A conversation on why opening your soul is irreversible
Some things cannot be unmixed. Pour milk into coffee and you have a new substance, and nothing will separate them again. Nobody had to make that a rule. It follows from what milk and coffee are.
The same thing happens when you open your intimacy to another person. Your souls mix, and they cannot be unmixed.
The lost word
We used to have a word for what you open when you open your intimacy. The word was soul.
Then the study of the soul, psyche in Greek, became the study of the mind. Psychology reduced something infinite to something measurable. A soul could be mysterious and sacred. A mind could be studied, optimized, and medicated. Once we accepted that demotion, the next step followed. If humans are minds, then humans are machines, controllable systems with inputs and outputs.
But you are not a machine.
When two souls entangle, they mix, the way coffee and milk in a latte behave as one. You can’t separate the milk from the coffee afterward.
Dirt in the cup
Protect your soul. Not everything belongs in it.
Nobody wants dirt in their coffee. But sometimes we get confused and let dirt in. Confusing you is the only thing evil can do to you. Evil cannot create or build. It can only confuse.
Trace any sin back far enough and you find a confusion. You couldn’t see clearly, so you mistook what was good, or you mistook yourself for God. The original sin was this confusion. The ego confused itself with the divine, and everything fractured from there.
If you knew the Truth fully and without distortion, you would have acted differently and kept the dirt out.
Repentance
But we do get confused, and dirt gets in.
Repentance is looking at the cup, recognizing the dirt, and no longer adding more. It happens more than once. Each time you notice something foreign in the mixture, you say, this does not belong here.
John the Baptist preached metanoia, Greek for a change of mind, the word our Bibles translate as repentance.
Without repentance, you leave the door to your soul open and keep pouring in confusion. Eventually you get lost, and then you risk losing your soul altogether.
With too much dirt in the cup, you can’t have a good latte anymore.
You can’t unmix, you can only overflow
A Zen story, collected in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, has a professor come to the Japanese master Nan-in with a mind already full of opinions. Nan-in pours tea into the professor’s cup and keeps pouring after it is full, until it runs over the table. “Like this cup,” he says, “you are full of your own opinions. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”
The soul works the same way. Nan-in cannot reach into the professor and take the opinions out. He can only keep pouring. If the water in your cup is cloudy, you cannot pick the dirt out. You can put the cup under a spring. Let clean water keep flowing in, and the dirt slowly overflows until the water clears.
You are finite. The divine flow is infinite.
That asymmetry is your hope.
With a cloudy soul you cannot see clearly, and you will stumble again. If you choose to receive Truth from the infinite source, it slowly displaces the confusion. That is less your own effort than what flows through you.
The stirring
The Bible gives no instructions for a marriage ritual. It gives a description, the two become one flesh. That describes a mixture, not a ceremony.
Coffee and milk have one more property. Left alone, the mixture separates as gravity pulls them apart.
So you stir it, on purpose, every day.
If you choose the mixture of souls, commit to it, and treat it as one thing, you can enrich it on purpose. Add cinnamon or sugar. Make it something neither ingredient could have been alone. Stirring does more than keep the mixture from separating. It makes something new.
Sin starts in the heart
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said something most people would rather not hear. Sin begins in the heart before it appears in action. Anger already takes part in murder, and lust already takes part in adultery. Thoughts and actions are not identical in every practical sense, but evil is born inside a person before it ripens into what they do.
An old saying puts it this way. Nobody knows who said it first, and it gets pinned on Laozi and on half a dozen others with no evidence for any of them.
Watch your thoughts, they become your words;
watch your words, they become your actions;
watch your actions, they become your habits;
watch your habits, they become your character;
watch your character, it becomes your destiny.
Consider what this means for someone who has had many partners. The memories stay. Images of you with someone else come back uninvited. You also carry expectations of attitudes that only other partners could provide. Each memory brings foreign thoughts to the mind and impossible expectations to the heart, and both stir dirt into the shared cup. You don’t choose this or intend it, but the cup gets cloudy anyway.
There are only two reasons to open your soul: to let the divine stream flow through you, and to entangle fully with a partner for a lifetime. Every other opening added dirt you will carry.
The truest repentance
If you listened to the schools, the media, and the street, you heard one message. Open your intimacy freely, experiment widely, and commit only after you’ve tried enough. The culture called this wisdom. It was confusion, and now you carry the dirt.
Modern people confuse regret with repentance. Regret looks back and feels bad. Guilt looks inward and feels stuck. Neither changes anything. Repentance, metanoia, looks up and turns. It is a decision to stop adding dirt and put the cup back under the spring, not a feeling.
The deepest act of love a modern husband can offer his wife is to repent of every other woman he was with. The same holds for a wife.
It has to be repentance, not abstract regret about the past. Those past mixtures still pour confusion into the one cup that matters, whether you want them to or not. The dirt keeps falling in from memories you didn’t protect yourself from. You repent because it was wrong then and because it still costs you both today.
Overflow, choose, stir, protect
The grace is that a lifetime of stirring and overflowing beats the short season of passion that put the dirt there. The cup can get clearer every year, and the mixture richer with each deliberate choice. Confusion broke something, and it can be redeemed slowly. You don’t erase the past. You flood it with something truer.
That is why opening your soul to another person is the most consequential thing you can do. It cannot be unmixed. Choose carefully, then stir, and protect the cup every day.
It isn’t easy. In fallen nature, faithful marriage is so improbable that the natural is not enough. You want the supernatural. That’s why a happy, faithful marriage requires a miracle.