A clear path to your soul is available, but just as we’ve seen with the body, drastically new thinking is required. We need a new set of breakthroughs, each one rooted in a new reality that isn’t bound by the flawed materialism of science or the flawed idealism of religion. Are you meant to be more loving and creative, happier and wiser? Some people do become more loving as their lives unfold, but others turn in the opposite direction. Some people become wiser, while others cling to ignorant beliefs. Opposites keep clashing. We take the bitter with the sweet because we have to. What this indicates is that there are just as many breakdowns in the nonphysical part of life as the physical. Each breakthrough will take us past these breakdowns. At the same time we will acquire true knowledge of the soul to replace mere wishful thinking. Reaching the soul means fulfilling the deepest aspirations of the human heart.
Bringing spirit down to earth
Religion made a terrible mistake when it consigned the body to the “lower” physical world while the soul was lifted to the “higher” spiritual realm. A functioning soul is not so very different from a functioning body. Both are involved in the same things—awareness and energy—that make life possible. “I am my body” and “I am my soul” are two faces of the same truth. The problem is that we have lost contact with the soul. It wasn’t created to be useless; we made it that way.
Imagine yourself sitting in a doctor’s office, waiting nervously for your appointment. Your eye is distracted by a rose garden outside the window, or a solitary tree. Consider how these plants live. A seed begins to grow, and inside the seed is the plant’s entire life. As it grows, a rose or a tree isn’t tempted to deviate from its programmed existence. In harmony with its environment, a rose effortlessly expresses its beauty, and a tree its strength. Human beings, however, are not tied to a preset plan. We have more latitude to shape our own destiny.
Somewhere along the way, we used that free will to make a choice to divide the body from the soul. The body became identified with sin, and the soul with God; the body with Earth, and the soul with Heaven. But if you take a functional approach, there’s no need for such a division. We don’t say that roses have a body and a soul. Everything about them, from the subtlest information in their genes to the prick of their thorns, unfolds as one life. A rose’s perfection—so rich, velvet, aromatic, and intensely colored—is present here and now. The same is true of you, if you can get past the split that cuts your soul off from daily life.
There is no reason for anyone to dream of a lost Paradise, a garden from which the first man and woman were banished. Paradise moved inside us to become a vision of infinite possibilities. Your chance to evolve is right here, right this minute, in this very body. Your soul can step down much more of God’s perfection than you can even imagine. The limited degree of love, intelligence, and creativity that you experience in your life barely hints at the untapped possibilities.
To resurrect your soul, you must do the opposite of what your past conditioning tells you to. Instead of turning to a higher power, you turn to yourself. Instead of leaving your body behind, you take it on the spiritual journey. Instead of condemning physical desire and temptation, you follow desire into the unknown region where the soul resides.
It’s strange to say, but even when you lost contact with your soul, your body didn’t. Cells keep the faith. They have been using “higher” awareness since you were born. Here’s a practical example: It’s become a medical cliché that we use only 10 percent of our brains. In a sense this claim is a trick, because the 90 percent that isn’t being used wasn’t made for thinking. There are billions of cells known as glia (Greek for “glue”) that surround your brain cells to hold them in place. Glia outnumber neurons about ten to one. For a long time they were viewed as second-class citizens in the brain, serving as little more than structural reinforcement, like rebar in cement. No one suspected the glia’s secret role, which turned out to make for a fascinating spectacle. Glia are like starbursts or hedgehogs, with dozens of tiny strands emanating from their centers.
When an embryo in the womb is ready to develop a brain, there’s a huge challenge ahead. How can a few hundred or thousand stem cells turn into the billions of brain cells required? It’s not sufficient for stem cells to divide madly until they reach the right number (although they do that, too). The brain has many parts, and the neurons responsible for sight or hearing, for example, must get to their proper locations, while other neurons responsible for emotions and higher thinking must get to their proper destination, too.
To do that, each stem cell goes on a migration. The journey is often as long, relatively speaking, as the flight of the arctic tern, which flies almost from pole to pole. In the stem cell’s case, it can migrate almost from one end of the embryo to the other. Migrating stem cells line up by the millions, nose to tail, and travel along the strands of the glia. Under a powerful microscope you can view their journey and marvel at how the stem cells that need to go to one region turn off the main highway and follow the exact glial strand that leads to their final home, while the next bunch of stem cells takes a different turn. Each move is purposeful and guided. The brain grows from the inside out, so newcomers travel past older brain cells to form layer after layer of tissue. When researchers discovered that glia served as guides for this incredibly complex process, their reputation grew enormously. It grew even more when it was found that after serving as guides, glia can turn into brain cells themselves.
In what way is this not a spiritual journey? Stem cells are being guided home by a higher intelligence, acquiring wisdom along the way. Your life has been following the same hidden pattern, but instead of following glistening glial strands, you are guided by your soul. It holds the blueprint of God’s intentions just as a blueprint on paper holds an architect’s intentions. Everything a cell can do must come from somewhere. It would be foolish to believe that brain cells act randomly; otherwise, stem cells would float about aimlessly with nowhere to go. Our best proof that brain cells are aware and intelligent is that they act aware and intelligent.
