What do you call a “disease of the soul”, an illness resulting from a longing, frustrated desire, and deep inner dissatisfaction and emptiness?  First clue … it is the necessary beginning of any spiritual path.  Second clue … it is a condition that manifests itself as if our souls are searching for love but lacking an inner experience of intimacy with oneself, with God, with life, and with the moment.  It happens when you get disconnected, abandoned and rejected and try and find love in the wrong places. It happens when you search for “your own” enlightenment by often looking for “people, places and things” to make you feel an intimacy of happiness.  The saddest people in the world are those people in the morning who seemed to be the happiest people last night.  What would you call this disease? 

If intimacy of happiness is what is being longed for then, where do we search and how?  All too often the search involves “over stimulation” whether it be in the search for or in the fulfilling of the longing.  The search usually involves an object, a substance, an event, or a repetitive anything (shopping, thinking, blaming, abusing, eating) in a way that cannot give the “intimacy with the moment” that is being sought. Then over time, when the fix does not work the ante is upped. You will always need more and more of anything that is not working.  Conversely, if something is really working for you, then less and less will be required to satisfy you.

The problem is that when you develop that trust relationship with a behavior, substance or compulsion of some kind and it is usually a momentary intensity passing itself off as intimacy, the effect is quickly over and then you need more.  When you put your trust and love into that behavior and that becomes what you seek the most, you have just defined your new god.  This is a god that cannot save you from the hell of loneliness, abandonment and rejection. 

We cannot engineer our own enlightenment.  It usually comes in the form of the work of someone else.  God’s grace from start to finish through and in the form of someone else.  We were made to breathe the Air that always surrounds us, feeds us, and fills us. Some of us call this experience God, but the word is not important.  For those who will gasp at this... even God said, I am what I am.  What is important is that you find someone who can guide you on a path to enlightenment, to a god that you can be in relationship with.  

If you seek to be happy, joyous and free then you need to look to the people around you and find those that are happy, joyous and free during the day time.  Souls that are alive to the world, engaged and rooted in happiness.  Find someone to talk to who can share their journey and their insights as they guide you.  Join a group that encourages discussion and laughter and I add, “in the morning”, because it is in those places that you will find the kind of god that you can be in relationship with. 

Life is tough, there seems to be no rules (just laws and punishment) and little direction in getting through it, never mind living it.  How you get through life and how you live it is up to you.  There are choices and one of those choices is right now.  Do you have a disease of living, a disease of the soul?  What are you going to do about it?