Spirituality For The Modern Age
Brought To You by Charles E.J. Moulton
I find it interesting to see what happens when forces unite. However, in order to unite forces with anyone today you need stamina. Finding forces to unite with is a very hard thing, because people are usually very keen on holding their own. This is a time of vanity. But what is vanity really? Someone wanting to look good, sound good, feel good, be the main focus of attraction. You can unite forces with your own emotions, with your angels, with your noblest feelings. Uniting forcing also means that both parties get their attention. We call that intuition.
The most amazing things happen when we follow our intuition. Those things can’t be planned. They happen. But we have to look inward toward what we are feeling and realize that we are first and foremost spiritual beings. And living with a spiritual belief is a lot is easier than without a spiritual belief.
The greatest projects have been born and the greatest inventions have come to pass when inventors and great people have joined forces with their own emotions and with other people’s spiritual powers. Bob Geldof created Live Aid, Isaac Newton found gravity, Buddha was enlightened, Mahatma Gandhi proved to others that giving peace a chance is an endeavor worth trying and Joe Carruthers opened that cute travel book shop on the corner in Essex.
Intuition has obstacles. Here they are.
This is a neurotic time, one where people are very worried about what other people think of them. Expectancy is the key word. What do people expect of me and how can I fulfil that expectancy? Do I need to fulfil that expectancy? If people expect me to be a certain way and I actually am nothing like that, should I change myself and play that role just to make them happy or should I try to convince them of who I actually am? Do I need to bother? Where is the actual border between private and professional? Can I not actually just use my skills and my talents to reach my goals? Do I have to smarm and “suck up” to my superiors?
You have to do your job well, but you don’t have to “suck up”.
You should never “suck up”.
My boss has a certain expectancy of me and I have to fulfil his expectancy, right? What expectancies are we talking about here? Professional expectancies that have to remain professional, those are the expectancies you are obliged to fulfil at the workplace. No more.
In the creative arts, the problem is that we are professionally dealing with emotions and psychological pressure. That is a part of the daily routine. Let’s say that it takes about twenty years of stage work to learn how to deal with that kind of psychological stress. Artistic skills are learned techniques that only partially rely on emotion, but because of that young artists are vulnerable in the free market. They have to feel the role while competing with others to be the best. They have to portray sensitivity on stage while being ruthless professionals. If you are fresh out of college, where that kind of competition is almost non-existent, that kind of a professional life becomes a shock. The only way is to keep it professional, even the private relationships should be kept professional. Certainly very dear friends will appear in your workplace. Some of my dearest friends have been and still are colleagues. But most of them are just that and only that: colleagues. That is not a bad thing. It is simply professional.
What I see as a problem is that the professional expectancies get mingled with also keeping a certain profile at the workplace. Unfortunately, I saw that working in the business of musical theatre. I loved my work there. No question. But the audition circuit was so overloaded with this pressure of a thousand people who all wanted the same job. Of course there was networking, people who pretended to be your best friend and actually were just after pulling your pants down. That became especially obvious while auditioning for some musical. Everybody was pretending to be so easy going, being best friends with everyone and bragging about their work like crazy (the real show was not the audition, that happened while waiting to audition: how well do I present myself as successful and elite). The atmosphere was horrendous.
What is your status at your workplace? Are you a Fat Cat or a Low Joe? Do you also have to behave like a Low Joe? Does your boss expect you to behave like one? Do your colleagues expect you to behave like one? The really interesting thing is when you have a different status in different workplaces. That is of course only true for those who are freelance or have side jobs.
I’ll tell you a secret: the competitive race at the auditions I told you about, present in many other professions and workplaces is a completely redundant and an unnecessary triviality. You do not have to play that game. Sometimes you are different things and play different roles just according to where you are and what “suit” you are wearing. But you are you and you should rely on your skills and your knowledge and your friendly and outgoing diplomacy to get where you want.
No more.
When I teach my students, I am the experienced teacher. When I work as an author, that audience knows me maybe from my published horror stories or my research papers in academic journals or my philosophical articles. When I work as a jazz vocalist, people expect of me to fulfil my obligations as a swing singer. When I work in the opera chorus, my boss or bosses will expect other things from me than my other employers.
