The Eternal Part of You
| Rob Brezsny Feb 24, 2026 |
Art by June Bird Ngale
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YOUR IRREDUCIBLE YOU-NESS
Do you have a soul? Is there even such a thing? If so, what is it exactly? Where does it live, how does it move, and what does it need? How do you grow more of it? And is it really, as some of the wisest humans who ever lived have insisted, the most valuable thing in the universe?
I invite you to sit with these questions. Meditate on the soul, dream about the soul, and turn the soul over in your imagination as if you were exploring a luminous treasure.
To start the inquiry, I’ll tell you about a woman I met who had arrived at a devastating answer to these questions.
She told me she firmly believes she is no more than the sum total of the influences of all the people she has ever known. The way she talked about herself was as if she were a machine, a passive assemblage of other people’s programming.
She lives her life as if she has no essential core, but is merely what others have shaped her into: a reflection of her parents’ and teachers’ and friends’ and enemies’ expectations of her: a mirror that has forgotten it also generates its own light.
I understood the cultural currents that had carried her to this diminished self-concept. And I agree that each of us is partly a creation of forces beyond our control. Most people have no idea how thoroughly they are shaped by the zeitgeist, by ancestral patterns, by the collective unconscious, by advertising and propaganda and the relentless pressure of consensus reality.
But I am quite sure that each of us also has an essential core, a diamond nature and irreducible YOU-ness that isn’t entirely manufactured by outside forces.
I believe our souls are ancient entities that exist both outside of time and space and very much inside it. They are both eternal and urgently present, both transcendent and gloriously incarnate in this particular body at this particular moment in history.
So I will ask you to do you and me a favor. Even if you’ve been taught that consciousness is merely the result of brain chemistry and the soul is a metaphor at best and a hallucination at worst: Imagine, just for now, that you do have a soul—not as an article of religious faith but as an experiential reality you can actually feel.
Relax the frenzied activity of what the Zen Buddhists call the monkey mind. And try to feel the quality of that deep, indivisible part of you.
This part of you knows itself and loves itself with clarity and grace. It’s so utterly unique that no other soul in the history of this planet has ever been quite like it, and no other soul ever will be. It’s the gorgeous, humming center of you, quietly broadcasting its singular frequency beneath all the noise and distraction and performance and anxiety.
This essential core is NOT merely a creation of your parents. Does NOT measure its worth against anyone else’s. Is NOT a slave to other people’s opinions of who you should be.
It’s who you were before you were born into this body, and who you will be after you leave it. It’s the part of you that chose this particular incarnation, with its particular set of challenges and gifts, and decided to arrive at this precise moment in history to do your singular work.
Your soul can never be completely understood. It will always be partly mystery. And yet it’s your sweetest, most reliable source: the wellspring of your authentic creativity and your deepest compassion. No matter how lost you may become in the maze of conditioning and fear and self-doubt, your soul will always be there at your center, emanating its signal, inviting you to remember, ready to guide you home.
In this era of manufactured confusion and artificial intelligence and deepfake everything, that authentic signal is more precious than ever. It’s the one thing that can’t be corrupted. It holds the blueprint of your most luminous becoming, and it loves you with an unconditional devotion that asks nothing except that you trust the wild, beautiful truth of who you really are.
So tune in. Its tender guidance has never been more available to you—or more necessary.
Art by Howard G. Charing
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Can we go even further?
You might feel moved to explore the nature of the soul with rare companions who take the soul seriously. They won’t flinch when the conversation goes deep.
Of course, you don’t want to get into the trap of debating the soul’s existence with people who snicker and reach reflexively for their skepticism. Conversations like those are useless. Save your energy for something more alive.
You may also decide that the fact you have encountered this essay means that now is an excellent time to go out in active search of experiences that will expand and deepen your soul. How might you attune yourself to the synchronicities and encounters and recognitions that will teach you more about what your soul is and why it matters?
Below are some navigational hints.
Anything or anyone you find truly beautiful will lead you toward soul. And by beautiful I don’t mean pretty packaging or pleasing surfaces. I mean beautiful in the older, stranger sense: glowing with intelligence and intensity and mystery and depth. Beautiful as in made by hand, close to the earth, energizing to your body, and impossible to reduce to a price tag.
Anything that awakens your reverence will lead you to soul. Anyone who is acutely alive to the flow of life, who spills over with vitality and genuine responsiveness, will lead you there, too.
Feelings of gratitude will lead you there. So will adventures that catch you off guard. Unpredictability stirs the soul, and surprising truths. Deeply felt traditions with real roots can awaken or feed the soul.
But you know more than I do about what will lead you, specifically, to soul. You have your own particular hungers and your own telltale signals. You know those moments when some mystery in you suddenly leans forward, alert and awake.
Pay close attention to those signals. Write about them. Make a list of the experiences, the people, the landscapes, the works of art, and the conversations that have awakened the deepest stirrings in you. Let that list become a kind of map.
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Now here are three questions with tentative answers to open your imagination further.
Question 1: Was there a time, once upon a time, when star-crossed romance wounded your capacity for love? Left a scar across the very place in you that most wants to give and receive tenderness?
Answer: Yes. Almost certainly yes. But there has never been a better moment than now to begin healing that wound.
Question 2: Is it possible you are finally willing to relinquish your long-held addiction to a certain tragic magic? That exquisite, melancholy story you’ve been telling yourself, beautiful in its way but also keeping you smaller and sadder than you need to be?
Answer: Yes. Your urge to genuinely love your life is growing stronger than your attachment to ancient sorrow. Your need for clarity is quietly overwhelming the melodrama that once felt essential but is now, if you’re honest, becoming increasingly beside the point.
Question 3: Has there ever been a better time than right now to perform quietly courageous acts—small, steady, unglamorous acts of integrity—that turn you away from the seductions of shallowness and toward the deeper allure of the soul?
Answer: You already know the answer. You’ve known it for a while.
Art by Wassily Kandinsky