Our soul is at once a mystery and the only thing we know.

To feel our soul we just have to tune into our inner observer. The one who is seeing sights, feeling feelings, and hearing the thoughts generated by our mind is the observer.

The observer is weird. It doesn’t age along with our mind and bodies. It was there when we were newborns and will be there when we are elderly. It doesn’t need food; that’s for our bodies. If we lose our arms and legs and lots of blood, the observer is unaffected. It doesn’t sleep; it witnesses our dreams.

A being that doesn’t age, eat, get injured, or sleep is not like most life forms we know. It’s something else.cialis

And yet it is the seat of consciousness from which we witness all of our reality.

My inner observer is probably the same as yours. Maybe we all share one observer. Maybe this is what is meant when people say all life is one. Maybe the observer is the universe.

When we quiet our mind and body through meditation, we let the observer expand within us. The feeling that arises is bliss. This is why statues and paintings of meditators depict them with a slight smile; they’re feeling bliss. The place our observer comes from is filled with love. That’s what we really are underneath it all.

Lots of energy is spent in meditation trying to turn around and look at the observer. But that’s pretty much impossible. To see what an observer looks like, you just have to look at another person. Each person is a blissful, loving observer wrapped in layers of physical and emotional experience.

Our souls remain separate from the great singular consciousness to the degree that we hold attachments to the material world. Souls cursed to roam as ghosts hold onto anger and frustration in this world. The rest of us may not get stuck as ghosts, but we may keep coming back to reincarnate endlessly until and unless we learn to, at the deepest level, let go.

 

This post is part of a series related to ideas that came to me in recent meditations. I usually write about climate-adaptation investing and startups.