You have to do your job. After all, you get paid for doing your job. But the quality of your work belongs to you and your customer, your student, your audience, your business partners, not necessarily your boss. In fact, the quality of your work more than anything belongs to you. I know that actually usually is not popular opinion. If you have a chosen or a public profession you will most probably love your job. I have the joy of working in the creative arts, as a director, singer, actor, teacher, author and painter (holy moly, now I am bragging). I usually don’t get paid for my painting, but I count everything creative in being part of my profession. That is a luxury. Due to the fact that I have seen some unspoken attitudes slip out of people’s mouths that have been less than prone to equality, I have grown to see that a boss will see more your status within the firm than your actual ability. You can go out there and sing the buns of the audience, but if he wants his cousin to get the role and get more roles it won’t matter what you do. But there are other places to audition, other fields to conquer, other people to impress.
Never put all of your chips in one place. If the croupier yells: “Rien de va plus!” and you’re still grinning behind your boss’s back, hoping that he will turn around, buddy, you in deep trouble. If you see that an employer would rather choose another guy or gal to do the big stuff, you can choose to prove him wrong. Main thing is that you keep it professional. If you can and if it is financially and vitally viable, seek professional or creative side-gigs where you get your kicks or seek other alternatives.
Now, that is not true all of the time. I am just saying that your work and the pride you feel in what you have accomplished in your work belongs to you, not to your boss. This is true whether you stand on a stage in front of eighty thousand people singing your songs or if you are just cleaning the local toilet. If someone does his her work well and is proud of it, it doesn’t matter what he or she does.
Being a kind of a rock in a storm is something many people wish to be. More than ever we have a time today when it is important to remain calm and have a positive outlook on life. Rationality, not brain, matters. The brain is just an organ. Use it. You are not your brain. The common idea is that emotion is irrational. But there is nothing as rational and as calm as the soul, especially if you school the soul to wait for the right answer.
A lot of professions require fast answers. Or maybe I should say that many important professionals need to produce fast answers. But I am not talking days here. I am not even talking minutes. A rational and productive answer really only needs a peaceful millisecond, one where you actually let yourself rest for one moment and let that fear, that storm, that irrational fear of cataclysm, sink and just trust that EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY.
That is actually the thing we should repeat over and over, especially in those times when we are overcome by this nerve-racking fear that we are doing something wrong.
EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY.
Faith.
That takes work. It takes a whole lot of perseverance.
We are back to one of my original statements here: your feelings, your work, your pride, they all belong to you, not your boss. He hires you, he gives you money, you give him your work. But your customers, whoever they are, are those who you can be proud of in having served. More importantly, be proud of yourself.
I mentioned neurosis. Contrary to belief or public opinion, there is a whole lot of obsessive-compulsive neurosis in the world. Due to sociological pressure, a lot of people walk around with the stress of having to be perfect. I have to look good, I have to seem cool, I have to give the impression of being successful, I have to have a great looking partner, I have to have a sexy smile, I can’t stink, I can’t wear the wrong clothes, I can’t have a messy flat, I can’t be strange, I have to fit in, I have to shake hands in the right way, I have to use the right language, I have to act like a man, I have to be a sexy chick, I have to be perfect. I have to be inline, online, offline, chatty, liked, cool, hot, with-it, made-it, in it, on it, got it?
You know what?
You have to be yourself.
You should excel. You should be the best you can be. You should be successful and happy and rich and loved and you should love others. But seek inside yourself to see who you really are and what area of life really suits you and what you want to be. If what you want to be serves and only benefits the rest of mankind, then go for it.
Much of the neurosis present today comes from being afraid of change.
Trust that God will be good to you. Believe that God will be good to you. He might change or reassemble a few things, but don’t be afraid of that. Change is life.
Now we come back to what sent me on this journey in the first place. Joining forces. Join forces with your angels. Join forces with your soul. Join forces with other souls that mean well and have productive, exciting, humane, all-inspiring plans. That costs nothing.
