The Voice of the Soul

 When you come to one of those occasions in your life when you must make a real decision that will affect your future or even your spiritual state how do you discriminate between what comes into your thoughts on the matter from God or the higher powers or your own soul, that is to say, your spiritual being, and what is self-generated as in coming from your worldly mind which includes desires, fears and ego or put there by the counter-evolutionary powers, as we might term them, those forces that would hold you back or misdirect you? Incidentally, both these powers exist. The old and slightly comical image of an angel on one shoulder and a devil (usually a red one) on the other have a lot of truth in them. The mind is a receiving station and, depending on its tuning, can receive impressions from the forces of both light and darkness.

To get back to the question. If something comes from God, using that term very loosely because God delegates and most people are not directly in touch with him but one of his hierarchical intermediaries, you don't worry about whether you should be doing something. You know you must do it. If a situation arises in your life and you are genuinely uncertain as to how to respond, the spiritual significance of your decision may not be great. But when you come to a fork in the road and one of the paths is a destined path that you are required to take for the benefit of your spiritual growth then you know. 

Which is not to say you do not doubt. The mind will often come up with all sorts of reasons for avoiding taking the right decision. There will be rationalisations about why you shouldn't be doing a particular thing or should be doing something else. Outer circumstances and other people, even family members, might try to deter you from the correct choice. But inside you will know. You will know that you have to do a certain thing or take a certain course. That doesn't mean you will do it. The outer mind can suppress that inner knowledge which means the connection you have to the inner voice will be weakened from then on. But, nevertheless, at a deep level of your being you will know. The worldly self might overwhelm that deep knowledge, even to the extent of posing as a deeper knowledge itself, but if you are true to yourself then you will know. An honest person will feel guilt for doing the wrong thing and relief for doing the right thing even if it is the difficult thing and brings worldly problems. A spiritual slacker will brush off this guilt and dismiss it as societal conditioning or impractical romanticism or even disguised selfishness, but that person is killing the voice of the soul inside and it will be easier for him to ignore it next time a similar situation arises until the point is reached where there is no connection at all.

Listen out for the voice of the soul. It will not always tell you what you want to hear, but it will unerringly direct you to the truth.