But the soul isn’t confined to stem-cell journeys happening under the dark cover of the skull. Your soul brings guidance from the outside as well as the inside. You can sit in a chair and reach a life-changing insight, or a great teacher can walk in the room to deliver it. One event takes place inside you, the other outside. But both are events that alter awareness. Once you reconnect with your soul, you aren’t restricted to only a few levels of existence: they all open up to the same ever-expanding consciousness. And at every level there is guidance.
The brain connection
The most practical way to think of the soul is as a connector. But if that is what your soul is doing, connecting you to subtle, invisible levels of life, there have to be junction points with your body. In particular, we need brain connections. As it stands, the brain is the great obstacle to the soul. Neurologists don’t feel the need for any invisible explanations for love. They can exhibit brain scans showing that various areas of the cortex and limbic system light up in lovers that don’t light up in the rest of us; being in love comes down to bursts of electricity and chemicals, just as, for the geneticist, being in love comes down to a love gene (as yet undiscovered, but the search goes on).
It’s up to us, then, to prove that love comes from a higher place. If we don’t want to accept that the brain creates love out of an electrochemical soup inside the skull, where’s the evidence that it comes from anywhere else? Let’s turn back to the example of the Tibetan Buddhist monks who developed “compassionate brains” as the result of practicing a meditation on compassion. A spiritual quality was transformed into physical manifestation. The split between body and soul was erased. In Sanskrit the same word, Daya, applies to both compassion and the everyday trait of sympathy. It turns out that the brain is extremely variable when it comes to sympathy. Functional MRIs taken inside a New Mexico prison (the only program of its type) show that inmates who score high on tests for psychopathic te
ndencies also have distorted brain function. Psychopaths possess the least innate sympathy imaginable. They have no conscience; they can commit acts of terrible cruelty without feeling a shred of the pain they are inflicting. Watching the blood ooze from a knife wound is an indifferent act, like watching juice ooze from a steak.
Can a psychopath’s brain be turned into a compassionate brain? No one knows; the psychiatric profession has largely given up changing psychopaths either through drugs or conventional couch therapy. But we do know that the brain is malleable enough that it embraces every moral state, and that every state of consciousness requires a shift in the brain. Just thinking that you are compassionate doesn’t do the job, which leads me to conclude that compassion isn’t a mood, a moral teaching, an ethical obligation, or a social ideal. It’s a subtle activity of the brain that needs that subtle level to exist. On its own, the brain can’t produce change; it merely adapts to your intention. This gives us a slightly more sophisticated map of what the soul is doing as it steps down subtle energy to the human scale. Take anything that you want out of life. Your soul contains the potential for it to come true. Your mind brings the potential to the level of wishing, dreaming, wanting, and desiring. Your brain then produces the result; you learn how to achieve what you want.
Here’s the whole scheme reduced to a simple formulation:
Soul carries the potential
Mind carries the intention
Brain produces the result
This is the basic flow chart of life. It reverses the flow that science espouses, where everything must begin in the brain. But there’s no reason why the physical level has to be primary. The brain learns new skills by forming neural networks, but the desire for change itself must come from somewhere else. If you think of compassion as a skill, like learning to play the violin, it must be prompted by wanting to learn compassion in the first place. This gives us an insight into the soul’s most useful role: it motivates us to reach higher.
A useful soul gives you the vision, the desire, and the will to evolve. Your mind carries that vision into the realm of thinking and wanting. Your brain receives the message and begins to give it physical shape. This process is already familiar to anyone who has learned a new skill. But when we learn to do anything now, we are only conscious of thinking and wanting. The brain isn’t accessible, since we don’t dip into it and start rewiring its connections by hand. The physical level takes care of itself once we start thinking. The soul level is also inaccessible. We don’t ask God how to ride a bicycle. Only in the isolated compartment we call spirit, where prayers occur, do we say that we are asking God. There is no need for such isolation. Every skill, from the most mundane to one as exalted as compassion, follows the same process. It’s a mental process that reverberates through the body and soul at the same time. Here are the steps involved:
Becoming genuinely interested.
Pursuing your interest spontaneously.
Practicing until you see improvement.
Sticking with your practice until the new skill is mastered.
Simple as these steps are, they require input from awareness; the whole process can’t be triggered simply by the brain. Step 1, becoming genuinely interested, requires inspiration. To be interested in compassion isn’t an ordinary occurrence in a society driven by self-gratification, even among mature, psychologically developed people. But if you read the lore of compassion that infuses Buddhism and Christianity, inspiration arises naturally. The same can happen when you are moved by compassionate acts performed in brave rescues, or by relief missions to places where people are suffering.
Step 2, pursuing your interest spontaneously, requires turning inward, because the inner landscape is the country of compassion. Once you find the place of empathy inside you, it wants to express itself. Empathy may bring discomfort (the very word compassion means “to suffer with”), so you have to overcome your natural urge to turn away from someone else’s distress. Yet in some people compassion triggers a unique kind of joy that they want to follow.