You don’t have to join a club or pay money to some religious order to join forces with the eternal spirit. In fact, if someone wants you to pay them money to believe in something you already believe in, run.
Soul. If you look into how much evidence there is of the existence of the soul then you will ultimately directly be lead to understanding the afterlife. The soul and the afterlife are closely related. In fact, they might be brother and sister. God is in you, you are a part of him or her. In fact, if you want you take your pride and your soul and your body along in order to pray to God in a mosque, a temple, a church or a synagogue. You don’t need to. But you can and I can tell you that it is inspiring. Or you can actually pray to him at home. You can call him Allah, Brahma, God or the Eternal Being or Sam or Joe. He doesn’t care which. And no, the Christian God is not a jealous God. He will not be angry if you invite Buddha. In fact, they both come from the same place. God is God, whatever you call him. He is eternal and he is as much a part of you as you are of him. Your soul is not dependent on a church or church tax. Your faith belongs to you and to God. It is a completely internal entity and your inner link to God.
Let me just tell you about how you can prove the afterlife to yourself. This is independent of your religious faith or if you are an atheist, even. Your soul exists, even if you don’t believe in it.
You are surrounded by the spiritual world all the time. The angels are no different than you, just that they don’t have bodies. They may have gone on, but they may also be with you right now. You are a soul. That is who you are. You may think that you have developed your characteristics over the years and through childhood experiences. That is only partially true. But you are your soul and a lot of what you feel is who you are and your mission in this life is to accomplish whatever it is you have to do here. Your characteristics are small parts of your own soul.
I could go all Shakespearian on you here or quote the Gilgamesh or the ancient scribes. I won’t. I will simply quote George Lucas. In Star Wars: A New Hope, a movie we all know, Obi-Wan Kenobi sits in Han Solo’s spaceship speaking to Luke Skywalker about the Force that binds us all. He is speaking of the spirituality that connects us all, that defines us, that is our identity. Han Solo answers that there is no force that controls everything. The problem is that Han Solo thinks that this Force exists outside of himself. It doesn’t. In fact, the Force is inside of him, in his feelings, in the love he feels for his friends, in his deepest thoughts, in what he loves and defends, in his choice of life and in his laughter and in his tears, in why he is who he is.
Fact number one:
Eternity. There is a paradox at hand that cannot be solved without the existence of a God. We cannot understand how the universe can suddenly end. What is beyond the end? Now, it was a good idea to come up with the big bang theory thingie-bob, but we still wonder what was before that? What comes after the supposed universe ends? Nothing? Nothing doesn’t exist. It can’t. But eternity? What is that? Related to that question is also the misunderstanding that aliens created us instead of God, as if the semen of their fruit made us. Maybe they created us. But that doesn’t explain away God. That is like claiming that the packed meat in the supermarket just appeared there in the counter out of nowhere. Who created the aliens? Eternity can only be solved with God as an answer. We think that the universe has to have a beginning and an end, but at the same time it can’t have an end. The same thing is true about your life. We are trapped to think that our lives our final, when in fact we are just riding a small part of our entire ride. We have to concentrate on this life and what we have to do here.
Fact number two:
There are no coincidences. You see signs of that everywhere. We can try to explain all of that away, the angels all the time begging us in vain to get it, or we can exercise some trust. In order to illustrate this I will tell you a few stories from my own life. In fact, all of my life I have received signs that never cease to amaze me. Recently, I took two of my paintings to be framed to function as a birthday present for my wife. Standing there in the art shop, I kept wondering if these framings weren’t too expensive for our finances. Finally, the price tag ended up being 129 € and walked out of the shop sort of regretting paying the high price. What do I see when I look up at the wall, ten feet away from the shop. Street address number 129.
Another story: a colleague of mine and I spoke about the song “Dancing in the Streets” with Mick Jagger and David Bowie. I hadn’t spoken about that song with anyone for at least three years. The next day I turn on the radio, just by chance, remotely, although I wanted to do something else. What is the song they play just as I turn on the radio? You guessed it. “Dancing in the Street”.
