Speak to Your Soul

I’m very excited to announce that yesterday I launched the first video in my new series called The Parabasis and I would LOVE to hear your thoughts. I can finally begin talking about a lot of stuff that has been happening behind the scenes. You can check it out here, and below the video is a new essay on the soul and how I think about decision-making in life. Enjoy!

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Dear reader,

Why is it that I am so continually interested in the thing beneath the thing? I can’t help myself.

I do not believe you and I are just bodies walking around doing things like buying groceries, driving, lying down after a long day, making love. I think our senses perceive but a small slice of what’s really going on.

I believe there are a thousand layers beyond what you can see and touch.

I’m quite inclined to a spiritual perspective on life that colors how I interpret what’s happening, so I think about life in terms of levels of consciousness and planes of existence, but you can also look at this through a scientific lens. A spider that falls from a 50 story skyscraper floats down to the Earth below, unharmed. It can walk on water. An elephant falling from the same 50 story skyscraper will not meet the same fate, nor can it walk on water. Even something as supposedly fixed as gravity operates radically differently depending on how big or small you are and where in the universe you find yourself. How do spiders and elephants experience pain or pleasure? Apparently trees communicate with one another. What the heck is that like?None of us are going to know definitively.

My point is that reality is so much more than we comprehend, and we only have our ape-like brains to interpret everything with.

Or, forget about spirituality and science for a second, and ask a mathematician that considers the universe through the lens of dimensions: same conclusion. Things get really weird!! At higher dimensions of perception, I am connected not only to every other moment of myself in this life (what a beautiful and foreign idea), but also every branching possibility and at higher dimensions still, beyond concepts my brain can understand.

All I’m trying to do here is step back a little and point to how big life and consciousness are, and how easy it is to forget this in my day to day life as I worry about a new hole in my favorite bag.

So no, I do not believe you’re just a fleshy bag of blood and bones. You’re an energetic field. I say this with confidence because I don’t just see people, or touch people, I feel people. We say words when we speak to one another, but I think there is so much more going on in every exchange.

One of the things that drives my curiosity about humanity is that there is even more at play. In addition to both our fleshy bodies AND the energetic fields that operate through those bodies, there appears to be a cloud of emotions that we carry with us everywhere we go. Yet another layer that is invisible but very real. And this cloud of emotions obscures our ability to see things as they are. And we all have it, and you can see it through the ways we all react differently to situations. We all have blind spots, things we get hung up about, or tense up around, or avoid or block off.

In rare moments I have either witnessed in others or in myself this extraordinary transition that can sometimes take place, when a fear of something is so full embraced and experienced that it melts away and is replaced by a sense of peace. I like to think of those moments as “proper vision” being restored. And they really are transformational moments.

Emotions are such a beautiful facet of human experience and so important to embrace and engage with fully and be curious about, but they cannot be in the driver’s seat, because our emotions often lead us to act out of fear.

So if emotions cannot be decision makers, and my mind is so limited in its understanding of the universe, who should be taking the lead?

There is some kind of animating force that drives all of us and while I don’t think it’s really important to label it, I do think it’s the source of the answer to my previous question. Different traditions use concepts like “soul” or “spirit” and I resonate deeply with the idea of a soul being like a bridge between Deluded Nathan and greater Truth.

Deluded Nathan identifies with his body. It’s a vision of the world that says something real ends when he dies. Deluded Nathan forgets we are all children of God, because if he really remembered this all the time, he would have full faith that there is nothing to be feared, nothing real will be lost, that love will eventually reclaim him. This is difficult to remember because God is beyond all mental concept and Deluded Nathan only operates through mental concept.

But, I believe there is a way out of delusion, and it is what every great spiritual text points at. And you feel it when you briefly forget your concept of yourself, when you are moved by art or by an act of generosity or vulnerability or when you lose yourself and surrender. When you are in service to humanity. Love in all of its various forms.

I believe it is possible to speak to your soul. It’s like speaking to yourself, but it’s a wiser, more loving, more patient, more expansive you. Some call it intuition. Socrates described doing something that sounds quite similar to me. He called it his daimonion (δαιμόνιον). He described it as a voice or sign that came to him spontaneously throughout his life — since childhood. Not a full god, not a demon. Something in between. A private, interior spiritual presence that was uniquely his.

One funny quirk about his daimonion: it only told him what NOT to do. So perhaps you could call it something like a guardian angel? Gotta be careful here, I’m stacking concept on top of concept and all I can honestly say is that I don’t know, and I prefer to stay there in the plausible-but-we’ll-really-see-when-I-die place rather than act like I’ve figured this out. I think when you act like you’ve figured it out, you’re in dangerous territory.

Anyway, that’s a little window into some of my worldview, and it helps inform every single one of my decisions and actions as I go through life. It shapes how I view hardship and what we’re all doing here. In a loose way. In a way that keeps evolving and blowing me away.

This also helps to explain why my relationship with publishing my work online has at times been stressful, confusing and triggering: I’m working through layer upon layer of emotions and fears that prevent me from seeing clearly. I get caught up in the allure of being seen, being wanted, being loved, being someone, that all of this can in some way assure my safety.

And here’s what’s funny about all of this. I just invoked all of these grand ideas about the universe, life and consciousness, but I do find myself regularly just returning to today, because what else am I going to do? I can only take the next small step in a journey far greater than I can comprehend. And I will trust that these conversations with my soul, and by extension with God, will take me where I need to go.

-Nathaniel Drew

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Bonus:

1. Here’s a recent No Backup Plan video on the battle with inner resistance that seemed to resonate with a lot more people than I anticipated:

2. Here’s a lovely song I discovered last week.