Singing Souls

Part 1

Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done. 
            — Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation

I believe this line from the Tao Te Ching to be true. 

Just as I believe it to be equally true that we can improve the world by following our dreams. That is, by doing those things that make our souls happy. 

Of course, some of you soul purists will want to challenge me and say that souls are neutral witnesses and can’t be happy.  Maybe you’re right. But, from my personal experience, I know that souls can sing. They can encourage us in one direction and, by their absence of song, discourage us from another. 

Can you think of a time when something you did, or experienced, or witnessed made your insides vibrate with the rightness of it? You were alive – and you knew you were alive. What I’m talking about here is more than a thrill. More than a cheap adrenaline rush. I’m talking about a feeling so deep and innocent and sacred that for a moment you forgot all your cynicism about the world. You forgot to label this thing “right” and this other thing “wrong”. You forgot to judge reality. 

When we take actions to follow our dreams – and even if that action is to intend to follow our dreams – we enter into that mystical place of forgetting. We forget what is possible and what is not possible. We tune into the call of our soul and follow a path laid out in breadcrumbs. We take one step and then another – we walk until we cannot walk any further. Until the message comes – in the form of peace and satisfaction – that it is time to sit down and rest. 

You may think that, in this time when so much is going wrong, we don’t have time to follow our dreams or to rest. You may think the only moral option is to resist the actions of tyrants and fight for justice for their victims.  Or perhaps we are the victims. Or the tyrants. (Hint: we are both – and neither at the same time) And perhaps, after we’ve tried complaining and opinionating and voting and marching and resisting and rallying, we grow hopeless. There have been many times when I felt hopeless. Hopeless that my actions did not make a difference. Hopeless that I could not change myself, let alone change the world. 

The trouble with hopelessness is that, if you dwell in it too long, it tends to mutate and amplify. It becomes depression and passivity or righteous outrage. It becomes dangerous – to ourselves and to others. It becomes yet another problem in the world that must be solved. Another malady in need of healing. 

But what if the true source of that hopelessness was not what’s going on outside ourselves, but inside? What if that hopelessness was a symptom and not the actual disease itself? What if the pain of all that hopelessness, depression, and rage was all designed to call us back from our fascination with the world’s problems and back to the songs in our hearts?  To re-introduce us to our souls?

And then what? One morning, after years of depression and outrage, you wake up to a longing. An ache so chilling and beautiful it reminds you how to weep. A longing that compels you out of bed, away from your iPhone, and into Joseph Campbell’s dark woods. The journey to your soul has begun. 

To be continued…