Those things, by the way, happen to me all the time. I heard lots of Billy Idol in February of this year. I had always missed hearing his older hits in the radio during the previous years. Now, contrary to tradition, suddenly there was Billy Idol everywhere in every radio station I tuned into, singing a song I had recently learned to love: “Eyes without a Face.”
A clearer example of divine intervention, though, is when you think of someone and that person calls you on the phone at the very same moment you think of them. One day many years ago, back when I lived in Vienna, I actually picked up the phone and the person I was about to call was waiting on the other end. I had picked up the phone after he had dialed the number but before the phone rang.
Something really troubled me to tears in March of this year. Promptly, without forewarning, my remote automatic Smartphone Bible app sent me a quote, reading “Don’t worry!” pretty much after I saw a car bumper sticker on the street, saying. “Everything’s gonna be okay!”
After a fantastic performance this year, my emotions high and my senses throbbing, I was pulled down by people who were not so enthusiastic about it. I was quite angry, mutterings something about how those emotions fell flat. What happens? Right in that moment, I passed a bicycle shop that told their customers that their bikes were “Unflatable”, that is: could not fall flat.
Now, add the mystery of eternity to those stories and you start wondering.
Fact number three:
The aura.
You know that the mysteries of the beginning and the end of existence vs. eternity can only be solved with the existence of a God. You get clear signs from the other side. Now if we were only bodies, DNA and brain cells, there would be no such thing as an aura, or a personality. We all know people with strong personalities, we all know they are powerful, but we do not actually contemplate that they are so because of their strong souls or magnetic personalities based in these souls. Your aura, or the radiance your soul has or directs to others, makes people turn around when they look at you. It makes thousands of people look at you when you perform for them. It binds married couples together, it can create peace or make war. When people die, their bodies lose weight. That is not just the air leaving the body, but the soul leaving it. You can’t lose your soul, by the way. You are your soul.
Aura is not body heat. Body heat does not spellbind.
If we were only bodies, love would not mean so much to us. We wouldn’t have to go to a shrink to solve personal problems. It is proven that most of a physical body is made up of the air between the atoms and that atoms are renewed every few years. So if you are mostly air and material that is regenerated, you would actually not be the same person after a few years. But you are. So what are we BUT souls? As I write this, my wife sits by my side, not knowing anything about the theme of the article I am writing, and reads a quote from the internet about “personal charisma”. If you say that she is feeling the vibrations of my work floating through the air, as a means to explain that away, the only answer to that is that the soul exists. If it does, so does the afterlife. Even self-fulfilled prophecies are proof of the existence of the soul and the afterlife.
Fact number four:
Reincarnation.
By now, there are so many amazing stories about people who remember past lives and went to prove that they were right. One kid knew his own previous address, knew his own previous language, knew his own previous family members names and went back to find them and prove his own memories right.
Another boy remembered being a World War Two fighter pilot, knew detailed flying skills, knew his own nickname and personal name in an earlier life, knew his sister’s address and where he had been shot down. All these stories were proven right.
These stories are not the only ones documented.
They come by the millions.
There’s got to be something to it.
Fact number five:
Out-of-Body-Experiences.
One website speaks of 724 so-called OBE’s a day.
One atheist saw his heart donor during a heart transplant operation while floating above his body and went to tell his doctors about it. Another man described in great detail how the doctor had used his medical tools and what he had done with them during the operation. This was when the patient was out cold, mind you.
Eternity, signs, aura, reincarnation and OBEs: add to that the fact that every life seems to have a pattern that just has to transcend a simple DNA-explanation. People are simply more than just bodies. Where does that leave you as a modern professional or a modern person? That you, if you know that you here for a reason, can look at your role as a professional or a private individual in a different light if you know that someone is taking care of you and that you are a soul to begin with.
Finally, there is a difference between your profession and your workplace and the answer is inside your own spiritual life: in searching your soul how you can find things to love inside things you dislike: something pretty you can look at, at your office desk, a nice colleague, a creative assignment, an interesting project, nice thoughts you think while preparing for a job. Your place of work may change, but you will still be a professional.
Your body may change and you might slip into a new one eventually, so both this one and your other bodies will change, but you soul will always stay the same, even it changes entirely.
Good luck, and remember: EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY!
