Sometimes I feel like my soul is nothing more than a leaky faucet ... the kind that drips all night long. It doesn't really make a loud sound but more of an incessant one. Yet after hours of drip, drip, drip the sound not only echoes but progressively intensifies. The more silent the room, the louder the drips become. And before I know it, the sound consumes the room. And I would give anything to be able to shut it off ... this is when it would be especially good to know something about plumbing. I wonder if plumbers ever have faucets that drip ... you know like cobblers whose kids have shoes that always need mending. But I digress.
After a while, if the water continues to drip for long enough, the sound moves from deafening to silence. We just can't hear it anymore. It becomes what scientists call "white noise" or background noise. The noise is still there, it is still calling out to us, but we become almost numb to it. It goes from thunder to silence and, then when we least expect it, back to thunder.
I have found soul cravings to be like that. They scream in our heads until your "ears" almost hurt but then after a while they become almost like a silent scream. We can't hear them any longer and we can almost deny that they remain at all except for the echo down deep in the hollowness of our souls. We don't really know what it is that our souls want and we seem to have struck out looking for what it is that our souls need. So as a result, we begin losing our souls ... and we try to ignore incessant dripping and just move on.
Perhaps our souls are bit like us as kids waiting tireless day after day for the ice cream truck to drive down our streets. I remember back in the day wishing that I could own my very own ice cream truck and just eat dessert all day long. That to me is a picture of what feeding my soul is like. It keeps confusing what it wants with what it needs. Or maybe my soul just isn't convinced until I am physically sick to my stomach that the former is not the latter.
Buddha may have been right when he spoke against desires: they really can make us sick. Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to us is to get what we want ... consider all those lottery winners whose lives are literally destroyed by their prizes. Desires and passion can lead us down some very dark paths. Buddha must have experienced some of the same frustrations as I have and decided the only way to solve this problem was to rid ourselves of all our desires.
Now millions of his followers pursue this goal to eliminate all their desires. For him it was pretty simple: if his desires keep making his soul sick, get rid of them -- all of them. Personally, I have found this to be impossible, but I can understand the sentiment. I am not even Buddha [though some may say I am beginning to look like him ... maybe I can at least keep a few hairs on my head] but I have figured out that what my head, heart and body desire is not necessarily what my soul needs.
We can get lost in our desires and never truly find out what it is that our souls long for. Instead of facing the hard reality that what we are pursuing is not what our souls crave, we tend to just try to solve the problem by getting more -- more toys, more money, more power, more prestige, more sex, more stuff. We literally spend our lives trying to satisfy our souls. Yet some things are only a facade. Some things satisfy but for just a moment. Some things actually deaden our souls. It's kind of weird when we think about it -- to gain the whole world and lose our souls. Jesus, of course, warned us about this way back in the day.
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