The Soul’s Journey

As a New Year’s gift to you, my post today will be an excerpt from a book that came to me a month ago, and that has completely changed my outlook on life. I’ve done some chopping up to retain the parts that impacted me the most. Wishing you love, joy and fulfillment in 2013.

“What the soul is after is the highest feeling of love you can imagine. This is the soul’s desire. This is its purpose. The soul is after the feeling. Not the knowledge, but the feeling. It already has the knowledge, but knowledge is conceptual. Feeling is experiential. The soul wants to feel itself, and thus to know itself in its own experience.

The highest feeling is the experience of unity with All That Is. This is the great return to Truth for which the soul yearns. This is the feeling of perfect love.

Perfect love is to feeling what perfect white is to color. Many think that white is the absence of color. It is not. It is the inclusion of all color. White is every other color that exists, combined.

So, too, is love not the absence of an emotion (hatred, anger, lust, jealousy, covetousness), but the summation of all feeling. It is the sum total. The aggregate amount. The everything.

Thus, for the soul to experience perfect love, it must experience every human feeling. How can I have compassion on that which I don’t understand? How can l forgive in another that which I have never experienced in Myself?

So we see both the simplicity and the awesome magnitude of the soul’s journey. We understand at last what it is up to: the purpose of the human soul is to experience all of it—so that it can be all of it.

How can it be up if it has never been down, left if it has never been right? How can it be warm if it knows not cold, good if it denies evil? Obviously the soul cannot choose to be anything if there is nothing to choose from. For the soul to experience its grandeur, it must know what grandeur is. This it cannot do if there is nothing but grandeur.

And so the soul realizes that grandeur only exists in the space of that which is not grand. The soul, therefore, never condemns that which is not grand, but blesses it—seeing in it a part of itself which must exist for another part of itself to manifest.

The job of the soul, of course, is to cause us to choose the grandeur—to select the best of Who You Are—without condemning that which you do not select.

You are goodness and mercy and compassion and understanding. You are peace and joy and light. You are forgiveness and patience, strength and courage, a helper in time of need, a comforter in time of sorrow, a healer in time of injury, a teacher in times of confusion. You are the deepest wisdom and the highest truth; the greatest peace and the grandest love. You are these things. And in moments of your life you have known yourself as these things.

Choose now to know yourself as these things always.”

From Conversations With God : An Uncommon Dialogue (Book 1) by Neale Donald Walsch.