Brought To You by Charles E.J. Moulton
I find it interesting to see what happens when forces unite. However, in order to unite forces with anyone today you need stamina. Finding forces to unite with is a very hard thing, because people are usually very keen on holding their own. This is a time of vanity. But what is vanity really? Someone wanting to look good, sound good, feel good, be the main focus of attraction. You can unite forces with your own emotions, with your angels, with your noblest feelings. Uniting forcing also means that both parties get their attention. We call that intuition.
The most amazing things happen when we follow our intuition. Those things can’t be planned. They happen. But we have to look inward toward what we are feeling and realize that we are first and foremost spiritual beings. And living with a spiritual belief is a lot is easier than without a spiritual belief.
The greatest projects have been born and the greatest inventions have come to pass when inventors and great people have joined forces with their own emotions and with other people’s spiritual powers. Bob Geldof created Live Aid, Isaac Newton found gravity, Buddha was enlightened, Mahatma Gandhi proved to others that giving peace a chance is an endeavor worth trying and Joe Carruthers opened that cute travel book shop on the corner in Essex.
Intuition has obstacles. Here they are.
This is a neurotic time, one where people are very worried about what other people think of them. Expectancy is the key word. What do people expect of me and how can I fulfil that expectancy? Do I need to fulfil that expectancy? If people expect me to be a certain way and I actually am nothing like that, should I change myself and play that role just to make them happy or should I try to convince them of who I actually am? Do I need to bother? Where is the actual border between private and professional? Can I not actually just use my skills and my talents to reach my goals? Do I have to smarm and “suck up” to my superiors?
You have to do your job well, but you don’t have to “suck up”.
You should never “suck up”.
My boss has a certain expectancy of me and I have to fulfil his expectancy, right? What expectancies are we talking about here? Professional expectancies that have to remain professional, those are the expectancies you are obliged to fulfil at the workplace. No more.
In the creative arts, the problem is that we are professionally dealing with emotions and psychological pressure. That is a part of the daily routine. Let’s say that it takes about twenty years of stage work to learn how to deal with that kind of psychological stress. Artistic skills are learned techniques that only partially rely on emotion, but because of that young artists are vulnerable in the free market. They have to feel the role while competing with others to be the best. They have to portray sensitivity on stage while being ruthless professionals. If you are fresh out of college, where that kind of competition is almost non-existent, that kind of a professional life becomes a shock. The only way is to keep it professional, even the private relationships should be kept professional. Certainly very dear friends will appear in your workplace. Some of my dearest friends have been and still are colleagues. But most of them are just that and only that: colleagues. That is not a bad thing. It is simply professional.
What I see as a problem is that the professional expectancies get mingled with also keeping a certain profile at the workplace. Unfortunately, I saw that working in the business of musical theatre. I loved my work there. No question. But the audition circuit was so overloaded with this pressure of a thousand people who all wanted the same job. Of course there was networking, people who pretended to be your best friend and actually were just after pulling your pants down. That became especially obvious while auditioning for some musical. Everybody was pretending to be so easy going, being best friends with everyone and bragging about their work like crazy (the real show was not the audition, that happened while waiting to audition: how well do I present myself as successful and elite). The atmosphere was horrendous.
What is your status at your workplace? Are you a Fat Cat or a Low Joe? Do you also have to behave like a Low Joe? Does your boss expect you to behave like one? Do your colleagues expect you to behave like one? The really interesting thing is when you have a different status in different workplaces. That is of course only true for those who are freelance or have side jobs.
I’ll tell you a secret: the competitive race at the auditions I told you about, present in many other professions and workplaces is a completely redundant and an unnecessary triviality. You do not have to play that game. Sometimes you are different things and play different roles just according to where you are and what “suit” you are wearing. But you are you and you should rely on your skills and your knowledge and your friendly and outgoing diplomacy to get where you want.
No more.
When I teach my students, I am the experienced teacher. When I work as an author, that audience knows me maybe from my published horror stories or my research papers in academic journals or my philosophical articles. When I work as a jazz vocalist, people expect of me to fulfil my obligations as a swing singer. When I work in the opera chorus, my boss or bosses will expect other things from me than my other employers.
