World Feelings or Soul Feelings? Your Life Depends on it!

Colleagues have often wondered aloud, how it is possible for me to stay high on life, regardless. Why is it so hard for us to do and so easy for you to do, they ask. Doesn’t anyone or anything ever get you down? What is your secret, they ask. Well, here it is, for all of you to know.

I’ll share it with you in the form of a story.

A few years back, I was incapacitated for two long months. From a hospital bed, I watched the nurses go to and fro easing human suffering where they could. From the little window, I saw a small patch of sky. There was mostly silence and I was not allowed the use of a computer as doctors suspected I would watch porn and that would not do well for my heart.

Silence slowly became a friend and laying there in the corner of the world, so to speak, I began to look at the rest of the world, as well as myself, as if I no longer was part of it.

One morning, a little sparrow flew in, sat on the window sill and started chirping. It was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. Its song felt like God’s whistling to me and I had never heard anything like it. It sang on for a few minutes and few away leaving my tired and exhausted heart feeling as if God had just held it in the palm of His hands and kissed it.

I began to compare and contrast this with the joy I experienced in the workplace and it just was not the same. The sparrow had given me a ‘soul feeling’ but the joy I got from being accepted and applauded in the workplace seemed like a ‘world feeling.’

After, my enjoyable stay in the hospital, I returned to the work place and began to actively search for opportunities to experience this ‘soul feeling’. I got them from helping others reach their goals, overcome their addictions, sometimes just from being there for them when they needed a sounding board. My only challenge there was to resist the temptation to want to be thanked. The challenge was to help and then leave. Don't wait for gratitude.

I was soon able to understand other differences between world and soul feelings.

The former exists because of our conditioning which are put in place to ensure we stay productive. We are made hungry for applause, acceptance and are sold concepts like security, position, power and similar concepts that in themselves are meaningless. World feelings stem from plastic joy, controllable happiness and are hence deceptive and/or empty. Take a look around you and see how many are not controlled by these world feelings. Nearly, everyone is. Doesn't that tell you something?

Soul feelings come from helping a blind person cross the road, watching a flower bloom as we ponder the power that makes it so. Soul feelings rise from running in the rain for fun, trying to kiss a butterfly, marveling at what makes your heart beat, giving thanks for all you have, etc. Soul feelings comprise pure, undiluted bliss that (unlike world feelings), come with no stings attached. You are not puppet to them. You are pure bliss itself. You have been given a glimpse of the Kingdom of God and once you have, nothing else will matter. The world will have lost its control over you and you will be free from the strings of attachment, praise, applause, condemnation that it had controlled you with all your life. In losing the world, you would have gained your soul.

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