated by the roles that they play in our lives.
We all play many roles in our lives. Brother, mother, friend, employee, student, uncle, enemy, priest, CEO, person in a coffee shop, and churchgoer are just some roles to which people ascribe. With each role comes different expectations about how one should behave or interact with another. Do you speak to your sister the same way you talk to your boss? Are you as emotionally vulnerable and expressive with your spouse as you are with your bus driver? Why are there differences? The roles that you assign to people in your life dictate acceptable behaviors and thus, limit your self-expression with them to some particular context. While these roles serve important functions, they also impact our full soul expression. In fact, we fundamentally relate to each other in a limited capacity because the labels, roles, expectations we cast upon others are not authentic to the way souls experience one another.
Our roles, the expectations associated with them, and our self-expression based on those expectations impact our ways of being with others and, ultimately, limit soul expression. To illustrate the limitation, consider how we commonly conceive of romantic relationships. We use labels like “boyfriend” and “fiancée” to describe people and how they relate to us. These labels are roles that are not based in form but created in human minds. With each comes expectations. There are certain things you expect of your boyfriend that you don’t of others. And there are things you expect of your spouse that you might not have expected when you were just dating. Did something change? Did your souls change? Then why would you be relating differently to one another?
Souls come in and out of each other’s lives. They experience one another for a time and place to learn lessons together. Some souls stick around together for a long time while others come and go more quickly. The reason why so many people are unhappy in their relationships is because they don’t relate to one another as souls. They force labels and expectations on one another as if that is the natural way of being. But of course, this is not true. If you honored a soul in your life for its purpose, then could you ever be upset about a marriage falling apart or a friendship ending? If you truly experienced another’s soul, you could only have an appreciation for the time spent together. Our relationships are meant to teach us something about our own individual and collective Consciousness. If we related to others how souls connect, rather than how people commonly interact with one another, we might learn something very important about ourselves and about our Being.
To experience a soul as intended, you must be in a moment of presence; a moment of acceptance and seeing of another—of all that they are and all that they are not. We limit human experience by not recognizing the Divine in others. When we block the experience of being with another in a moment of complete presence, we block the expression of one’s soul. If we honored people as Divine souls and interacted from a soul level, our world would be completely different.
Souls are meant to be experienced; unconditionally loved and accepted as a manifestation of one’s Being in the cosmos. You might ask: “How do I honor the expression of one’s soul?” Listen from a place of presence. When listening, create a space for another to Be. It is the most precious gift you can give. Create a space to be fully present, without distraction, and just Be.
Over the next week, I challenge you to reconsider how you interact with others. Are you experiencing and honoring the souls that are interacting with you? Or are people occurring for you in a way that is somehow dissociated with who you are; objects in your world to be managed and dealt with. Take a moment, in each interaction with another person, to be fully present and see what emerges for yourself. Talk to the person on the train that you sit next to. Ask your co-worker what is important to them in the lunch line. Sit with your partner and experience their essence in complete silence. Find out what your children want for themselves and their lives. You might find that there is more to life than you usually experience when you honor your connections on the level of the Soul. You might also discover something for yourself about your own soul.
With love,
Cam
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