When you have touched these deeper sources, you have begun to make the ego your servant and not your master. Over the years, your ego has found a specific way it wants you to be in order to win the most approval—what Henri Nouwen calls the “ego ideal.” The ego wants you to point your life to the role that will make you seem smart, good-looking, and admirable. It’s likely you have spent a lot of time so far conforming to the ego ideal.
As the psychologist James Hollis puts it, “Your ego prefers certainty to uncertainty, predictability over surprise, clarity over ambiguity. Your ego always wants to shroud over the barely audible murmurings of the heart.” The ego, says Lee Hardy, wants you to choose a job and a life that you can use as a magic wand to impress others.
It’s at this deep level that you sense a different life, one your ego cannot even fathom. There’s something in you that senses, as C. S. Lewis wrote, “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
We’re at the first stage of renunciation—shedding the old self so the new self can emerge. It’s at this point you realize you are a much better person than your ego ideal. It’s at this point when you really discover the heart and soul.
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Heart and Soul
Not long ago I read a passage in a book about a guy who bought a house with a bamboo stand growing near his driveway. He decided to get rid of it, so he cut it down, then took an ax to its roots and smashed them into little pieces. He dug down and removed as much of the root system as he could and then he poured a plant poison over what remained. He filled the hole with several feet of gravel, and then, taking no chances, paved it over with cement. Two years later he noticed something: A little green bamboo shoot pushing up through the cement. That bamboo was unquenchable. It could not stop pushing upward.
We have something like that inside ourselves. It is our desire. We are often taught by our culture that we are primarily thinking beings—Homo sapiens. Sometimes our schools and companies treat us as nothing but analytic brains. But when we’re in the valley, we get a truer and deeper view of who we really are and what we really need. When we’re in the valley our view of what’s important in life is transformed. We begin to realize that the reasoning brain is actually the third most important part of our consciousness. The first and most important part is the desiring heart.
As the Augustinian scholar James K. A. Smith writes, “To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live.” There is some deep part of ourselves from where desires flow. We’re defined by what we desire, not what we know.
Look at kids in a school play—singing with all their might, dancing as best they can, concentrating furiously to get it right. There is something in them that animates them, the dream of being a star, the drive of pleasing a teacher or making a difference in the world or simply being great. The world may do a good job of paving over their desires, but those green bamboo shoots push stubbornly upward. Cruel adults and broken relationships will do their best to break the green shoots, boring schools try to dull them, poverty tries to starve them, but if you look at kids in even the roughest circumstances, nine times out of ten the green shoot is still there, desiring, dreaming, pushing upward.
Our emotions guide us. Our emotions assign value to things and tell us what is worth wanting. The passions are not the opposite of reason; they are the foundation of reason and often contain a wisdom the analytic brain can’t reach. The ultimate heart’s desire—the love behind all the other loves—is the desire to lose yourself in something or someone. Think about it: Almost every movie you’ve ever seen is about somebody experiencing this intense sense of merging with something, giving themselves away to something—a mission, a cause, a family, a nation, or a beloved. In the movie Casablanca, for example, the hero, Rick, has had his heart covered over. But love