from The White Album (2)

There are people walking around with no souls. I don’t know. They just don’t have them. You just know. Like… they were born without them, or whether they’ve lost them, who can say. You can lose your soul. Fear. Laziness. Lack of love. Over-eating. Bad luck. Any of these things can make it break apart and gradually… I can even tell you where it goes.

Do you know where the perineum is? It’s this little spot between your asshole and your balls. If you’re a guy. If you’re a girl, it’s between your asshole and your pussy. You can feel it—it’s a little bulge, a little pocket of muscles.

At any rate, the soul, you know, is not this ghostly thing rattling around inside you. It’s actually outside you. And inside. That’s the one bible verse I read that I found myself nodding along to: “The kingdom of heaven is inside you, and it is outside you.” I can’t remember where it’s from.

The part of the soul I’m talking about rests on top of you like an extra layer above your skin. It’s very thin and very large. If it was spread out flat it would cover—I don’t know. A lot. You can see it if you want to, if you know what to look for.

On some people it’s very thin, very faint. On some people it’s begun breaking up, like piebald, you know? Patches of it are missing. If you lie down at night you can feel it seeping away, through the perineum. It happens in the middle of the night, very early, like between three and four a.m.

In fact, if you find yourself waking up a lot at that time, that’s probably what’s happening. You can feel it right there. It might itch a little. It’s a terrible feeling, for sure. You’ve just woken up from a nightmare, probably. That’s your body trying to warn you about your soul.

Okay, but the good news is there’s these people going around who can help you. I’m not talking about evangelists or preachers per se, but they could be that—they could be anybody. Really they are angels; they are people, really, but for a moment or two they are angels, they have the power of angels if you open yourself to them and listen.

I mean, it could be the person in line behind you at the grocery store. Most often, probably, it’s a bum or a street person like us, because we’re the most open and available for the angels to use. I can see that you’re not really following me.

Think of it like this: You must have had an encounter with someone where you thought, ‘There’s something weird going on here. This person seems to know me, without having to say a word.’ Maybe you start talking. Maybe you just look at each other and laugh. Maybe all you do is look—even for just a second or two—if you’re open to it, that’s all it takes.

You might even have been an angel for somebody else, sometime. You wouldn’t know. Only they’d know. It doesn’t sound like much, but that’s the type of thing that can keep you going. That’s how you can get your soul back, if you’ve lost it. Little by little, by degrees. Maybe it will never be as big as it once was, enough to cover your whole body. But it’ll be something.