You have to do your job. After all, you get paid for doing your job. But the quality of your work belongs to you and your customer, your student, your audience, your business partners, not necessarily your boss. In fact, the quality of your work more than anything belongs to you. I know that actually usually is not popular opinion. If you have a chosen or a public profession you will most probably love your job. I have the joy of working in the creative arts, as a director, singer, actor, teacher, author and painter (holy moly, now I am bragging). I usually don’t get paid for my painting, but I count everything creative in being part of my profession. That is a luxury. Due to the fact that I have seen some unspoken attitudes slip out of people’s mouths that have been less than prone to equality, I have grown to see that a boss will see more your status within the firm than your actual ability. You can go out there and sing the buns of the audience, but if he wants his cousin to get the role and get more roles it won’t matter what you do. But there are other places to audition, other fields to conquer, other people to impress.
Never put all of your chips in one place. If the croupier yells: “Rien de va plus!” and you’re still grinning behind your boss’s back, hoping that he will turn around, buddy, you in deep trouble. If you see that an employer would rather choose another guy or gal to do the big stuff, you can choose to prove him wrong. Main thing is that you keep it professional. If you can and if it is financially and vitally viable, seek professional or creative side-gigs where you get your kicks or seek other alternatives.
Now, that is not true all of the time. I am just saying that your work and the pride you feel in what you have accomplished in your work belongs to you, not to your boss. This is true whether you stand on a stage in front of eighty thousand people singing your songs or if you are just cleaning the local toilet. If someone does his her work well and is proud of it, it doesn’t matter what he or she does.
Being a kind of a rock in a storm is something many people wish to be. More than ever we have a time today when it is important to remain calm and have a positive outlook on life. Rationality, not brain, matters. The brain is just an organ. Use it. You are not your brain. The common idea is that emotion is irrational. But there is nothing as rational and as calm as the soul, especially if you school the soul to wait for the right answer.
A lot of professions require fast answers. Or maybe I should say that many important professionals need to produce fast answers. But I am not talking days here. I am not even talking minutes. A rational and productive answer really only needs a peaceful millisecond, one where you actually let yourself rest for one moment and let that fear, that storm, that irrational fear of cataclysm, sink and just trust that EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY.
That is actually the thing we should repeat over and over, especially in those times when we are overcome by this nerve-racking fear that we are doing something wrong.
EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY.
Faith.
That takes work. It takes a whole lot of perseverance.
We are back to one of my original statements here: your feelings, your work, your pride, they all belong to you, not your boss. He hires you, he gives you money, you give him your work. But your customers, whoever they are, are those who you can be proud of in having served. More importantly, be proud of yourself.
I mentioned neurosis. Contrary to belief or public opinion, there is a whole lot of obsessive-compulsive neurosis in the world. Due to sociological pressure, a lot of people walk around with the stress of having to be perfect. I have to look good, I have to seem cool, I have to give the impression of being successful, I have to have a great looking partner, I have to have a sexy smile, I can’t stink, I can’t wear the wrong clothes, I can’t have a messy flat, I can’t be strange, I have to fit in, I have to shake hands in the right way, I have to use the right language, I have to act like a man, I have to be a sexy chick, I have to be perfect. I have to be inline, online, offline, chatty, liked, cool, hot, with-it, made-it, in it, on it, got it?
You know what?
You have to be yourself.
You should excel. You should be the best you can be. You should be successful and happy and rich and loved and you should love others. But seek inside yourself to see who you really are and what area of life really suits you and what you want to be. If what you want to be serves and only benefits the rest of mankind, then go for it.
Much of the neurosis present today comes from being afraid of change.
Trust that God will be good to you. Believe that God will be good to you. He might change or reassemble a few things, but don’t be afraid of that. Change is life.
Now we come back to what sent me on this journey in the first place. Joining forces. Join forces with your angels. Join forces with your soul. Join forces with other souls that mean well and have productive, exciting, humane, all-inspiring plans. That costs nothing.
