Find it. Hold it.
Close your eyes for a moment (except don’t, because then you couldn’t read) and imagine your very center. Imagine it’s a tiny dot. Even an infinitely small dot. Smaller than an atom.
And then imagine yourself, that dot, that spark, is going to try out life on earth. You’ve chosen to live a human life to experience all that’s divine in you. You want to experience truth, joy and love, forgiveness and gratitude, pleasure and generosity. You choose to become human.
What do you imagine that you, spark of the divine fire that you are, would like that life to be like? I’m guessing it’s not this:
I’d like to spend my day like this: I’ll rush out the door, leaving my home and family, and I’ll drive for a half-hour or an hour in lots of traffic (that I know is creating toxins), and pass by people who are asking for money for food, people who haven’t had a roof over their heads in a while. I’ll ignore them, or most of them, and shut myself up in an office for several hours, where I’ll breathe the smell of plastic and varnish and laser toner, and I’ll talk to some people who make me smile, and some who give me a tummy ache. After hours of this, I’ll eat a lunch made by unhappy, underpaid people, out of animals that are farmed cruelly, and that is likely to give me heartburn, a heart attack, or cancer. Then I’ll go back to that building for several more hours, after which I’ll repeat the half-hour or hour long drive in the other direction, and I’ll cook dinner, clean up, speak gruffly to my family, watch some TV and sleep.
Listen to the spark. The tiny spark of divine fire, your soul. What does your soul want?
Collectively, we make even stranger choices. We work together to create a society where people go hungry, people feel desperate enough to steal, hopeless enough to spend their time stoned or drunk, and alone enough to be violent toward one another. We create a society where it’s considered perfectly acceptable to send our children to schools where they have to ask to go to the bathroom, where they are exposed to violence, and where they are separated from their families and communities for hours every day. When people do bad things, we think it’s reasonable to want to make them suffer. We round them up and lock them in cement buildings with other people who do bad things, and let them hurt each other. Sometimes we lock up people who haven’t actually done bad things, but we think that’s a small price to pay to make sure we get all the ones who do.
We drive cars and listen to the news tell us about global warming, about starving people, about war and corporate crime, but we ignore that just like we ignore the people we drive past who are asking for our help. We pour things down our drains that we know cause cancer, but we try not to think about it.
When we listen to our souls, we will find those things unthinkable. When we are still, and listen, we will give ourselves the life we came here for, and it will be beautiful.