heart and soul

Many of us do not like the word soul. We have been fooled too often (once is enough) and have adopted the sparse language of the day, the Occam's Razor language of science. Soul is considered as too ethereal, too ephemeral. One smells a con job.

The word heart, however, is fine. No problem there. Heart is matter, is material. Heart matters. Soul, we think, has no substance, does not matter. So we discard soul and open to heart.

Once again, as we do so often in this hard-boiled don't-give-me-that-crap era, we regard the material as the divine. Divine is defined here as what matters, what is appearing before us as matter. And since we are matter, we matter, and regard ourselves as divine.

Not that we would say it that way. Oh no. But if we could, we would kiss ourselves on the lips, smacking with self-satisfaction. (Which has its shadow side, the kicking of ourselves in the butt with self-loathing.)

We are hearty creatures with no soul. We have condensed the universe down to our selves, isolated balls of being in a vast nothingness. We are interested only in breathing out, extending our own aura into the world, forgetting that something is breathing us, and that at some point we will need to breathe in. We don't want to breathe in because we have put ourselves into a dead cosmos from which, we have decided, we receive no nourishment. Alienated protoplasmic blobs, we dance our own little boogie and that's that.

That is not the world I live in. I have soul. I am soul. I live in a thick rich nourishing environment of soul. Soul is not a noun, an objectified thing. Soul is a verb, linking subject and object. Duality vanishes when we have and are soul.

The universe, the cosmos is alive. It is not some static deadness waiting to be discovered and exploited. The cosmos is a living being with whom we play and interact. We are microcosms of that macrocosm. We are micro-cosmic, holons of the Whole One.

Heart and soul. We are heart and soul.

It's okay to breathe in.