THE SOUL AS DIVINE ECHO

THE SOUL AS DIVINE ECHO

We are capable of such love and belonging because the soul holds the echo of a primal intimacy. When talking about primal things, the German talk of ursprüngliche Dinge – original things. One could say that there is an Ur-Intimitat in der Seele, i.e. a primal intimacy in the soul. This original echo whispers within every heart. The soul did not invent itself. It is a presence from the divine world, where intimacy has no limit or barrier.

You can never love another person unless you are equally involved in the beautiful, but difficult, spiritual work of learning to love your self. There is within each of us at the soul level, an enriching fountain of love. In other words, you do not have to go outside your self to know what love is. This is not selfishness, and it is not narcissism; they are negative obsessions with the need to be loved. Rather, this is the wellspring of love within the heart. Through their need for love, people who lead solitary lives often stumble upon this great inner fountain. They learn to whisper awake the deep well of love within. This is no a question of forcing yourself to love your self. It is more a question of exercising reserve, of inviting the wellspring of love that is, after all, your deepest nature to flow through your life. When this happens the ground that has hardened within you grows soft again. Through a lack of love everything hardens. There is nothing as lonely in the world as that which has hardened or grown cold. Bitterness and coldness are the ultimate defeat.

If you find that your heart has hardened, one of the gifts that you should give your self is the gift of the inner wellspring. You should invite this inner fountain to free itself. You can work on your self in order to unsilt this, so that gradually the nourishing waters begin in a lovely osmosis to infuse and pervade the hardened clay of your heart. Then the miracle of love happens within you. Where before there was hard, bleak, unyielding, dead ground, now there is growth, colour, enrichment and life flowing from the wellspring of love. This is one of the most creative approaches in transfiguring what is negative within us. You are sent here to learn to love and to receive love. The greatest gift new love brings into your life is the awakening to the hidden love within. This makes you independent. You are now able to come close to the Other, not out of need or with the wearying apparatus of projection, but out of genuine intimacy, affinity and belonging. It is a freedom. Love should make you free. You become free of the hungry, blistering need with which you continually reach out to scrape affirmation, respect and significance for your self from things and people outside your self. To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul.