I Know Why You're Sad

Soul is our inwardness, our self-reflectiveness, our orientation to the unknown. Soul waxes in private, wanes in public. We feel it, or feel through it, when we are in sacral spaces, when we love, when we respond to natural or artistic beauty. Soul may be elicited in many ways. We comprehend it unthinkingly—we either know it as a resonance, a prese

The soul has so shrunken from view that far from standing awestruck by its infinitude we have difficulty remembering that it exists: indeed, why speak of soul; mind or consciousness play no role in the electrochemical image of the human being which popular imagination and some scientists today present unchallenged.

Soul—a vast, elusive word, and I need to be careful not to use it indiscriminately. What do I mean by it? Although I don’t want to rule out its religious sense, I am not using it, as believers have for centuries, to designate the part of ourselves that is held to be immortal. My use of soul is secular. I mean it to stand for inwardness, for that aw

The lost soul is the consciousness that has dropped into the place where one human’s thoughts, emotions, and sensory perceptions of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell are all synchronized. All these messages come back to one spot. Then the consciousness, which is capable of being aware of anything, makes the mistake of focusing on that one spot

You’re sad not because you have a thing, like black bile that has entered your nonmaterial spiritual heart, but because your brain’s chemistry is off. Your inner self is buffered; it is just your body (in this case, your brain) that is making you feel this way.

The mind becomes a place the soul goes to hide from the heart. To transcend this tendency to hide in either your heart or your mind, simply realize that it is always the same conscious awareness experiencing what is going on inside.

which belongs with you. Soul is not a thing, but a perspective. It’s the slow courtship of an event that turns it into a meaningful experience. It’s the practice of trusting that if we sit silently and long enough with the absence of magic, the miraculous will reveal itself. Nothing is sacred until we make it so with the eloquence of our attention,