Step 3, practicing until you see improvement, requires discipline, because you must constantly renew your dedication in the face of old conditioning that tempts you to turn away from compassion in pursuit of the ego’s constant demands. Pleasure is innately selfish; therefore, no one finds compassion without a struggle.
Step 4, sticking with your practice until the new skill is mastered, requires patience, because there are many inner forces—and outer ones, too—that oppose compassion. Higher awareness doesn’t force change; it melts away old patterns so that new ones can replace them, which takes time. (Ask aid workers who have flown to a disaster in the developing world. Their idealism vanishes at the first shocking sight of real devastation. They pass through stages of despair, frustration, and numbness. Yet beneath the surface a new strength develops, one that not only adjusts to the outer spectacle of suffering, but blossoms into a much stronger empathy.)
This outline gives us more insight into what I’ve called “subtle action,” which begins in awareness and then reaches into the body. Subtle action erases the boundary between a compassionate person and a compassionate brain. Each needs the other; neither is enough on its own. Heretical as it may sound, it took subtle action to create Buddha and Christ. They established unshakable compassion in themselves by following the same steps an ordinary person would follow. Buddha and Christ didn’t realize, perhaps, that they had to transform their brains, but they were certain that higher awareness was at work. At the very least, to be compassionate while not changing the brain is a temporary achievement, subject to the winds of change. Because we were all born with the capacity to sympathize, our brains await their next instruction to expand this capacity to the level of the soul.
Garry’s story
The subtle level of the mind, which connects with the soul, is attuned to signs, omens, portents, suggestions, pointers, and prophecy—indicators of the built-in guidance that is inherent in life. Conscious thinking doesn’t have to be involved. But we are so used to thinking as the brain’s highest function that it’s easy to overlook the silent, hidden aspects of the mind until they suddenly make themselves known. Then it’s no longer possible to overlook them any longer.
“I became a seeker when my career suddenly collapsed,” recalls Garry, who is forty-five and was diagnosed with a serious heart valve defect in his early thirties. “I went through a difficult surgery that led to complications. Recovery took a long time. The other guys who had been my friends on the fast track after business school dropped me; it was like my problems had made me somehow different. And they were right. I wasn’t like them anymore. Things were shifting inside.
“I took to wandering around town, waiting for something but not knowing what. One day I was getting on a bus, and I had the thought, Am I doing the right thing with my life? The man in front of me, a complete stranger, turned around and said, ‘Trust it.’ Then, as if he hadn’t said anything, he got on the bus without another word. That moment began a series of strange incidents. I was walking past a kid carrying a boom box, and at that moment I was thinking of going back to my old job. Suddenly he turned up the volume, and the song that blasted at me was ‘No, no, no, Delilah.’
“I laughed, but I wasn’t entirely amused. I felt a spooky connection with something beyond me. Soon afterwards I decided to go to a tarot card reader, and when I asked the cards if I should go on a spiritual path, the best card in the deck came up—it showed ten golden cups with a rainbow overhead and a joyous crowd dancing down below. After a while it got so I could ask myself a question and turn on the TV, knowing that the next words coming out of the set would answer my question.”
“And it never failed?” I asked.
Garry smiled. “Only when I tried to control it. The whole phenomenon had a certain innocence and surprise factor, so most of the time I was caught off guard. If I tried to push things or manipulate the outcome, nothing happened.”
“Did you get deep answers?”
I asked.
He shook his head. “Not always, but each one fit the moment. It was very personal, speaking directly to my situation.”
Garry had more examples to relate, as everyone does who finds that his life is guided. No one is especially chosen for guidance. It is an aspect of life that permeates every level, for all of us. Certainly the instincts built into so-called lower creatures are a profound form of guidance. One observes salmon, for example, who live for years in the open ocean and then return to spawn in the exact same stream where they were born. Their unerring guidance is explained by smell—it is presumed that even hundreds of miles out at sea they can detect molecules of water from their native freshwater birthplace. But something more holistic is also at work, because salmon don’t respond to this smell until they reach a certain age, at which time they find the right direction, change color, stop eating, and begin to secrete large amounts of cortisol, a hormone that will increase to the point that it kills every fish soon after spawning. Timing, chemistry, sex drive, and life expectancy are precisely coordinated by an inner guidance that remains mysterious.
In Sanskrit the inner guidance that shapes a human life is called Upaguru, “the teacher who is near.” Over the past four decades the word guru has become familiar in the West to describe a spiritual teacher—the root word means “dispeller of darkness.” In other words, anyone who can guide you to see what you need to see serves as your guru. No one’s spiritual journey is shaped by a cookie cutter. Each is made up of individual moments that occur only once in the entire history of the universe. It takes infinite flexibility for your soul to understand what you need at any given moment. But every soul is up to the challenge, and therefore each daily moment contains, hidden inside it, a small, unique revelation. Zen Buddhists hold that every question already contains its own answer. Your soul takes the same perspective.