Setting Your Soul

What shall a man give in exchange for his soul? ­– Jesus

There is an unspoken thing that determines if a person will yield or refuse to yield to anything – good or bad, wrong or right. It is the setting of your soul, your hearts disposition. This determines to extents that cannot be estimated what happens to you. It determines how you react or respond to stimulus. It interrupts the cause and effect process and gives you the power to determine the direction of your life.

Let’s say the president of your country decides to lift the ban on imported leather. You will interpret his move based on the setting of your soul. If your soul is set on the need to empower the shoe making industry and creating employment you will celebrate it. If on the other hand you are a manufacturer of local leather I would suppose that your soul will be set on the opposite. We all see the world and every single thing that happens to us through the lens of our soul settings. These settings determine how we see ourselves, our environments, the world, and what we get out of our lives.

In the Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, there are two famous (infamous in some cases) doors. One is labeled, “PREJUDICED,” and the second, “UNPREJUDICED.” The second doesn’t open. The idea behind the two doors is to show that there is nothing called an “Unprejudiced Adult.” The museum designers recognize that we all have set our souls.  

The American writer and poet, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, summarizes my thought line well when she wrote:

One ship drives east and another drives west

With the selfsame winds that blow.

‘Tis the set of the sails,

And not the gales,

That tells us the way to go.

Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate;

As we voyage along through life,

‘Tis the set of a soul

That decides its goal,

And not the calm, or the strife.

How have you set your soul?