Most of us would like to hide the fact that we’re dissatisfied at the soul level, but privately, we do well to sit up and take notice.
Dissatisfaction is the heart telling the head that it knows something that the head is missing. The heart is the soul, which impresses through the intuition. The head is the self-image, which is all about catering to the fact-hungry intellect.
This week I was talking to a new friend who observed: “So much of what I’m hearing through so-called truth teachers seems contrived and shallow.”
“That’s because they’re ‘parroting’ something they’ve heard from someone else,” I said, “not something they’ve discovered themselves.”
“Okay. I’ll get there someday,” he said
“You’re already there,” I said. “Otherwise, you couldn’t recognize the ‘contrived and shallow’ thing.”
Eyebrows raised. Skepticism filled the face I was looking at. I’ve grown accustomed to that look.
We don’t trust ourselves. Someone or something “out there” is the authority that will satisfy our need to know. But what, exactly, is driving this need to know?
One person keeps sending me quotes from A Course in Miracles, obviously hoping to enlighten me with ideas that did not originate with her. Only God knows where these ideas came from. I’ve had others remind me of Unity’s basic teachings, which I once agreed to represent verbatim, but now, not so much.
The soul is not confined to any system. What is meaningful to you on your spiritual birthday – that discovery you made that changed the course of your thinking, your very life – is but the tip of the iceberg of the full truth. But this awakening was your soul standing at the finish line, calling you forth, beckoning you to leave your old ways and set out on a line of thought that resonated with what your soul already knew to be true.
What appears to be the joy of discovery is really the satisfaction of recovery. You are recovering the truth that has been strangled by incessant body maintenance, cultural compliance, wandering in a world that believes its highest good comes packaged in some form of matter, title, or accomplishment. Despite the heavy weight of these influences, you have always known the truth when you hear it. You have the ears to hear and the eyes to see. This is not some frail, half-baked entity struggling to make itself known. It is your soul, the most powerful force in your life that will not let you rest or wander past some imagined point of no return.
We sell ourselves short by thinking our inspiration comes from others. These only confirm what we already know. They just had the courage to say it. Our timidity does not diminish this robust, inner voice that called long before we answered. We could not honor this “prophet” from our own country, for we’ve been trained to think that the highest is not the nearest but the farthest, somewhere over that distant horizon we never quite reach.
A sincere inquiry into the headwaters of dissatisfaction will lead you, not to that ever-growing list of things you do not have, but to that which you already have but insist on ignoring. Every moment you cast your net into the sea and gather fish of every kind. From these you sort the good from the unusable, the true from the false. Credit yourself for knowing the difference.
You’re not simply adding to a stockpile of accumulated ideas you cling to because they make you feel good. You are choosing from that very self that is already complete, and whose sole priority has always been to express this completeness through all that concerns you.
J Douglas Bottorff 
“A sincere inquiry into the headwaters of dissatisfaction will lead you, not to that ever-growing list of things you do not have, but to that which you already have but insist on ignoring…Credit yourself for knowing the difference.”
A friend of mine who attends a Unity church in another part of the state told me in an email today that her pastor does not stand close enough to the microphone, and she cannot hear most of what he says. “It is not because I have poor hearing, and I am not the only one,” she went on. Then she added, “I guess I will hear WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO HEAR.” (Caps mine.)
I was floored! I replied that I thought the pastor needed to know that some people cannot hear him, including her.
Not sure that this has any connection to the spiritual dissatisfaction you are talking about, but I’m afraid that my friend does not have enough to know the difference between what she receives and what she OUGHT to receive, and whose permission she thinks she needs, I am not sure.
Unfortunately, this type of skewed logic is not unusual. I encountered it frequently when I was reviewing cases against our ministers. A minister would be falsely accused of something and the review team would say something like, “What in your consciousness do you suppose brought this about?” When the minister would defend themselves, the review would be expanded because they were obviously “defensive,” even “combative.” I too was branded “combative” because I dared call them out on this type of nonsense.
There has always been an element within New Thought that is pretty flakey. This type of logic you are questioning could have easily originated from your friend’s pulpit. Her’s is not spiritual dissatisfaction, but a physical issue with an easy solution. That she chooses to see it in this manner is a different kind of problem, but also with an easy solution.
As always, thanks for your input.
Thank you for another welcome post! Ever the Prodigal, we wander into a far country until we “come to our self” and return to that Source which has never abandoned us – the Soul. The Quakers have always held that the “inner Light,” our true spiritual heritage, can be accessed directly in ‘the silence.’ As H. Emilie Cady writes in Lessons in Truth, “At the great heart of humanity there is a deep and awful homesickness that never has been and never can be satisfied with anything less than a clear, vivid consciousness of the indwelling presence of God., our Father.”
Cady is on the mark with that statement. And as Jacob realized, we’re in the house of God but did not know it. Thanks again for your input.