Click for audio: The Voice of the Soul
Part 2 of 6: Navigating from the Complete Soul
“Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13-14).
A very helpful insight that gives us an important perspective of ourselves is one shared by Jesuit priest and scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
It is easy to think of ourselves primarily as human beings having or seeking to have a spiritual experience. We tend to be objective thinkers who define ourselves from the outside-in rather than from the inside-out. We forget that the writer of Hebrews included us when he wrote, “…what is seen is made out of things which do not appear” (11:3).
The “voice” of the soul is not really a voice at all. It is an interior push toward a human experience of greater freedom that our soul already knows. When we think of ourselves only as a human being having a spiritual experience, we drink from the well of the senses which never fully satisfies. When we draw our identity from the soul, it becomes for us a spring of water welling up to eternal life, an eternal soul having a human experience.
You and I have never been without the intuitive guidance of our soul. Perhaps we have failed to understand the source of our discontent and unrest, but this inner urging is constantly trying to remind us of our spiritual nature.
When we see ourselves as human beings seeking a spiritual experience, we live in two worlds. When we begin to understand that we are spiritual beings expressing through the human experience, we live in one.