The greatest challenge we all face today is to join forces as a team to repair the crack in the cosmic egg that we all took part in creating (perhaps just so we could have fun repairing it together). We imagined a need to do this by getting caught up in the fundamental drive to become more aware of ourselves in the natural process of evolving consciousness—freeing and separating our unique individuality from the wholeness and unity from where we came, so that we could see, touch and feel it with certainty. Oddly this is the main purpose and contribution of technology, which is now already obsolete.

     There is a very serious, disturbing consequence of this fracture of mental and physical dualism that we created by dividing everything into this and that, in trying to get a better understanding of each. The direct result of this 180-degree approach is that we have only gotten a half-understanding of each half and this leads to a very uncomfortable and annoying feeling of emptiness, incompleteness and meaninglessness. We try futilely to fill this void by every means except the one thing that can actually work—a soulful personality.

     A huge fracture is the one between the heroes of psychology and religion who are trying to figure out how to “cure” these nagging problems. Neither approach works very well alone, because these two things both need to be merged into a mega-cure to be more effective in repairing such an enormous crack in the whole universe. The in-between answer—spirituality—is to apply wisdom from both sources as a creative compromise that results in everybody living a soulful personality now.

    All we can do at this stage is to imagine a prescription for a soulful personality. Such a prescription has to include both the ephemeral, insignificant wants of our ego and the more substantial, unchanging needs of our soul. So maybe the current problem is that we are wasting time spending the first half of our lives trying to quiet our egos’ noisy clamoring and desires for things, only to end up empty-handed and then realizing we have to go explore the other half. The other half of our life is spent exploring the ways to sooth the soul’s basic needs of creativity, intelligence, strength and peace.

     The underlying image that craves to be seen is the soulful personality that enjoys both these drives at the same time, rather than one leading or following the other. After all, what good would it be to achieve enlightenment with core spiritual values like wisdom and creativity if you didn’t apply them to everyday life to help yourself and others navigate through the conflicts that disturb both our egos and souls and everything in between?

     A prescription for allowing a soulful personality to emerge has to do with redefining basic needs and drives we have from a more balanced viewpoint between our egos and souls. This place is the center of our being and is not a place easy to get to without the realization that you have to be willing to give up all that you think you know about yourself and others and life in general, especially the sacred cows you cling to. And the ego’s pride is a high wall to climb because its foundation is much deeper than we can see.

    We should give serious consideration to redefining four imaginary ideas wider, so more of us can see, use and benefit from these things that nourish and grow a soulful personality.

CREATIVITY

     We may have first imagined creativity in an overly romantic and exclusive way with superior music, art and literature. Life is perpetual creation and being part of it, we all create things continuously, sometimes without being aware of it. It might make more sense to redefine creativity in a more mundane yet global way, such as the simple knack of seeing the basic back and forth flow of life between separation and unity and expressing our own unique version of it. Or it could be anything else from using ordinary things in new and unusual ways to just adding something slightly different to what you already know. Our imagination is creating more problems which require even more creative solutions.

INTELLIGENCE

     In the big picture of things, having a high IQ with lots of facts and information is only a very small part of real intelligence, which also includes practical common sense, creative thinking, wisdom about governing principles of life and total awareness of everything. The fact that none of us use but a tiny fracture of our brain’s capacity should be an eye-opening clue to the vastness of what real intelligence can include so we all have more of this valuable resource. The key in creating more of something as important and valuable as intelligence, is in the way we define its limitations. It is ours to have as much of it that we want and need.

STRENGTH

     Authentic strength can only emerge from a major shift in focus. This transition moves us from imagining the ego’s aggressive personal power to control and accumulate external things in life, to a passive but more powerful act of understanding and accepting the energy from within that helps us each reconcile our own fractures. This change of focus happens just so we can demonstrate the reality of unity and wholeness to those who need reassurance with their insecurities. This is selfish selflessness at its best and the single thought that can move mountains.

PEACE

     The peace will all imagine and strive for is not the absence of turmoil and conflict, but rather the balanced place between the distracting symptoms of these annoying and uncomfortable things, and the imagined calm of reconciliation. Probably the best word to describe this place is acceptance—acceptance of both the Yang and Yin of life as they occur on their own time frame and not ours. Besides that, life is both seemingly comfortable and uncomfortable and the goal of creativity, intelligence and strength is to transcend that imagined dualistic fracture to enjoy real peace of having it all.

     In the end, no great spiritual leader or self-help guru can help you become a soulful personality. All that we can do is tease each other into imagining what this creative compromise might be like and then sharing our secrets an suspicions that we each get from wading in the trenches between the life in here and the life out there. In other words, slow down to see and appreciate what is already happening and talk about it more.