The Soul Speaks

I've heard a lot of people talk at length about how westerners have "forgotten" how to listen to the voice of nature, and forgotten how to communicate with the unseen powers of this world in the natural, extraordinary way that human beings can. For a while, I was in agreement- a sad time, indeed, that we've forgotten such a natural and powerful thing.

Later I realized that we never "forgot" anything- most people today, east and west, have never known how to speak with the unseen world. After ages of living apart from our native animistic traditions and cultures, we found ourselves feeling very alone in the world. Then, we encountered other cultures that were still mystically awake enough to both hear the voices of the unseen, and speak back. Our reaction was understandable enough- we wanted to see and hear, as well. We wanted to speak. Not all of us did, but those who felt the pain of isolation strongly enough were desperate to do whatever they needed to do to get the voice and the sight back.

And we tried to get them, and failed. The reason why we failed is because we heard the words "hear" and "see" and "speak" and assumed that these words were directly describing the experience of soul-talk, of extraordinary communication. But they aren't; they are just the closest words available to try and express the inner reality of this experience. We weren't just isolated from the direct experience of the sacredness of things; we were imprisoned by the concreteness of our thinking with respect to words and concepts.

Life is nowhere concrete; the stone is all in our heads- life is water. Thinking is fluid, even if people try to fix it into stone. And experience itself- on any level- is foggy, permeable, fluid, and strange. We only really get a taste of that directly in our dreams, nowadays. You can fight with the rock-hard understandings that words create in us, and fail, or you can let the hardness go and fall back into a stream of experience that ties us inseparably to things.

This is where the soul can get its voice back, and open its eyes again. Even words like "song" or "chant" or "spell" or "speech" have an inner reality, a truthful nature that escapes the usual understandings attached to them.

We live in a world of sacred powers, and we are ourselves sacred powers. There are many ways to communicate in such a world, and human speech is just one way. I have always believed- and continue to believe- that the soul of each person, the non-ordinary aspect of each human being, is in constant communication with non-ordinary powers all around them, day and night. Even if we don't realize it is happening, we are having conversations, singing songs, and chanting constantly. We are both sending information and receiving it, in a great hoop of joy and rich experience. Sometimes those communications can become fearful or sharp- and we know it when it happens because we feel "spooked" or ill at ease, and usually, we can't explain why.

Every place, and all its powers, is singing away, day and night. And some part of us is listening. Some part is singing back. Trying to hear the song of a place is a good, wise thing, but learning to hear what you are saying back is harder, but perhaps wiser.

The soul speaks and sings to things. If you want to learn to "talk to spirits" or communicate in one of the many non-ordinary ways that you can, you must forget about your mouth and eyes, and let yourself become aware of what the deeper parts of yourself are saying. This isn't hard, and any thoughts of it as "hard", or beliefs that it will be "hard", will render it almost impossible. You let go, because water isn't hard. It's fluid. And what the soul is singing, and hearing, appears first to you as feelings.

Every morning I go out and greet the Sun with a song. I find it, look at it as much as I may, let its light fall all over me and through me, and, facing it in this way, I let myself hear what my soul is saying to it. I've never heard a "word", and yet, I've heard entire themes and conversations, entire songs of praise. The "Song to the Sun" every morning is a tradition found in more than one indigenous group- and it happens to be indigenous to this soul, as well. I think it's native to all souls, because the sun is one of the three greatest powers to bless mankind- so singing to it is easy.

This is the key- not given and yet given- to "speaking" to any spirit or power. You have to realize that there's no need to "begin" a conversation that has been in progress for quite a long time already. You just have to slide in and let yourself become a part of it. The soul speaks to everything already. Go outside tomorrow morning, and let yourself feel it.

We didn't forget how to speak to the sacred powers. We lost awareness of the fact that communication with the unseen world doesn't cease. We just became afraid to feel, and began questioning our feelings, explaining them away somehow. Stop the explanations. I've discovered how useless they really are, at least from the perspective of perfect happiness.

The soul- without a need for explanation- speaks to everything already, and always. Go outside tomorrow morning, and let yourself feel it. You'll find your voice easily enough under the face of the sun.