A certain kind of courage is required to follow what truly calls to us; why else would so many choose to live within false certainties and pretensions of security? If genuine treasures were easy to find this world would be a different place. If the path of dreams were easy to walk or predictable to follow many more would go that route. The truth is that most prefer the safer paths in life even if they know that their souls are called another way.

What truly calls to us is beyond what we know or can measure. It uses the language of hidden treasures and distant cities to awaken something sleeping within us. The soul knows that we must be drawn out of ourselves in order to truly become ourselves. Call it a dream or “the treasure hard to attain;” call it a vocation or the awakening of one’s innate genius. Call it what you will, upon hearing the call we must follow or else lose the true thread of our lives.

A true vocation requires shedding anything that would impede or obscure the call. A true pilgrimage requires letting go of the very things most people try to hold onto. In seeking after what the soul desires we become pilgrims with no home but the path the soul would have us follow. As the old proverb says, “Before you begin the journey, you own the journey. Once you have begun, the journey owns you.” After all, what good is a dream that doesn’t test the mettle of the dreamer?

"What good is a path that doesn’t carry us to the edge of our capacity and then beyond that place? A true calling involves a great exposure before it can become a genuine refuge."

In the soul’s adventure we become a self unknown, a self unexpected, and in that way we find the greater self within us. Answering the call gives primacy to unknown places and foreign lands; it requires that we seek farther in the world than we would choose on our own. We enter our essential “creatureliness” and learn to sniff at the world again. We learn to read the wind and find our way by sensing and intuiting, by imagining and by dreaming on. Eventually, the dream of the soul becomes the only hope; it becomes a prayer and a map as well. In allowing the journey to “have us” we become lost; we lose our usual selves in order to find our original self again. Lost souls are the only ones who ever get found.

Meanwhile, in order to get a toehold in life most people follow plans made by others. Most people follow maps that have been made by others in order to avoid getting lost in life. They forget the old proverb that states: “It is better to be lost than to follow a map made by tourists.” Those who fail to find and follow the dream of their life remain but tourists in this world, visitors who never fully buy into the essence of the life they have been given. The real adventures in life begin where and when we step off the beaten paths and enter unmarked territories.

Most educational paths simply follow where others have gone, most careers aim at obvious goals. Yet the soul has its own essential agreement with life and its own course to follow. The design set in the soul has more value in the long run than any plan cooked up by one’s ego or career sanctioned by one’s culture. Meanwhile, life arranges things so that all of us, young or old, eventually arrive at a point in time where the map we have been given does not match the territory we find ourselves in.

We are each called to an adventure that we cannot control and would best surrender to. We live on the edge of an errand that the divine sent us on and that our dreams try to indicate. Such a soulful errand necessarily involves a long road with twists and turns that can’t be anticipated. Many things are lost along the way; especially we must lose any fixed notions about ourselves and about the true nature of this world. The reason for undertaking the soul’s adventure is to become completely other than who we have been so far.

The greater life requires that we shed the false self that is fashioned simply for allowing us to fit in and get along. So the map of self-discovery leads away from the goal before ever turning to it. Until we become properly lost we have no way of knowing why we are alive.

"We must go missing to be found, become lost in the world, washed in the unknown, wrapped in confusion and hidden even from ourselves before we can find what we are truly aimed at."

If we could arrive in the same condition as when we departed, there would be no reason to go. If the genuine way was simple and straightforward, no vision would be required, no dream would be needed and no one’s soul would be truly tested. If we could go directly there, there would be no there when we arrive there. Everyone would set out and arrive directly; no need to have one’s assumptions defeated or one’s illusions shattered. Point A would simply lead to point B and we would arrive just as we were when we began. That may be the desired effect when making regular travel plans, but it can’t be the aim when seeking a greater life.

People say that what we seek to find in the world already resides in ourselves; there’s truth in that, yet only after reaching some extreme limit can we locate what we carry all along. The necessary resources may lie within, yet we must go far out into the world before we learn how to trust what resides within. What we search for is both part of us and other to us; it is an “other that is also us,” an “other self” that is the true self hidden within us. Before we can learn the other within us, we must experience the otherness around us. The hardest thing to trust in this world tends to be our own self.

— Michael Meade, “Fate and Destiny”