think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last….A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
If you look at world history or current events, you see how often events are driven by our need to feel morally justified, our need to feel righteous and to offer care, and unfortunately our need to assign guilt and feel morally superior. The moral drive explains so much that is good in the world and, when it is twisted by the desire to feel superior, so much that is evil.
The odd thing about the soul is that while it is powerful and resilient, it is also reclusive. You can go years without really feeling the force of its yearning. You are enjoying the pleasures of life, building your career. It’s amazing how untroubled you can be, year after year, while your soul is out there somewhere far away.
But eventually it hunts you down. In this way the soul is like a reclusive leopard living high up in the mountain forest somewhere. You may forget about him for long stretches. You are busy with the normal mundane activities of life, and the leopard is up in the mountains. But from time to time out of the corner of your eye, you glimpse the leopard, just off in the distance, trailing you through the tree trunks.
There are spare moments when you vaguely or even urgently feel his presence. This can happen agonizingly, in the middle of one of those sleepless nights, when your thoughts come, as one poet puts it, like a drawer full of knives. There’s trouble in your soul, and it keeps you awake.
The leopard can visit during one of those fantastic moments with friends or family—when you look out at the laughing faces of your own children across a picnic table on some perfect summer day, and you are overwhelmed by gratitude. In those moments, you feel called to be worthy of such undeserved happiness, and the soul sort of swells with joy.
And then there are moments, maybe more toward middle or old age, when the leopard comes down out of the hills and just sits there in the middle of your doorframe. He stares at you, inescapably. He demands your justification. What good have you served? For what did you come? What sort of person have you become? There are no excuses at that moment. Everybody has to throw off the mask.
A FORTUNATE FALL
In the valley, if you are fortunate, you learn to see yourself as a whole person. You learn you are not just a brain and a set of talents to impress the world, but a heart and soul—primarily heart and soul. Now everything you do for the rest of your life is likely to be testimony to that reality.
When you ask people what experience made them the person they are, they never say, “I really was a shallow and selfish jerk until I went on that amazing vacation in Hawaii.” No, people usually talk about moments of difficulty, struggle. The British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge put it bluntly, maybe a little too bluntly: “I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my 75 years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained.”
The reason transformation happens in the valley is because something that had hitherto been useful and pleasant needs to die. That thing is the ego self, the impressive rational way of being we constructed for ourselves on the first mountain. People develop this ego self so they can perform the tasks of the first mountain: to bull your way into the world, get a job, make your mark, build an identity. But there is a deeper self underneath that can’t be seen unless the ego self falls away.
For Nathaniel Hawthorne it took a serious illness and a confrontation with death to blast him out of his ego ideal. “My fit of illness had been an avenue between two existences,” he wrote, “the low-arched and darksome doorway, through which I crept out of a life of old conventionalisms, on my hands and