Discovery of the Soul

Imagine yourself marooned on a vast deserted island. You have been there for years, struggling just to survive, living within the most basic surroundings, gathering food, using only your hands and makeshift tools to scratch out an existence. Most of your days are fully taken up with satisfying the basic needs of life. You find some comfort in talking to some of the local creatures and birds that you have befriended. Having proved to yourself that you can survive with just the bare essentials you resign yourself to the fact that you will never be rescued. Anger turns to quiet desperation, then to acceptance as you carry on with your life.

Several years have passed and you have become accustomed to your lifestyle and feel comfortable enough to start expanding and exploring your island. You have settled in, and your attention lately has been directed towards the mountains and what is beyond.

As you begin to move further inland and away from your comfort zone, you develop a sense of strength and purpose for having survived the years on your own. Along the way you are making many discoveries that will enhance your life and make things easier. You are gathering an abundance of awareness and knowledge about the environment that you live in. By this time you have convinced yourself that there is nothing you can not do, and that there is nothing you really have to do to survive. Everything has been provided for you. You simply reach out and take it as you need it.

After 40 years of wandering the island, you finally reach the top of the mountain and turn away from the direction in which you came.

In the distance and time that separates you, you discover a huge modern city with all the amenities that such a place could hold. You discover that your island was not an island and that the city has always been there. As your mind races over the circumstances of the last 40 years, you fall to your knees weeping. You begin to ponder the ramifications of this discover and what could have been.

I should think that the discovery of your soul is very much the same overwhelming experience. It's not a religious experience unless you want it to be. It's natural and simply a discovery of another part of you, that was there all along, that you didn't know or thought little of. Think of the possibilities. Where there was one, now there are many. Where there was limited possibilities, now they are endless. And there is always that one question, "Why?" How could I have not known. How my life would have been different.

The human species is a three part being, mind, body and spirit. Because our focus is in the physical element; most of our attention is on the body. The mind is what drives us, the spirit is our personality or ego, and the body is loosely the vehicle that is used to experience the physical world.

To experience physicality, one needs to be physical, it's natural then to be focused on the body and its needs. Most all of our waking hours are centered on what the body wants to experience. The body and the physical world, are a buffet of endless experiences. There is nothing wrong with this arrangement, and it works flawlessly and on auto-pilot throughout our lifetimes with or without our awareness of what makes it tick.

So why am I bringing it up? If the system works perfectly, then leave it alone. Don't try to fix that which doesn't need fixing. Is ignorance not, bliss?

These notions of being alone and powerless, limit our experience of the physical world and our own personal growth. With a certain amount of awareness, our lives can be enhanced a thousand fold and more, with the discovery of our souls. Denial of the soul has far reaching ramifications. Awareness of it and communication with it, augments the quality of our lives. It is a vast warehouse of power and abilities that virtually go untapped as we struggle with the day to day elements of the physical world. It's like discovering that city that was always there, and you are given the key to access any part of it.

I am not talking about some abstract or far reaching, hypothetical element of our person, rather of something that actually exists. This soul that we are all part of, is only available to you on a conscious level when you recognize that it is there, when you discover it. You can not ever, avail yourselves of its wealth