Unlike Debra, I have no idea what my soul wants me to know. I do know that certain thoughts and actions help me feel better, and certain thoughts and actions result in my feeling worse. I assume those differences are guiding me in the right direction, but I am by no means certain. Unlike Debra and, presumably Gary Zukav, for example, I can understand the woman’s continuing to feel bad about her dead husband’s critical remarks. I have not only studied psychology and understand conditioned responses, but also have examples in my own life resulting from critical remarks made by my parents while I was young. I am no longer young, and my parents have both been dead for many years. Even so, some memories still influence my feelings and behavior. Conditioning is, after all, the way we learn.
The burned child fears the fire, and we drive more safely because we have learned how to respond to traffic signs and signals appropriately. One of the things that makes such responses useful is that they operate below our level of conscious awareness—we do not have to analyze a situation and make a logical choice. We chose a behavior automatically based on what has been punished or rewarded in the past. This system works for all living things: sunflowers turn to face the sun; dogs learn to come, sit, heel, and fetch through the same process. Cats may not come when called, but they pay close attention to the sound of a can opener. The general rule is, “What gets rewarded, gets done.” Zukav’s woman, as is true of all people, kept doing what she had been doing because she found it rewarding.
The missing piece is learning to make new choices when old choices are no longer serving your purpose. If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten. If you want a different outcome, you need to choose a different behavior. Choosing a different course of action requires two things: First, the recognition that you don’t want what you’ve been getting, and, second, recognizing that you have options. I’m not sure that either of those recognitions is based on soul awareness. I don’t know for sure whether the woman in the Zukav story wanted a different outcome. She may have felt that she was somehow punishing her dead husband by attending events that would have annoyed him and may have felt that she was maintaining a relationship that had been important to her. It’s also possible that she simply didn’t know you can make new choices and change the way you feel. You don’t have to keep doing what you’ve always done.
The key is awareness. It’s a matter of being aware of what you are feeling and the contributing factors. Awareness makes choice possible. I don’t know what Gary Zukav said to the woman or whether he helped her become more aware of choices that would lead to better feelings. I also don’t know whether our souls are especially interested in our feelings. My sense is that the purpose of earth school is to provide us with the experiences necessary for our spiritual evolution—or for us to help others along the way, even if that means we have to play the role of the “bad guy” from time to time. We not only learn from those who set good examples, but we also learn from those who demonstrate the unpleasant. Heroes could not be heroic if villains weren’t being villainous.
I think our main choices are a natter of the degree to which we want to be aware. My sense is that greater awareness is better than less awareness, but I have no sense of certainty that’s the case. It may be that we have the level of awareness that allows us to learn the lessons we incarnated to learn. My sense is that humanity has been making spiritual progress over the centuries, but the process is slow—perhaps because it needs to be. My sense is that the only thing that counts is our own awareness of spiritual evolution. In Voltaire’s novel, Candide, the main character echoes the belief that because a benevolent God created the world, the world must be the best of all possible worlds. As the protagonist travels and sees all sorts of misery, he decides that the world may not be as benevolent as some had thought. For Voltaire, and for Jonathan Swift and Herman Melville, God created a world of problems and was indifferent to human suffering. The poet John Keats thought that a world of pains was necessary to school an intelligence and make it a soul.
Voltaire, Swift, Melville, and Keats all seem to be saying that suffering—in one way or another—is necessary for spiritual evolution. I don’t know that’s the case. More recently, Stevie Wonder said that evolution is taking 10 Zillion light years because we’ve had so far to come. These stories, including the Stevie Wonder song, and others resonate with me. Nature also resonates. That’s as close as I can come to listening to my soul. I do not know whether Zukav’s long-suffering woman was listening to her soul in complaining about her dead husband. It seems entirely possible to me that she was using her memory of her husband’s criticism as motivation for attending workshops that would contribute to her increasing spiritual awareness.
Although I am in favor of greater conscious awareness, I’m not at all sure that unconscious patterns are the problem. Would the woman be better off knowing that she no longer needed to use her dead husband as motivation for attending workshops? I don’t know. If she had that awareness, she might stop attending workshops rather than simply attending them more joyfully. Even so, had I met the woman, I probably would have wanted to help her understand that she no longer needed to use her dead husband to motivate her to seek greater enlightenment.
And what about you? In Herman Melville’s terms, why are you seeking the great white whale?