Soul or Circumstances?

Some live out of soul; some live from cir­cum­stances. Those liv­ing from soul are not both­ered much by what hap­pens. They are on an eter­nal jour­ney; they live for the moments of the good, the beau­ti­ful, and the true; they live for spir­i­tual insights and a rela­tion­ship with the Divine. These peo­ple are mys­tics with an infi­nite cen­ter. Deep down inside they know that there is more going on than mol­e­cules, motion, and momen­tum. Some­thing beyond magic is hap­pen­ing, and it is personal.

Cir­cum­stance peo­ple live in a sense of almost con­stant panic. They can­not be con­tent unless they have all of their ducks in a row. For them, life is an ever-receding secu­rity hunt; they manip­u­late oth­ers for their own good; they are eas­ily threat­ened if things do not go their way; they are almost always fran­tic in their search for hap­pi­ness. Since they are cir­cum­stan­tial beings, they are most con­scious of their self-defining affil­i­a­tions — their polit­i­cal pref­er­ences, their race, their gen­der issues, their finan­cial con­di­tion, and their social rank. They whine and bully much of the time; they are for­ever threat­ened by what they can­not directly control.

Soul peo­ple know that cir­cum­stance peo­ple look down at them. They know that they are ridiculed as “less objective” — when in fact they have a higher abil­ity to be truly objec­tive (they see life from the stars rather than the side­walk). You will see a gen­tle smile on the lips of the soul peo­ple dur­ing var­i­ous debates over sci­ence, reli­gion, or pol­i­tics. They are not smug, but they know that all argu­ments are lim­ited and ulti­mately petty. It really does not mat­ter to them. They are look­ing at life from the van­tage point of “the big show.”

My soul is on some sort of cos­mic jour­ney. Right now it is attend­ing “earth-school” — for the bet­ter part of a cen­tury. I care what hap­pens here but not ulti­mately. I know things will change con­tin­u­ally. If I died today, life would con­tinue on this lit­tle planet. Though things do not always go as I think they should down here, my soul’s des­tiny is not deter­mined by what hap­pens on this giant ball of mud float­ing through the galaxy. No, there is some­thing greater hap­pen­ing. I can­not fully explain it; oth­ers have alluded to it, pointed to it, labeled it “King­dom of God” and other sim­i­lar things. It is deep and tran­scen­dent at the same time, and it has noth­ing to do with whether I am liked or if things go like I think they should.