As you read the words of my friend Joe, pictured above with his wife Jo, allow yourself to peacefully rock with the words and slip into that state where your soul cries out for more.

We are not merely dry husks of skin and bones, defined only by our appearance and accomplishments.

We are God made to be deep, fathomless depths of life.

As I read these words, I ached with the struggle it must have been to write this out and share with the public. The vulnerability and depth it took is breathtaking.

I hope it speaks to your soul like it did to mine.

You can find more of Joe on Facebook under Joseph Miller. His profile picture is the same as the picture you see. You will want to hit that follow button.

Thank you Jo/e for allowing me to share.

Enjoy.

“CIVILIZATION IS A THIN VENEER, and our sophistication is gilding over brass. Even those of us who are very self-aware see but shallowly below the surface. Under the layers of awareness, beneath our visible motivations and murky foundations, lays the deep black impermeable liquid soup of our innermost soul. It's from this pool that our longings and fears emanate. Invisible to the mind, it lies beneath all we know or feel, sending up spurts of raw elemental input into our subconscious, where it's filtered through our traumas, prejudices, and baggage. And from there, it runs through our conscious mind, where it's filtered yet again by our culture, belief systems, and education. As a result, our feelings when they emerge have been significantly modified from their inception.

No, we don't understand the essence of this pool. Nor do we know it, although it is wholly us. We communicate with it only through motivated and unreliable intermediaries. It's like listening to a trickster describe someone you haven't met. A game of psychic telephone. How can you know? The heart, as the prophet says, is deceitful. Who can plumb its depths?

Sometimes in the small hours of the night, when our dreams rouse us and the borders between the material and spiritual grow thin, we can sense its presence. Our connection to that mystical realm grows more robust, and our relationship to what we know as reality grows weaker. In those moments, ghosts, goblins, and fairies loom as tangible in our minds as eggs and bacon will three and a half hours later.

In that misty twilight between soulish and spiritual, we sense our connectedness with God, the deep, immeasurable universe, and mankind across all boundaries of time and space. It's a phantom, this spiritual realm—a Will-O-The-Wisp which cannot be grasped. You think you glimpse it from the corner of your eye, but when you turn to reckon with it, it slips coyly away, unseen. That's because the cold eye of the rational mind inhabits a different universe. It cannot see into this deeper part of us and its connections with the spirit world. The spirit simply does not exist in the brick and marble edifices of our rational experience. It can be sensed only in unsatisfactory and fleeting ways.

I recently had a weird and unsettling dream in which I grew furious at some cowardly and duplicitous character. As I shouted at him in a righteous fury, I woke myself up. There, in the infinite dark of the morning, was triggered a deep memory, unformed and senseless. In fact, it was more accurately the memory of a memory long buried. I couldn't reach it, and yet it beckoned to me. Drawn into the unknown in spite of myself, I followed the trail nearly against my will. It was as if the phantom, instead of retreating, as usual, was waiting in the shadows so I could catch up to it.

At length, a memory materialized in the depths. It seemed to consist of three elements: darkly muted colors in contracting motion, shaped in a curve (something like a shrimp), muffled sounds with a nonsensical word, and a movement of my lower legs. I saw, felt, and heard these things with unexpected certainty, although not with great precision. And I recalled that I had dreamed of them as a very young child.

The hair on the back of my neck rose up as I felt with a strange, unsettling conviction that I was remembering swimming in my mother's womb. I could see muted light casting soft shapes. (I checked this morning to see if light can penetrate the uterus. It can.) I can still feel the kicking motion of my lower legs as I write this. The uncovering of this memory was not pleasant. It wasn't foreboding or dark but unsettling and disruptive. Like Adam in the garden, my skin prickled with the dread of being discovered. My adult self was as naked and raw and subliminal before my creator at that moment as when I was ensconced in my amniotic pool in the weeks and months following my conception.

In some way, this memory was fearful. I cannot know why, because it wasn't well defined. I just had a vague sense of the need to escape. It was as if the vigorous swimming was in an attempt to get away. Suddenly there was a cascade of other memories. Recurring dreams I'd had as a small child. Dreams in which I was running from dogged faceless pursuers, and when trapped at last on the cusp of an infinite black chasm, found that by wriggling my legs rapidly, I could fly away. Only it wasn't like flying as much as it was like swimming awkwardly through the air using only my lower legs. Kicking strongly and urgently through the inky darkness and away from danger.

As I lay there pondering the ramifications of what I'd seen, other thoughts materialized from out of the ether. My predilection for avoidance in confrontational or unpleasant situations. My constant struggle with fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of being discovered as a fraud. Fear of being disliked. Fear of my weaknesses being exposed to the world.

In my altered state, I knew beyond doubt that this fear buried in my hiddenmost soul resulted from this memory, whatever it was. And I knew that all my clumsy efforts to deal with the outworkings of fear in my life were the reasons for most of my flaws. They were the source of my sometimes coldness to loved ones, for instance, or my preference for an aloof and insular lifestyle. I could see it all as clearly as if written on a great scroll that spanned the heavens. "Your inept attempts to deal with this fearful memory are causing you to live a stilted life and depriving your family of your presence."

Far better to be healed of the trauma of fear, I thought. And I bowed my head and asked the Good Father to take the anxiety out of that memory and heal it. I prayed for a while, and then somewhat comforted, I fell deeply asleep.

Of course, with the rising of the sun, the curtains were drawn back across that briefly opened window by a ghostly hand, and I was again denied access to its secrets. The veneers of tangibility grew 'round my reality once more and closed my inner eye to all but what I could see and touch. My intellect (such as it is) reasserted its iron dominion, and now it all seems very far away and silly. But I'm left to wonder: who actually lives in the very soul of me?

And which of those two worlds is most real?”