You don’t have to join a club or pay money to some religious order to join forces with the eternal spirit. In fact, if someone wants you to pay them money to believe in something you already believe in, run.
Soul. If you look into how much evidence there is of the existence of the soul then you will ultimately directly be lead to understanding the afterlife. The soul and the afterlife are closely related. In fact, they might be brother and sister. God is in you, you are a part of him or her. In fact, if you want you take your pride and your soul and your body along in order to pray to God in a mosque, a temple, a church or a synagogue. You don’t need to. But you can and I can tell you that it is inspiring. Or you can actually pray to him at home. You can call him Allah, Brahma, God or the Eternal Being or Sam or Joe. He doesn’t care which. And no, the Christian God is not a jealous God. He will not be angry if you invite Buddha. In fact, they both come from the same place. God is God, whatever you call him. He is eternal and he is as much a part of you as you are of him. Your soul is not dependent on a church or church tax. Your faith belongs to you and to God. It is a completely internal entity and your inner link to God.
Let me just tell you about how you can prove the afterlife to yourself. This is independent of your religious faith or if you are an atheist, even. Your soul exists, even if you don’t believe in it.
You are surrounded by the spiritual world all the time. The angels are no different than you, just that they don’t have bodies. They may have gone on, but they may also be with you right now. You are a soul. That is who you are. You may think that you have developed your characteristics over the years and through childhood experiences. That is only partially true. But you are your soul and a lot of what you feel is who you are and your mission in this life is to accomplish whatever it is you have to do here. Your characteristics are small parts of your own soul.
I could go all Shakespearian on you here or quote the Gilgamesh or the ancient scribes. I won’t. I will simply quote George Lucas. In Star Wars: A New Hope, a movie we all know, Obi-Wan Kenobi sits in Han Solo’s spaceship speaking to Luke Skywalker about the Force that binds us all. He is speaking of the spirituality that connects us all, that defines us, that is our identity. Han Solo answers that there is no force that controls everything. The problem is that Han Solo thinks that this Force exists outside of himself. It doesn’t. In fact, the Force is inside of him, in his feelings, in the love he feels for his friends, in his deepest thoughts, in what he loves and defends, in his choice of life and in his laughter and in his tears, in why he is who he is.
Fact number one:
Eternity. There is a paradox at hand that cannot be solved without the existence of a God. We cannot understand how the universe can suddenly end. What is beyond the end? Now, it was a good idea to come up with the big bang theory thingie-bob, but we still wonder what was before that? What comes after the supposed universe ends? Nothing? Nothing doesn’t exist. It can’t. But eternity? What is that? Related to that question is also the misunderstanding that aliens created us instead of God, as if the semen of their fruit made us. Maybe they created us. But that doesn’t explain away God. That is like claiming that the packed meat in the supermarket just appeared there in the counter out of nowhere. Who created the aliens? Eternity can only be solved with God as an answer. We think that the universe has to have a beginning and an end, but at the same time it can’t have an end. The same thing is true about your life. We are trapped to think that our lives our final, when in fact we are just riding a small part of our entire ride. We have to concentrate on this life and what we have to do here.
Fact number two:
There are no coincidences. You see signs of that everywhere. We can try to explain all of that away, the angels all the time begging us in vain to get it, or we can exercise some trust. In order to illustrate this I will tell you a few stories from my own life. In fact, all of my life I have received signs that never cease to amaze me. Recently, I took two of my paintings to be framed to function as a birthday present for my wife. Standing there in the art shop, I kept wondering if these framings weren’t too expensive for our finances. Finally, the price tag ended up being 129 € and walked out of the shop sort of regretting paying the high price. What do I see when I look up at the wall, ten feet away from the shop. Street address number 129.
Another story: a colleague of mine and I spoke about the song “Dancing in the Streets” with Mick Jagger and David Bowie. I hadn’t spoken about that song with anyone for at least three years. The next day I turn on the radio, just by chance, remotely, although I wanted to do something else. What is the song they play just as I turn on the radio? You guessed it. “Dancing in the Street”.
