The soul is the seedbed of your moral consciousness and your ethical sense. C.S. Lewis observed, there’s never been country where people are admired for running away in a battle, or for double-crossing people who were kind to them. We seem to be oriented by these moral sentiments the way other animals are oriented by the magnetic field.
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within,” Immanuel Kant wrote.
Mostly, what the soul does is yearn. If the heart yearns for fusion with another person or a cause, the soul yearns for righteousness, for fusion with the good. Socrates said that the purpose of life is the perfection of our souls- to realize the goodness that the soul longs for.
The odd thing about the soul is that while it is powerful and resilient, it is also reclusive. You can go for years without really feeling the force of its yearning. It’s amazing how untroubled you can be, year after year, while your soul is out there somewhere far away.
And then there are moments, maybe more toward middle or old age, when the leopard comes down out of the hills and just sits there in the middle of your doorframe. He demands your justification. What good have you served? For what did you come? What sort of person have you become? There are no excuses at that moment. Everybody has to throw off the mask.
~David Brooks
how the other half of me and you live….
inquiry for today~ there is the rise and the falll
I am seeking.
I am striving.
I am in it with all my heart.
~Vincent van Gogh
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