A commonly held belief is that we have souls. There’s this thing called a soul and it lives inside of you. When you die, your soul goes to heaven or leaves this earth.
This reductionist mindset is convenient for the ego. The ego needs to make the “unknown” known to feel safe. (Which is an illusion, but for another time.) If the ego cannot reduce your life down to having a soul, then it risks losing control and dealing with the discomfort of chaos and where do I go when I die.
Like all beliefs, there are consequences outside of our awareness. One consequence this belief creates is the illusion of separation. For example, If you want to keep your soul, then you must strive to be a “good person” and condemn the bad, soulless persons. So there’s you (the “I”), the good soulful person, and then there’s the wicked soulless person (the “other”). It’s an old cultural story of separation of fighting good vs. evil that still dominates our psyche today.
This belief also creates a sense of displacement. When you have a soul, you can lose it, taint its existence, or not fulfill your soul’s purpose. Because of this separation, there are feelings of uselessness or a lack of belonging until you figure out your soul’s purpose. Furthermore, this lack of belonging is exacerbated by ideologies, economics, and patriarchal patterns that judge your usefulness. You’re only useful when providing quantifiable value or have socioeconomic status.
Let’s reframe this belief to something more empowering, and perhaps more accurate. Instead of having a soul, let’s reframe it to: we live inside soul. Try that on for a moment. We live inside soul.
There’s a sense of belonging and completeness with that reframe. You don’t need to seek something outside of yourself to be purposeful, whole, or useful. When you live inside soul, how can anything be lacking while immersed in that which provides?
You don’t need to find your usefulness; you are already useful. You are expressing usefulness in every moment. Your usefulness is unique and being deployed in just the right moment, to the right person, when needed.
We have a hard time understanding this because the mind says our usefulness needs to be something big. However, the most intimate action is useful. The things that can’t be measured, for example, holding the hand of a dying person, healing a wounded bird, or smiling at someone at just the right time, are as useful as, if not more than, the things that can be plotted on a graph. When you are immersed in soul, that which is yours to do becomes known.
It’s not a matter of finding your usefulness. It’s a matter of unlearning the indoctrination of what makes you useful. Making the reframe that you live inside soul is part of the unlearning process to understand deep in your bones that you belong and are useful.
Another positive consequence of living inside soul is that our relationship to life changes. If you’re immersed in soul, it’s difficult to intentionally harm nature and life. Damage done to life is damage done to yourself.
Under the new paradigm of living in soul we can create a new earth from a place of inter-being. Thich Nhat Hanh describes inter-being as “togetherness” and our deep interconnection with everything else. He quotes a scientist that said, “There are, he says, no solitary beings. The whole planet is one giant, living, breathing cell, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis.”1
We are in the midst of changing our story. A story from separation to inter-being. As we integrate living in soul and inter-being into our culture, the stories of politics, ecology, economics, money, family, and relationships with shift to mirror the new story of inter-being.
Our objective will change from dominating nature to restoring and working with nature. We will ask better questions like, “What does life want from me? How can I be useful to life? How can I be useful to you?” We won’t see ourselves as separate entities residing in bags of skin. Instead, we will see ourselves as an individual, living in soul, and through the conscious awareness of inter-being.
Thich Nhat Hanh. The Art of Living: Peace and Freedom in the Here and Now. Harper One, 2017.