Those things, by the way, happen to me all the time. I heard lots of Billy Idol in February of this year. I had always missed hearing his older hits in the radio during the previous years. Now, contrary to tradition, suddenly there was Billy Idol everywhere in every radio station I tuned into, singing a song I had recently learned to love: “Eyes without a Face.”
A clearer example of divine intervention, though, is when you think of someone and that person calls you on the phone at the very same moment you think of them. One day many years ago, back when I lived in Vienna, I actually picked up the phone and the person I was about to call was waiting on the other end. I had picked up the phone after he had dialed the number but before the phone rang.
Something really troubled me to tears in March of this year. Promptly, without forewarning, my remote automatic Smartphone Bible app sent me a quote, reading “Don’t worry!” pretty much after I saw a car bumper sticker on the street, saying. “Everything’s gonna be okay!”
After a fantastic performance this year, my emotions high and my senses throbbing, I was pulled down by people who were not so enthusiastic about it. I was quite angry, mutterings something about how those emotions fell flat. What happens? Right in that moment, I passed a bicycle shop that told their customers that their bikes were “Unflatable”, that is: could not fall flat.
Now, add the mystery of eternity to those stories and you start wondering.
Fact number three:
The aura.
You know that the mysteries of the beginning and the end of existence vs. eternity can only be solved with the existence of a God. You get clear signs from the other side. Now if we were only bodies, DNA and brain cells, there would be no such thing as an aura, or a personality. We all know people with strong personalities, we all know they are powerful, but we do not actually contemplate that they are so because of their strong souls or magnetic personalities based in these souls. Your aura, or the radiance your soul has or directs to others, makes people turn around when they look at you. It makes thousands of people look at you when you perform for them. It binds married couples together, it can create peace or make war. When people die, their bodies lose weight. That is not just the air leaving the body, but the soul leaving it. You can’t lose your soul, by the way. You are your soul.
Aura is not body heat. Body heat does not spellbind.
If we were only bodies, love would not mean so much to us. We wouldn’t have to go to a shrink to solve personal problems. It is proven that most of a physical body is made up of the air between the atoms and that atoms are renewed every few years. So if you are mostly air and material that is regenerated, you would actually not be the same person after a few years. But you are. So what are we BUT souls? As I write this, my wife sits by my side, not knowing anything about the theme of the article I am writing, and reads a quote from the internet about “personal charisma”. If you say that she is feeling the vibrations of my work floating through the air, as a means to explain that away, the only answer to that is that the soul exists. If it does, so does the afterlife. Even self-fulfilled prophecies are proof of the existence of the soul and the afterlife.
Fact number four:
Reincarnation.
By now, there are so many amazing stories about people who remember past lives and went to prove that they were right. One kid knew his own previous address, knew his own previous language, knew his own previous family members names and went back to find them and prove his own memories right.
Another boy remembered being a World War Two fighter pilot, knew detailed flying skills, knew his own nickname and personal name in an earlier life, knew his sister’s address and where he had been shot down. All these stories were proven right.
These stories are not the only ones documented.
They come by the millions.
There’s got to be something to it.
Fact number five:
Out-of-Body-Experiences.
One website speaks of 724 so-called OBE’s a day.
One atheist saw his heart donor during a heart transplant operation while floating above his body and went to tell his doctors about it. Another man described in great detail how the doctor had used his medical tools and what he had done with them during the operation. This was when the patient was out cold, mind you.
Eternity, signs, aura, reincarnation and OBEs: add to that the fact that every life seems to have a pattern that just has to transcend a simple DNA-explanation. People are simply more than just bodies. Where does that leave you as a modern professional or a modern person? That you, if you know that you here for a reason, can look at your role as a professional or a private individual in a different light if you know that someone is taking care of you and that you are a soul to begin with.
Finally, there is a difference between your profession and your workplace and the answer is inside your own spiritual life: in searching your soul how you can find things to love inside things you dislike: something pretty you can look at, at your office desk, a nice colleague, a creative assignment, an interesting project, nice thoughts you think while preparing for a job. Your place of work may change, but you will still be a professional.
Your body may change and you might slip into a new one eventually, so both this one and your other bodies will change, but you soul will always stay the same, even it changes entirely.
Good luck, and remember: EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY!