Prior to reading The Seat of the Soul, I suffered from the disease to please. Like millions of people, most of them women, I was a slave to the needs, wants, and desires of others. I would say yes when I seriously wanted to say no. I would give precious time and energy, money, gifts—whatever was asked—simply to avoid the possibility of upsetting someone. I once flew from Chicago to Spain, appeared onstage for less than forty-five seconds at a friend’s charity benefit, then got back on a plane and flew straight to work to do my show—all because I didn’t know how to say no. To this day, I couldn’t even tell you what the charity event was for.
My breakthrough was recognizing that my intention to be liked was causing all the requests. Cause and effect. If your intention is to do what other people want, they will keep asking you to do exactly that. That was an aha moment! When I changed my intention to be about doing what I wanted, what I felt was worthy of my time, the effect automatically changed.
While writing my first book, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, I discovered—to my complete surprise—inspiration that came from beyond my mind, nonphysical intelligences that I could not articulate, and the electricity of creating consciously with constructive intent. I had never experienced anything like this. I loved these experiences, but, for the most part, I forgot about them after the book was finished.
The Seat of the Soul brought remarkable people into my life. Two of them in particular touched me more deeply than I could have imagined and continue to support me in ways that thrill and surprise me.
1 Evolution
We were taught, in other words, that evolution means the progressive development of organizational complexity.
“Survival of the fittest” means that the most evolved organism in a given environment is the organism that is at the top of the food chain in that environment. According to this definition, therefore, the organism that is most able to ensure its own survival, most able to serve its self-preservation, is the most evolved. We have long known that this definition of evolution is inadequate, but we have not known why. When two humans engage one another, they are, in terms of organizational complexity, equally evolved.
Jesus, we are told, foresaw the plot against His life, even to the details of how His friends would act and react, yet He did not run from what He saw. The entirety of humankind has been inexorably shaped by the power and love of One who gave His life for others. All who revere Him, and almost all who but know His story, agree that He was one of the most evolved of our species. Our deeper understanding tells us that a truly evolved being is one that values others more than it values itself, and that values love more than it values the physical world and what is in it.
We see that when the activities of life are infused with reverence, they come alive with meaning and purpose. We see that when reverence is lacking from life’s activities, the result is cruelty, violence, and loneliness. The physical arena is a magnificent learning environment. It is a school within which, through experimentation, we come to understand what causes us to expand and what causes us to contract, what causes us to grow and what causes us to shrivel, what nourishes our souls and what depletes them, what works and what does not.
When the physical environment is seen only from the five-sensory point of view, physical survival appears to be the fundamental criterion of evolution because no other kind of evolution is detectable. It is from this point of view that “survival of the fittest” appears to be synonymous with evolution, and physical dominance appears to characterize advanced evolution. When perception of the physical world is limited to the five-sensory modality, the basis of life in the physical arena becomes fear. Power to control the environment, and those within the environment appears to be essential.
Families, like cultures, are patriarchal or matriarchal. One person “wears the pants.” Children learn this early, and it shapes their lives.
Police departments, like the military, are produced by the perception of power as external. Badge, boots, rank, radio, uniform, weapons, and armor are symbols of fear. Those who wear them are fearful. They fear to engage the world without defenses. Those who encounter these symbols are fearful. They fear the power that these symbols represent, or they fear those whom they expect this power to contain, or they fear both. The police and the military, like patriarchal and matriarchal families and cultures, are not origins of the perception of power as external. They are reflections of the way that we, as a species and as individuals, have come to view power.
Competition for external power lies at the heart of all violence. The secondary gain behind ideological conflicts, such as capitalism versus communism, and religious conflicts, such as Irish Catholic versus Irish Protestant, and geographical conflicts, such as Jew versus Arab, and familial and marital conflicts, is external power. The perception of power as external splinters the psyche, whether it is the psyche of the individual, the community, the nation, or the world. There is no difference between acute schizophrenia and a world at war. There is no difference between the agony of a splintered soul and the agony of a splintered nation. When a husband and a wife compete for power, they engage the same dynamic that humans of one race do when they fear humans of another race.
Authentic power has its roots in the deepest source of our being. Authentic power cannot be bought, inherited, or hoarded. An authentically empowered person is incapable of making anyone or anything a victim. An authentically empowered person is one who is so strong, so empowered, that the idea of using force against another is not a part of his or her consciousness.
We are evolving from five-sensory humans into multisensory humans. Our five senses, together, form a single sensory system that is designed to perceive physical reality. The perceptions of a multisensory human extend beyond physical reality to the larger dynamical systems of which our physical reality is a part.
The decisions that you make and the actions that you take upon the Earth are the means by which you evolve. At each moment you choose the intentions that will shape your experiences and those things upon which you will focus your attention. These choices affect your evolutionary process. This is so for each person. If you choose unconsciously, you evolve unconsciously. If you choose consciously, you evolve consciously. The fearful and violent emotions that have come to characterize human existence can be experienced only by the personality. Only the personality can feel anger, fear, hatred, vengeance, sorrow, shame, regret, indifference, frustration, cynicism, and loneliness. Only the personality can judge, manipulate and exploit. Only the personality can pursue external power. The personality can also be loving, compassionate, and wise in its relations with others, but love, compassion, and wisdom do not come from the personality. They are experiences of the soul.
2 Karma
The lifetime of your personality is one of a myriad of experiences of your soul. The soul exists outside of time. The perspective of the soul is immense, and the perception of the soul is without the limitations of the personality. Souls that have chosen the physical experience of life as we know it as a path of evolution, have, in general, incarnated their energies many times into many psychological and physical forms. For each incarnation, the soul creates a different personality and body. The personality and the body that, for the five-sensory human, are the experiential entirety of its existence, are, for its soul, the unique and perfectly suited instruments of a particular incarnation.
The incarnation of a soul is a massive reduction of the power of the soul to a scale that is appropriate to a physical form. It is a reduction of an immortal Life system into the framework of time and the span of a few years. It is the reduction of a perceptual system that partakes simultaneously, through direct experience, of countless lifetimes, some of them physical and some of them nonphysical, to the five physical senses. The soul chooses, voluntarily, to undertake this experience in order to heal. The personality is those parts of the soul that require healing, along with those parts of the soul, such as compassion and love, that the soul has lent to the process of healing in that lifetime. The splintered aspects of the soul, the aspects that require healing, need to interact in physical matter so that each part of the splinteredness can become whole. The personality is like a complex mandala that is formed from these splintered parts in addition to the parts that are not splintered. It comes directly from the parts of the soul that the soul has chosen to work on in this lifetime to heal, that need to experience physical matter, and those parts that the soul has given to the process of healing in which you are involved.
The harmonious personality is one in which the soul flows easily through the part of itself that is in touch with its physical incarnation. The soul is. It has no beginning and no end but flows toward wholeness. The personality emerges as a natural force from the soul. It is an energy tool that the soul adapts to function within the physical world.
is the persona of the soul, so to speak, that interacts with physical matter. It is a product that is formed from the vibrational aspect of your name, the vibrational aspect of your relationship to planets at the time of your incarnation, and vibrational aspects of your energy environment, as well as from the splintered aspects of your soul that need to interact in physical matter in order to be brought into wholeness.
It is the result of the personality being unable to find its reference point, or connection, to its mothership, which is its soul. The conflicts of a human’s life are directly proportional to the distance at which an energy of personality exists separately from the soul, and, therefore, as we shall see, in an irresponsible position of creation. When a personality is in full balance, you cannot see where it ends and the soul begins. That is a whole human being. What is involved in the healing of a soul? Most of us are accustomed to the idea that we are responsible for some of our actions, but not all of them.
Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect. If we participate in the cause, it is not possible for us not to participate in the effect. In this most profound way, we are held responsible for our every action, thought, and feeling, which is to say, for our every intention. We, ourselves, shall partake of the fruit of our every intention. It is, therefore, wise for us to become aware of the many intentions that inform our experience, to sort out which intentions produce which effects, and to choose our intentions according to the effects that we desire to produce.
Within physical reality, the dynamic of karma is reflected by the third law of motion: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In other words, the great law of karma that governs the balancing of energy within our evolutionary system is reflected within the domain of physical objects and phenomena by the last of three principles, three laws of motion, that govern the balancing of energy within physical reality. The law of karma is an impersonal energy dynamic. When its effects are personalized, that is, experienced from the point of view of the personality, they are experienced as a reversal in the direction, a coming back to the intender, of the energy of his or her intention. This is how the personality experiences the impersonal dynamic that is described by the third law as an “equal and opposite reaction.” The person who intends hatred for others experiences the intention of hatred from others. The person who intends love for others experiences the intention of love from others, and so forth. The Golden Rule is a behavioral guide that is based upon the dynamic of karma. A personalized statement of karma would be, “You receive from the world what you give to the world.” Karma is not a moral dynamic. Morality is a human creation. The Universe does not judge. The law of karma governs the balancing of energy within our system of morality and within those of our neighbors. It serves humanity as an impersonal and Universal teacher of responsibility.
Therefore, without knowledge of its soul, reincarnation, and karma, it is not always possible for a personality to understand the significance or the meaning of the events of its life, or to understand the effects of its responses to them.
In order to become whole, the soul must balance its energy. It must experience the effects that it has caused. The energy imbalances in the soul are the incomplete parts of the soul that form the personality. Personalities in interaction are souls that are seeking to heal. Whether an interaction between souls is healing or not depends upon whether the personality involved can see beyond itself and that of the other personality to the interaction of their souls. This perception automatically draws forth compassion. Every experience, and every interaction, provides you with an opportunity to look from the point of view of your soul or from the point of view of your personality. What does this mean in practical terms? How does a personality begin to look beyond itself and to see its soul in interaction with the souls of others? Since we cannot know what is being healed through each interaction—what karmic debts are coming to conclusion—we cannot judge what we see.
If we intervene in an argument, or break up a fight, it is not appropriate that we judge the participants. Of one thing we can be certain: A person that is engaging in violence is hurting deeply, because a healthy and balanced soul is incapable of harming another.
The Christ did not judge even those who spit in His face, and who subjected Him without mercy to His pain and humiliation. He asked forgiveness, not vengeance, for those who tortured Him. Did neither the Christ nor Gandhi know the meaning of justice? They knew non-judgmental justice. What is non-judgmental justice?
Non-judgmental justice is a perception that allows you to see everything in life, but does not engage your negative emotions. Non-judgmental justice relieves you of the self-appointed job of judge and jury because you know that everything is being seen—nothing escapes the law of karma—and this brings forth understanding and compassion. Non-judgmental justice is the freedom of seeing what you see and experiencing what you experience without responding negatively. It allows you to experience directly the unobstructed flow of the intelligence, radiance, and love of the Universe of which our physical reality is a part. Non-judgmental justice flows naturally from understanding the soul and how it evolves. This, then, is the framework of our evolutionary process: the continual incarnation and reincarnation of the energy of the soul into physical reality for the purposes of healing and balancing its energy in accordance with the law of karma. Within this framework we evolve, as individuals and as a species, through the cycle of being unempowered to becoming empowered, yet the experiences that we encounter in this process need not be the kind that we have encountered to now.
3 Reverence
When our actions create discord in another person, we, ourselves, in this lifetime or in another, will feel that discord. Likewise, if our actions create harmony and empowerment in another, we also will come to feel that harmony and empowerment. This allows us to experience the effects of what we have created, and thereby to learn to create responsibly. The framework of karma and reincarnation is impersonal, and provides for each soul, in response to the actions of its personalities, the experiences that it requires in order to evolve. Therefore, the orientation, or the attitude, with which a personality approaches the evolutionary process determines the nature of the experiences that will be required for the evolution of its soul. An angry personality, for example, will respond to the difficulties of its life with anger, and thereby bring into being the necessity of experiencing the results of anger; a sorrowful personality will respond sorrowfully and bring into being the necessity of experiencing the results
Thus, a person who is reverent will automatically be spared the severe karmic consequences of one who is not.
We justify our exploitation of Life upon what we perceive to be the design of Nature. We maim and kill. We create situations in which millions of people starve while we store grain in silos and pour milk down drains. We look upon each other as prey to satisfy our emotional and physical needs. We say, “It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” and that to survive in it we must take advantage of others before they take advantage of us. We look upon Life as a contest that produces winners and losers, and we feel no restraints upon us when the needs of other people or other groups threaten us.
Reverence is engaging in a form and a depth of contact with Life that is well beyond the shell of form and into essence. Reverence is contact with the essence of each thing and person and plant and bird and animal. It is contact with the interior of its beingness. Even if you cannot sense the interior, it is enough to know that the form, the shell, is merely an outer layer, and that underneath it the true power and essence of who a person is, or what a thing is, is present. That is what is honored in reverence.
Reverence is not respect. Respect is a judgment. It is a response to the perception of qualities that we ourselves admire, or have been taught to admire. Qualities that are admired by the people of one culture may not be admired by the people of another culture, or by the people of a subculture, or by another generation of the same culture. Therefore, what is respected by some people may not be respected by others. It is possible to respect one person and not respect another, but it is not possible to revere one person without revering every person. Reverence is a perception, but it is a holy perception.
The perception of reverence allows us to see the interdependency of different species from a more comprehensive and compassionate perspective. It allows us to see the significance of each living creature, and its experiences, to the compassionate unfolding of the Universe. This perspective is much less likely to create violent or destructive responses within us as we grow through our lives because it reveals in each moment the value of all Life.
Because we have no reverence, our journey to empowerment often includes the experiences of victimizing life. Therefore, there are victims and victimizers. The process of destroying Life while we are learning about Life that has characterized our evolution would cease, or at least would be very different, if we approached Life with a quality of reverence.
Yet, to the multisensory human, a reverent businessman or businesswoman is a person who infuses a new energy into the archetype of entrepreneur, shifting it from a dynamic that is motivated by profits that are generated by serving others to a dynamic of serving others that is made possible by profits, and a reverent politician is a person who challenges the concept of external power, and brings to the political arena the concerns of the heart. Therefore, the decision to approach Life with reverence means acting and thinking as a spiritual person in a world that does not recognize spirit, and it means moving consciously toward the perceptions of the multisensory human.
Reverence permits non-judgmental justice. The soul does not judge, and so the personality chooses to bring into physical reality another of its soul’s characteristics when it chooses to approach Life with reverence. The reverent person cannot consider himself or herself superior to another person or to any other form of Life, because the reverent person sees Divinity in all forms of Life, and honors it. An attitude of reverence facilitates the transition from the logic and understanding of the five-sensory human to the higher order of logic and understanding of the multisensory human, because, as we shall see, this higher order of logic and understanding originates in the heart.
4 Heart
The central position of the heart in the higher order of logic and understanding of the multisensory human, and the sensitivity to emotional currents that is characteristic of multisensory humans, appear as extraneous to the five-sensory personality because they do not serve the accumulation of external power. As we have come to seek and wield external power consciously, we have come to view feelings as unnecessary appendages, like tonsils—useless, but capable of creating pain and dysfunction. Thus, the pursuit of external power has led to a repression of emotion. This is true of us as individuals and as a species. The irrelevancy that we attribute to feelings pervades our thinking and our values. We admire the “hard-nosed” businessman who fires employees for the sake of external power. We reward the military officer who sends himself or others to pain and death for the sake of external power. We honor the statesman who is not swayed by compassion.
When we close the door to our feelings, we close the door to the vital currents that energize and activate our thoughts and actions. We cannot begin the process of understanding the effects of our emotions upon us, our environment, and other people, or the effects of the emotions of other people upon themselves, their environment, and us. Without an awareness of our emotions, we cannot associate the effects of anger, sadness, grief, and joy—within ourselves or others—with their causes. We cannot distinguish between that part of us which is personality and that part of us which is soul. Without an awareness of our feelings we cannot experience compassion. How can we share the sufferings and the joys of others if we cannot experience our own?
Emotions reflect intentions. Therefore, awareness of emotions leads to awareness of intentions. Every discrepancy between a conscious intention and the emotions that accompany it points directly to a splintered aspect of the self that requires healing. If, for example, your intention to marry causes pain instead of joy, following the pain will lead you to unconscious intentions. If your intention to advance in your work causes sorrow instead of satisfaction, following the sorrow will lead you to unconscious intentions. Without an awareness of your emotions you are not able to experience reverence. Reverence is not an emotion. It is a way of being, but the path to reverence is through your heart, and only an awareness of your feelings can open your heart.
Science, for example, reflects the Divine impulse to become conscious of relationships that connect apparently separate aspects of experience. It is the pinnacle achievement of the five-sensory personality, yet when the fruits of science are grasped only with the logic and understanding of the five-sensory human, internal dynamics—feelings and intentions—appear to be unrelated to the world of matter. Neither supernovas nor subatomic decay rates nor anything in between appear to be affected by what human beings feel or think. When the discoveries of science are comprehended with the logic and understanding of the multisensory human, intimate relationships appear between internal dynamics and regularities that govern physical phenomena. To the multisensory human, for example, “A body in uniform motion will remain in uniform motion until it is acted upon by a force,” reflects not only a dynamic at work within the realm of time and space and matter, but also a deeper dynamic that works within nonphysical reality as well.
He made arrangements to live in solitude while he searched within himself for the deepest causes of his painful life. When he emerged, weeks later, both his perceptions and his values had changed. He began to soften, and, slowly, his old mannerisms dropped away. Over the following years he developed a more sensitive way of being with people. His cynicism gave way to an emerging joy, his anger melted, and other people became central to his life. He is a productive person now, and he draws his strength from the contributions that he makes to his fellows. These changes did not come easily to Gregory. His transition from an angry, manipulative, disdainful person to a more caring and considerate person was a journey through pain that required much courage.
In other words, from the point of view of the multisensory human, the discoveries of science illuminate both inner and outer experiences, physical and nonphysical dynamics. A foundational discovery of optics, for example, is that white and black are not colors, like blue, green, and red. White is a combination of all the colors of the visible spectrum of light, and black is the absence of that spectrum. In other words, white is an integration of all the visible forms of radiance, and black is an absence of radiance. What nonphysical dynamics does this discovery illuminate? In European literature, white is associated with purity, goodness, and rightness. It is the symbol of positive and protective energy. Heroes and heroines dress in white. God’s messengers and Heaven are associated with white. Angels are painted in robes of white. Black is associated with evil. Villains wear black. Black is the symbol of destruction. The day that catastrophe strikes is called a black day. Black represents despair, anger, and rage, which are absences of love, compassion, and forgiveness. A person who feels these things is said to be in a black mood.
“Dark Ages” are said to be a time when the “light of reason” was absent. The suffering of a splintered psyche, a psyche without radiance, is called the “dark night of the soul.” The Devil is called the Prince of Darkness, and Hell is said to be a place where the Light of God does not reach. Is the perception of white as an integration, or a completion, and black as an absence, therefore, limited in accuracy or applicability to the physical phenomena of white light and blackness? No. Language, mythology, religion, and science of the West each recognize in white a reflection of integration, or wholeness, or completion, and in black a reflection of the absence of this. The multisensory personality sees directly that each of these ways of understanding reflects the same thing. The five-sensory personality cannot see in this way, and, therefore, its logics and understandings are not as comprehensive. The nature of wholeness and the lack of it, and the effects of each, are not discernible through the study of physical phenomena to a personality that is not able to see that both physical phenomena and the relationships between them are simultaneously parts of and reflections of larger patterns of life.
A personality with limitations of consciousness will find what we call evil more attractive than will one with a more expanded awareness. The temptation to walk that way will be strong for such a personality. All souls are tempted, but an individual with limitations of consciousness will find it more attractive to walk into the magnetic field of fear because it would not recognize fear for what it is. It would accept it as something else, as something that is normal to Life. How we understand evil, therefore, is very significant. Evil needs to be understood for what it is: the dynamic of the absence of Light. It is not something that one should prepare to battle, to run from, or to outlaw. Understanding evil as the absence of Light automatically requires that we reach for this thing called Light. Conscious Light is equal to Divinity, to Divine Intelligence.
Understanding that evil is the absence of Light does not mean that it is inappropriate to respond to evil. What is the appropriate response to evil? The remedy for an absence is a presence. Evil is an absence and, therefore, it cannot be healed with an absence. By hating evil, or one who is engaged in evil, you contribute to the absence of Light and not to its presence. Hatred of evil does not diminish evil, it increases it. The absence of Light causes the personality to suffer. There is pain. When you hate, you bring that suffering upon yourself. Hatred of evil affects the one who hates. It makes him or her a hateful person, a person who also has absented himself or herself from Light.
5 Intuition
The central perception of the multisensory human is that he or she is not alone. The multisensory human does not need to rely solely upon his or her own perceptions and interpretations of events for guidance, because he or she is in conscious communication with other, more advanced intelligences. This does not mean that the multisensory human is relieved thereby from choosing, in each instant, the course of his or her life, but it does mean that the multisensory human has conscious access to compassionate and impersonal help in the analysis of his or her possible choices, their probable consequences, and in the exploration of the different parts of himself or herself. The five-sensory human is not alone either, but the five-sensory human is not aware of the assistance that is continually being given to him or her, and, therefore, cannot draw upon that assistance consciously. The five-sensory human must learn primarily through his or her physical experiences, and this learning takes longer because lessons that are learned in this way must come through the density of physical matter. A person that needs to learn the lesson of trust, for example, will experience a distrust of others. This distrust will create misunderstandings, and these will lead to tensions and unpleasant experiences. A five-sensory human will continue to experience the unpleasantnesses that result from his or her distrust of others until, in this lifetime or another, he or she realizes through interactions with others the source of these unpleasantnesses and takes steps to change it.
A multisensory human can learn more rapidly than a five-sensory human. With the help that is available to it, the multisensory personality can understand more quickly the meaning of its experiences, how they come into being, what they represent, and its role in creating them. It does not need to experience twelve or twenty or two hundred painful experiences to learn a major lesson of trust, or responsibility, or humbleness. This does not necessarily mean that multisensory personalities do not experience painful situations, but that they have the capability of learning more quickly from them than five-sensory personalities, and, therefore, are more quickly able to choose more wisely, and with more compassion.
The five-sensory personality accepts every impulse and insight as his or her own, as originating within his or her psyche. The multisensory personality knows that this is not always the case. Impulses, hunches, sudden insights, and subtle insights have assisted us on our evolutionary path since the origin of our species. That we have not
recognized the guidance that has come to us in this way is a consequence of seeing reality through only five senses. From the five-sensory point of view, there is no other place from which insights and hunches can come.
To the five-sensory personality, intuitions are curiosities. To the multisensory personality, they are promptings from, and links to, a perspective of greater comprehension and compassion than its own. To the five-sensory personality, intuitive insights, or hunches, occur unpredictably, and cannot be counted upon. To the multisensory personality, intuitive insights are registrations within its consciousness of a loving guidance that is continually assisting and supporting its growth. Therefore, the multisensory personality strives to increase its awareness of this guidance. The first step to this is becoming aware of what you are feeling. Following your feelings will lead you to their source. Only through emotions can you encounter the force field of your own soul. That is the human passage in a word.
Each question that a person asks, such as, “Why does news of this business meeting affect me this way?”, “Why do I feel so disturbed?”, and “Does my experience support my suspicion?”, invokes guidance. Every time you ask for guidance, you receive it. Every time you ask yourself, “What is my motivation?”, you ask the Universe, “Help me to see,” and help comes. You may not always be capable of hearing the answers to your questions when you ask them, and the answers may not always come in the ways that you expect, but they always come. Sometimes an answer occurs in the form of a feeling—a yes feeling or a no feeling—sometimes in the form of a memory, or a thought that, at the time, seems random, sometimes in a dream and sometimes in the form of a realization that is prompted by an experience that will occur the next day. No question is unheard, and no question goes unanswered. “Ask and you shall receive” is the rule, but you must learn how to ask and how to receive.
In a world of five-sensory humans that understand power as external, intuitive knowledge is not regarded as knowledge, and, therefore, it is not processed. It is not submitted to the intellect. It is not expanded or studied or made technical and disciplined.
The first of these is to honor emotional cleansing at all times. If you are emotionally blocked and you cannot, or you do not, know what you feel, or if you have blocked what you feel so effectively that you become emotionless, you become a negative person, and you also create a physically diseased body. By keeping your emotions clear, emotional negativity does not reside in you, and you become lighter and lighter. This opens your intuitive track because it allows you a clear sense of loving. It brings you closer to unconditional love and renders you harmless. It lightens the quality of your frequency, so to speak, and therefore the guidance that you receive is clear and unobstructed as it enters your system. This requires that you clear yourself each day of your emotional impacts. Just as you dispose of your physical body wastes and toxins, so, too, dispose of your emotional wastes and toxins by finishing emotionally unfinished business, by not going to bed in anger, by seeing that you do not feel contaminated emotionally, and by learning to work with and to honor your emotional currents of energy. The second is a cleansing nutritional program. Being physically toxic interferes with intuition. The third is to honor the guidance that you receive. Emotional and physical cleansing leads to intuition, and this leads to learning to respond. You must be willing to hear what your intuition says and act accordingly. Many people do not wish to hear what can be heard so easily, and, therefore, they deny that they hear anything. The fourth is to allow yourself an orientation of openness toward your life and the Universe, to approach the questions in your life with a sense of faith and trust that there is a reason for all that is happening, and that that reason, at its heart, is always compassionate and good. This is an essential thought that needs to be in place in order to activate and cultivate intuition.
Intuition also can permit the personality, through its higher self, to receive information from other souls of higher process, souls that are not its own soul. Sources of guidance other than your own higher self can come across on the same radio station, so to speak. This is not the same as an intuitive process. This is a process of receiving guidance through intuitive channels. Receiving information through intuitive channels is significantly different from receiving information through intuitive processes. Receiving information through intuitive processes is cooking at home. Receiving information through intuitive channels is ordering out.
What is truth? Truth is that which does not contaminate you, but empowers you. Therefore, there are degrees of truth, but, generically, truth is that which can do no harm. It cannot harm. Higher self connecting to nonphysical teachers produces a level of truth that is true not just for you, but that would be true for anyone who came into contact with
To the multisensory personality, it is unusual not to rely upon truths that it receives from its higher self and, through its higher self, from souls that are more advanced.
The multisensory personality is aware of its soul—it seeks to align itself with its soul, to become the physical embodiment of its higher self—and it consciously invokes and receives the loving assistance of its own soul and of other souls that assist it.
6 Light
The soul is not physical, yet it is the force field of your being. The higher self is not physical, yet it is the living template of the evolved human, the fully awakened personality.
Knowing in the cognitive sense cannot produce proof of nonphysical reality any more that it can produce proof of God. Proof of nonphysical reality does not exist in the dimension that the rational mind seeks it. Therefore, when you ask from the perspective of the five-sensory personality, “Does nonphysical reality exist?” what you really are asking is, “If I cannot prove the existence of nonphysical reality, do I decide that it is nonsensical? Do I decide that there is no answer, or do I expand myself to the level at which the answer can be given?”
Nonphysical reality is your home. You came from nonphysical reality, you will return to nonphysical reality, and the larger part of you currently resides in, and evolves in, nonphysical reality. The same is true for each of the billions of human beings upon this planet.
You are a system of Light, as are all beings. The frequency of your Light depends upon your consciousness. When you shift the level of your consciousness, you shift the frequency of your Light. If you choose to forgive someone who has wronged you, for example, rather than to hate that person, you shift the frequency of your Light. If you choose to feel affection, or kinship, with a person rather than distance or coldness, you shift the frequency of your Light. Emotions are currents of energy with different frequencies.
“Light” represents consciousness. When we do not understand a thing, we say that we must “bring it to light.” If we are confused, we say that our process “needs more light.” When a sudden idea reorders our thoughts, we say that the “light came on,” and when a person is fully conscious, we say that he or she is “enlightened.” When you release a negative thought, or a negative feeling, you release lower-frequency currents of energy from your system, and this, literally, allows an increase in the frequency of your consciousness.
Physical light is not the Light of your soul. Physical light travels at a certain velocity. It cannot go faster. The Light of your soul is instantaneous. There is no time between a daughter’s loving intention toward her father and the soul of her father understanding that intention. Instantaneousness, therefore, is very much a part of your life. In nonphysical reality, the decisions that you make in terms of how you choose to use your energy have effects that are instantaneous. They are one with who and what you are. Energies that emanate from your soul have instantaneousness to them. Energies that emanate from your personality follow the path of physical light. Fear, for example, is an experience of the personality. The soul can be confused and away from Light, but it does not experience fear. If the soul experiences an absence of Light from a part of itself, the personality will experience this absence of Light as fear. That fear is of the personality, and, therefore, of space and time. Unconditional love is of the soul, instantaneous, Universal, not bound. Just as visible light is one portion, like an octave, in a continuum of energy of graduated frequencies that extends below and above what the eye can see, the continuum of nonphysical Light extends below and above, so to speak, the frequency range in which the human exists. The human experience is a particular frequency range in the continuum of nonphysical Light in the same way that visible light is a particular frequency range in the continuum of physical light. Other intelligences inhabit other ranges of frequency. These forms of Life do not exist elsewhere from us. Just as infrared light, ultraviolet light, microwave light, and many, many other frequencies and ranges of frequencies coexist with the visible light spectrum, but are invisible to us, the Life forms that are characterized by different frequency ranges of nonphysical Light coexist with us, but are invisible to us. In the place that you now sit exist many different beings, or groups of beings, each active and evolving in its own reality and in its own way. These realities commingle with yours in the same way that microwave radiation exists alongside of visible light, but is undetectable to the human eye.
Our species is evolving from one frequency range in the spectrum of nonphysical Light into another, higher range of frequency. This is the evolution of the five-sensory personality into the multisensory personality. The multisensory personality is more radiant and energetic than the five-sensory personality. It is aware of the Light of its soul, and it is able to…
The Universe is a hierarchy that has no bottom and no top. Between the levels of the hierarchy there is an understanding that higher perceptions can be a part of, and are encouraged to be a part of, the experience of lower plane spirits as they strive to expand their own awareness. Thus, there is always a higher level of assistance. You are involved in this process…
You are not aware of the many lifetimes of the past and future personalities of your soul, for example, but the intensity of parts of your being derives directly from these lifetimes, just as do some of your relationships. If an aspect of your being manifests physically, such as the aspect of you-as-teacher, or you-as-warrior, then there are connected nonphysical aspects that are also active and participating in the teaching, or the warring, dynamic from the nonphysical realms of which you are a part and bonded to. The…
The five-sensory personality associates rank within a hierarchy with graduated levels of worth, and it associates a lower rank within a hierarchy with less worth, less ability to control others, and more vulnerability. From the point of view of the Universe, all the ranks of creation are of equal value, all are precious. When seen through authentically empowered eyes, a being with a higher rank in creation is one that has more ability to see without obstruction, more ability to live in love and wisdom, and more ability and desire to help others evolve into the same love and Light. Each human soul has both guides and Teachers. A guide is not a Teacher. Guides are what might be thought of as experts in certain fields that are called in for consultation. If you are writing a…
The vertical path is the path of awareness. It is the path of consciousness and conscious choice. The person who chooses to advance his or her spiritual growth, to cultivate awareness of his or her higher self, is on a vertical path. The vertical path is the path of clarity. The potential for the creation of clarity and the experience of interacting with your nonphysical Teacher are one and the same. The horizontal path is the path that satisfies your personality. A businessman or a businesswoman, for example, who devotes his or her life to the accumulation of money is on a horizontal path. No matter how diverse his or her ventures may become, they are essentially identical. If they make money, they please the personality, and if they lose money, they distress the personality, but they do not serve the higher self. They do not serve his or her spiritual growth. A person that seeks relationships only to gratify his or her own needs, such as his or her own emotional or sexual needs, will find that each relationship is essentially identical, that the people in his or her life are replaceable, that experiences with the first and experiences with the second are…
In each instance, your Teacher, or Teachers, will advise you with impersonal compassion and clarity. It will help you to examine the probable results of each choice that you make. It will touch your feelings in ways that bring your awareness to areas that need to be healed. It will answer your questions, but you must ask them, and, therefore, give direction to your own energy. It will advise you as to which courses will most likely lead to which results, and it will continue to advise you with wisdom and compassion no matter what choices you make. A Teacher can neither create nor remove karma for you. No being, not even a nonphysical Teacher, can assume responsibility for your life, for the way that you choose to use your energy, but a nonphysical Teacher can help you to understand what your choices and your experiences represent.
Every decision that you make either moves you toward your personality, or toward your soul. Each decision that you make is an answer to the question “How do you choose to learn love?”, “How do you choose to learn authentic empowerment—through doubt and fear, or through wisdom?” This is the heart of the Garden of Paradise story. The Tree of Truth, given unto the entire human species, said, “Learn! Which way do you wish to learn?”
This is the ultimate first act of free will: How do you wish to learn? The question continues in every one of your life situations. It is the eternal question. It is the longest-running show on Broadway, so to speak. No matter what situation, no matter what moment, the Garden of Eden question continues and continues and continues. Each time the opportunity in every circumstance in miniature is, “Will you choose the way of doubt and fear, or will you choose the Tree of Wisdom?” The Tree of Life, of Knowledge, of Truth, of Wisdom, is an opportunity, an archetypical question. Adam and Eve, the male and female principles within the Garden of Eden, took the apple symbolically, and misused knowledge. Their choice was to misuse knowledge, and, therefore, they created shame.
The decision to take the apple was a decision of the highest order of evolution, an order that cannot be conceived, or even grappled with, in the same context that we would use to understand a human decision. To speak of decisions in terms of an individual human life, or in the terms of a larger body of individual human lives, is very different from speaking about how the role of evolution and learning began billions of years ago with the human species.
It refers to principles of energy that were brought to bear upon larger bodies of group consciousnesses that had stress, that had formation energies, creation energies. In their process of forming their own polarities, polarities that would become the polarities of the human experience, doubt and fear stood opposing to trust and Light, and so they came into being.
7 Intention I
thought is energy, or Light, that has been shaped by consciousness. No form exists without consciousness. There is Light, and there is the shaping of Light by consciousness. This is creation. Energy continually pours through you, entering at the top of your head and descending downward through your body. You are not a static system. You are a dynamic being of Light that at each moment informs the energy that flows through you. You do this with each thought, with each intention. The Light that flows through your system is Universal energy. It is the Light of the Universe. You give that Light form. What you feel, what you think, how you behave, what you value, and how you live your life reflect the way that you are shaping the Light that is flowing through you. They are the thought forms, the feeling forms and the action forms that you have given to Light. They reflect the configuration of your personality, your space-time being.
If you intend that your relationship with your husband or your wife become harmonious and loving, that intention will open you to new perceptions. It will allow you to see the love that your husband or wife expresses for you in his or her own way, if that is the case. It will allow you to see the absence of that love, if that is the case. It will reorient you toward harmony and love so that you can see clearly from that perspective what is necessary to change your relationship, and if that is achievable.
This is the experience of a splintered personality. A splintered personality struggles with itself. The values, perceptions, and behaviors of a splintered personality are not integrated. A splintered personality is not conscious of all the parts of itself. A splintered personality is frightened. It fears aspects of itself that threaten what it seeks and what it has attained. A splintered personality experiences the circumstances within its life as more powerful than itself.
whole personality is not like a laser. A laser is like a whole personality. Lasers are the reflection in physical reality of an energy dynamic that, until very recently, has not been central to the human experience. The development of the laser in the middle part of the twentieth century reflects within the physical arena a dynamic that is central to what our species is evolving into. We are evolving into a species of whole individuals, individuals who are aware of their nature as beings of Light, and who shape their Light consciously, wisely, and with compassion. Therefore, the physical phenomenon of phase-coherent light, light that does not struggle with itself, so to speak, has come into being. It is a new phenomenon to the human experience, and it reflects the new energy dynamic of the whole human. The achievements of science, in other words, do not reflect the laboratory capabilities of individuals, or nations, but the spiritual capabilities of our species.
You create your reality with your intentions. How does this happen? Intentions shape Light. They set Light into motion. Each intention—anger, greed, jealousy, compassion, understanding—sets energy into motion, sets patterns of Light into motion. Physical matter is the densest, or heaviest, level of Light. Physical reality is not a dead and empty stage on which Life evolves. Every physical form, as well as every nonphysical form, is Light that has been shaped by consciousness. No form exists apart from consciousness. There is not one planet in the Universe that does not have an active level of consciousness, although it may not be what we recognize as consciousness. Physical reality and the organisms and the forms within physical reality are systems of Light within systems of Light, and this Light is the same Light as the Light of your soul. Each of these systems of Light is shaped by consciousness. The physical reality of the Earth school is shaped by the decisions of those who are in it.
When individual human souls come together, they form a group energy field, a merger of soul energy in a group. Therefore, the decisions that you make within your personal reality, such as the decision to be giving or to be selfish, or the decision to be angry or to be understanding, contribute to the shaping of the reality that you share with your family.
Most individuals, for example, understand “city,” and “urban area.” Most individuals understand “Europe,” and “United States.” These are shared collective perceptions, but they are not shared as widely as the perceptions of “water” and “air,” which are universal perceptions upon our planet.
As you continue to move outward through the layers of your reality, they become more and more impersonal. The next layer of your reality is your race. If you are black, you—your soul—has chosen to participate in the evolution of what it is to be a black human. Your experiences of exhilaration, anger, wisdom, or kindness help to shape this impersonal energy dynamic.
The next layer is your sex. If you are female, you have chosen to participate in the evolution of femininity within the human species. If you look upon this structure as an inverted pyramid, with your personal reality at the bottom, and each layer of your reality above your personal reality as more inclusive and more impersonal, the uppermost layer, the broadest and most impersonal layer, is humanity, the experience of being human. As an individual you participate in group experiences simultaneously with being an individual, just as you can simultaneously be a man, a father, and a husband, or a woman, a wife, and a mother. These experiences are all simultaneous. Some of them are collective, and some of them are individual. You can have an individual experience as a father, for example, and an occupation as a baseball player with a team. There you participate in a group energy system.
Creating a building is a group effort. Several souls participate in the construction of that reality. It is built with group energy, and not with just individual energy. Therefore, it has an existence that is independent of each of the individuals that built it. In the same way, you are participating in the evolution of the United States, yet when you die, this place called the United States will continue. You are connected in layers and through layers to your experience. As you advance from the individual experience of your own life into the larger experience of the family of which you are a part, and beyond, you move into dynamics of group energy. The group dynamic of the family is part of the larger group dynamic of the community, which is part of the larger group dynamic of the nation. Group dynamics advance through the system and the entire system—the entire inverted pyramid—is the soul of the human species. The soul of the human species is sometimes called the collective unconscious, but it is not that. It is the soul of humankind. Your soul is a miniature of the soul of the human species. It is a micro of a macro. It has as much individual energy and power. As part of the micro, you have all the power of the macro calibrated to an individual
form of certain frequencies. You form collective energies that help the whole evolve, although they are not themselves souls, and do not have souls. In between the micro and the macro are the various experiences afforded the individual human soul learning within a group, participating in group evolution, such as the evolution of your country, your religion, and the individual personal experiences that comprise the human experience.
The reality of each individual is created by his or her intentions and the intentions of others. What we think of as a physical reality that we share is an intermingling, or a formation, a massive overlay of appropriate realities. It is a fluid massive consciousness in which each of us exists independently of each other and yet coexists interdependently with each other. What we, as a species and as individuals, are now becoming aware of is the effect of consciousness on this process.
8 Intention II
You are the product of the karma of your soul. The dispositions, aptitudes, and attitudes that you were born with serve the learning of your soul. As your soul learns the lessons that it must learn to balance its energy, those characteristics become unnecessary, and are replaced by others. This is how you grow. As you come to realize, for example, that anger leads nowhere, your anger begins to disappear and you move into a more integrated and mature orientation toward your experiences. What once angered you now brings forth different responses.
Until you become aware of the effects of your anger, you continue to be an angry person. If you do not reach this awareness by the time you return home, your soul will continue this lesson through the experiences of another lifetime. It will incarnate another personality with aspects that are similar to your own. What is not learned in each lifetime is carried over into other lifetimes, along with new lessons that arise for the soul to learn, new karmic obligations that result from the responses of its personality to the situations that it encounters. The lessons that the soul has learned also are brought forward into other lifetimes, and this is how the soul evolves. Personalities mature in time, and the soul evolves in eternity.
These are lower-frequency currents of energy. They produce feelings of depletion, weakness, inability to cope, and exhaustion. The highest-frequency current, the highest energy current, is love. It produces buoyancy, radiance, lightness, and joy.
Your intentions create the reality that you experience. Until you become aware of this, it happens unconsciously. Therefore, be mindful of what you project. That is the first step toward authentic power.
You may seek companionship and warmth, for example, but if your unconscious intention is to keep people at a distance, the experiences of separation and pain will surface again and again until you come to understand that you, yourself, are creating them. Eventually, you will choose to create harmony and love. You will choose to draw to you the highest-frequency currents that each situation has to offer. Eventually, you will come to understand that love heals everything, and love is all there is. This journey may take many lifetimes, but you will complete it. It is impossible not to complete it. It is not a question of if but of when. Every situation that you create serves this purpose. Every experience that you encounter serves this purpose. The healing journey of the human soul through its incarnations into the physical arena is a process of cycles of creation:
Karma → personality → intentions + Energy → experiences → reactions → Karma → etc.
The karma of the soul determines the characteristics of the personality. It determines the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual circumstances into which the personality is born. It determines the ways that the personality is prone to understand its experiences. It determines the intentions with which the personality will shape its reality. These intentions create the reality that provides the soul, at each moment, with the experiences that are necessary for the balancing of its energy, and the personality with the clearest choice between learning through wisdom or learning through doubt and fear. Through these intentions the personality shapes the Light that is flowing through it into the reality that is optimal for its growth, for the evolution of its soul. The reactions of the personality to the experiences that it has created create more karma. Reactions express intentions. They determine the experiences that will be created next, and the reactions of the personality to those experiences create more karma, and so forth, until the soul releases that personality and body. When the soul returns to its home, what has been accumulated in that lifetime is assessed with the loving assistance of its Teachers and guides. The new lessons that have emerged to be learned, the new karmic obligations that must be paid, are seen. The experiences of the incarnation just completed are reviewed in the fullness of understanding. Its mysteries are mysteries no more.
What has been balanced, what has been learned, brings the soul ever closer to its healing, to its integration and wholeness.
The world as we know it has been built without a consciousness of soul. It has been built with the consciousness of the personality. Everything within our world reflects personality energy. We believe that what we can see and smell and touch and feel and taste is all there is to the world. We believe that we are not responsible for the consequences of our actions. We act as though we are not affected when we take and take and take. We strive for external power and in that striving create a destructive competition.
When you speak of a “marriage,” for example, you invoke a particular consciousness, a particular energy. When two people marry, they become “husband” and “wife.” “Husband” means the master of a house, the head of a household, a manager. “Wife” means a woman who is joined to a man in marriage, a hostess of a household. Sometimes it means a woman of humble rank. The relationship between a husband and a wife is not equal. When two people “marry,” and think and speak of themselves as “husband” and “wife,” they enter into these consciousnesses and intelligences. In other words, the archetypical structure of “marriage” can be thought of as a planet. When two souls marry, they fall into the orbit, or gravitational field, of this planet and, therefore, despite their own individual intentions, they take on the characteristics of this planet called “marriage.” They become part of the evolution of the structure itself through their own participation in a marriage.
An archetype is a collective human idea. The archetype of marriage was designed to assist physical survival. When two people marry, they participate in an energy dynamic in which they merge their lives in order to help each other survive physically. The archetype of marriage is no longer functional. It is being replaced with a new archetype that is designed to assist spiritual growth. This is the archetype of spiritual, or sacred, partnership. The underlying premise of a spiritual partnership is a sacred commitment between the partners to assist each other’s spiritual growth. Spiritual partners recognize their equality. Spiritual partners are able to distinguish personality from soul, and, therefore, they are able to discuss the dynamics between them, their interactions, on a less emotionally bound ground than husbands and wives. That ground does not exist within the consciousness of marriage. It exists only within the consciousness of spiritual partnership because spiritual partners are able to see clearly that there is indeed a deeper reason why they are together, and that that reason has a great deal to do with the evolution of their souls.
The bond between spiritual partners exists as real as it does in marriage, but for significantly different reasons. Spiritual partners are not together in order to quell each other’s financial fears or because they can produce a house in the suburbs and that entire conceptual framework. The understanding or consciousness that spiritual partners bring to their commitment is different, and, therefore, their commitment is dynamically different. The commitment of spiritual partners is to each other’s spiritual growth, recognizing that that is what each of them is doing on Earth, and that everything serves that. Spiritual partners bond with an understanding that they are together because it is appropriate for their souls to grow together. They recognize that their growth may take them to the end of their days in this incarnation and beyond, or it may take
them to six months. They cannot say that they will be together forever. The duration of their partnership is determined by how long it is appropriate for their evolution to be together. All of the vows that a human being can take cannot prevent the spiritual path from exploding through and breaking those vows if the spirit must move on. It is appropriate for spiritual partners to remain together only as long as they grow together.
Just as external power is no longer appropriate to our evolution, the archetype of marriage is no longer appropriate. This does not mean that the institution of marriage will disappear overnight. Marriages will continue to exist, but marriages that succeed will only succeed with the consciousness of spiritual partnership. The partners in these marriages contribute through their participation in them to the archetype of spiritual partnership. When you bring the consciousness of your soul to your intention-setting process, when you choose to align yourself with your soul instead of with your personality, you create a reality that reflects your soul rather than your personality. When you look upon the experiences of your life as karmic necessities, when you respond to your experiences as the products of an impersonal energy dynamic rather than the products of particular interactions, you bring the wisdom of your soul into your reality. When you choose to respond to life’s difficulties with compassion and love
instead of fear and doubt, you create a “heaven on Earth”—you bring the aspects of a more balanced and harmonious level of reality into physical being.
If you attend to the negative aspects of life, if you choose to focus your attention on the weaknesses of others, on their faults and shortcomings, you draw to yourself the lower-frequency energy currents of disdain, anger, and hatred. You put distance between yourself and others. You create obstacles to your loving. Your energy and influence move slowly through the realm of the personality, the arena of time and space and matter. If you direct your energy into criticism of others with the intention to disempower them, you create negative karma. If you choose to focus your attention on the strengths of others, on the virtues of others, on that part of others that strives for the highest, you run through your system the higher-frequency currents of appreciation, acceptance, and love. Your energy and influence radiate instantaneously from soul to soul. You become an effective instrument of constructive change. If your intention is to align your personality with your soul, and if you focus your attention upon those perceptions that bring to you in each situation the highest-frequency currents of energy, you move toward authentic empowerment.
The scientific accomplishments of our species reflect our awareness as a species of nonphysical dynamics as they unfold within the arena of matter and time, within the realm of the five-sensory personality.
The distance between you and your understanding of the creation of matter from energy is equal to the distance that exists between the awareness of your personality and the energy of your soul. The dynamic of soul and personality is the same dynamic as energy converted into matter. The system is identical. Your body is your conscious matter. Your personality is the energy of your soul converted to matter. If it is unaware, it is the splinteredness that is transmitted. If it is aware, it begins to become whole.
9 Choice
You cannot choose your intentions consciously until you become conscious of each of the different aspects of yourself. If you are not conscious of each part of yourself, you will have the experience of wanting to say, or to intend, one thing, and finding yourself saying or intending something else. You will want your life to move in one direction, and find that it is moving in another. You will desire to release a painful pattern from your experience, and see it reappear yet again. It is not easy for a splintered personality to become whole because only some parts of a splintered personality seek wholeness. The other parts, because they are not as responsible, or caring, or compassionate as the parts that seek wholeness, pull the other way.
shape nonphysical Light must choose which experience you will create. As you become conscious of the different parts of your personality, you become able to experience consciously the forces within you that compete for expression, that lay claim to the single intention that will be yours at each moment, that will shape your reality. When you enter these dynamics consciously, you create for yourself the ability to choose consciously among the forces within you, to choose where and how you will focus your energy. The choice not to choose is the choice to remain unconscious and, therefore, to wield power irresponsibly. Awareness of the splintered personality and of its need for integration brings with it the need for conscious choice.
You may be aware that deceiving another person is not in alignment with your soul, but decide to do that anyway in order to gain a profit, or save a relationship that you are not yet ready to lose. You may know that the path of compassion is to share your thoughts and actions, and yet decide not to share them because you think that would cost you money, or security. When you choose the energy of your soul—when you choose to create with the intentions of love, forgiveness, humbleness, and clarity—you gain power. When you choose to learn through wisdom, you gain power.
The effort that you apply to each decision to align yourself with your soul is rewarded many times. The part of yourself that reaches toward Light may not be the strongest part of you at the moment that you choose to journey toward authentic power consciously, at the moment that you choose the vertical path, but it is the part that the Universe backs.
A personality that is conscious of its splinteredness, and struggles consciously to become whole, does not need to create negative karma in order to evolve, in order to learn to create responsibility, in order to acquire authentic power. When you struggle consciously with a choice between the wants of your personality and the needs of your soul, you enter a dynamic through which you are enabled to evolve without creating negative karma. That is the dynamic of temptation. What is temptation? Temptation is the Universe’s compassionate way of allowing you to run through what would be a harmful negative karmic dynamic if you were to allow it to become physically manifest.
Temptations are not traps. Each temptation is an opportunity through which the soul is able to learn without creating karma, to evolve directly through conscious choice. The dynamic of temptation is the energy of what might be thought of as the challenging dynamic of the human experience, as the Luciferic principle. It serves the purpose of assisting the evolution of power. Lucifer means “Light bringer.” Temptation, the Luciferic principle, is that dynamic through which each soul is graciously offered the opportunity to challenge those parts of itself that resist Light. The Luciferic energy is represented in the Garden of Eden story by a snake, by the idea of a presence other than human that could tempt, but, literally, could not have dominion over the human being. The Luciferic energy tempts you, tempts the level of human being that is mortal, that is five-sensory, but the snake cannot destroy the soul. It can merely threaten that part of you that becomes too linked to the physical. The snake is of the Earth. When you are too close to the Earth, when you find yourself honoring the gods of the Earth, and make Earth your god and master, then so, too, you shall be bitten. The Light-bringing energy, the Luciferic energy, that tempted the person Jesus of Nazareth who became the Christ, and that tempted the person Siddhartha Gautama who became the Buddha, is the same energy that tempts you. It tempts the accountant to steal, the student to cheat, the spouse to adultery, the human being to external power. It opposes the Light of your immortal soul to the physical light of your personality. It sets before you the vertical path and the horizontal path. What is the nature of transformation? It is the compassionate way of temptation.
If you decide that you cannot beat a temptation, what you are really doing is giving yourself permission to be irresponsible. The desires and impulses that you feel that you cannot resist, that you lack the power to overcome, are your addictions. Addictions are the wants of the parts of your personality that are very strong and resistant to the energy of your soul. They are those aspects of your personality, of your soul incarnate, that are most in need of healing. They are your greatest inadequacies.
Your addiction may be to food, or drugs, or anger, or sex. You may have more than one addiction. In each instance, you cannot release the addiction until you understand the dynamic that underlies it. Beneath every addiction is the perception of power as external, as the ability to control and use the environment or others. Beneath every addiction is an issue of power.
The journey to wholeness requires that you look honestly, openly, and with courage into yourself, into the dynamics that lie behind what you feel, what you perceive, what you value, and how you act. It is a journey through your defenses and beyond so that you can experience consciously the nature of your personality, face what it has produced in your life, and choose to change that.
10 Addiction
You cannot begin the work of releasing an addiction until you can acknowledge that you are addicted. Until you realize that you have an addiction, it is not possible to diminish its power. The personality rationalizes its addictions. It dresses them in attractive clothing. It presents them to itself and others as desirable or beneficial. A person who is addicted to alcohol, for example, will say to herself or himself, or to others, that drunkenness is a way of loosening up, of relaxing after a tense day, of having fun, and, therefore, it is constructive. A person who is addicted to sex will say to herself or himself, or to others, that random sexual encounters are expressions of closeness, or love, that they reflect an evolved and liberated perception, and, therefore, they are desirable.
Why does the personality resist acknowledging its addictions? Acknowledging an addiction, accepting that you have an addiction, is acknowledgment that a part of you is out of control. The personality resists acknowledging its addictions because that forces it to choose to leave a part of itself out of control, or to do something about it. Once an addiction has been acknowledged, it cannot be ignored, and it cannot be released without changing your life, without changing your self-image, without changing your entire perceptual and conceptual framework.
An addiction is not merely an attraction. It is natural for males and females to admire each other, for example, and to feel a warmth and attraction toward each other. An addiction is more than that. An addiction is characterized by magnetism and fear. There is attraction plus fear, plus a jolt of energy that is out of proportion to the situation. Attractions are a pleasing part of life. They can be satisfied and left behind, but addictions cannot. An addiction cannot be satiated. A sexual addiction, for example, cannot be satisfied by sex. This is the first clue that the dynamic that is involved in what appears to be a sexual addiction is not sexual, but that the experiences of addictive sexual attraction, or repulsion, serve a deeper dynamic.
Enter into your own fear, into your own sense of wanting a drink, or sex with a different partner. Ask yourself to seriously review all of the times in your life that you thought you would gain so much from that, and face what you gained. Hold on to the thought that you create your experiences. Your fear comes from the realization that a part of you is creating a reality that it wants, whether you want it or not, and the feeling that you are powerless to prevent it, but that is not so. This is critical to understand: Your addiction is not stronger than you. It is not stronger than who you want to be. Though it may feel that way, it can only win if you let it. Like any weakness, it is not stronger than the soul or the force of will. Its strength only indicates the amount of effort that needs to be applied toward the transition, toward making yourself whole in that area of your life.
The greater the desire of your soul to heal your addiction, the greater will be the cost of keeping it. If you—if your soul—has chosen to heal an addiction now, you will find that the decision to maintain your addiction will cost you the things that you hold most dear. If that is your wife or your husband, your marriage will be placed in the balance against your addiction. If that is your career, your career will be placed in the balance. This is not the doing of a cruel Universe or a malicious God. It is a compassionate response to your desire to heal, to become whole. It is the compassionate Universe saying to you that your inadequacies are so deep that the only thing that will stop you will be something of equal or greater value in opposition to your inadequacies.
As you work through your weaknesses, and you feel levels of addictive attraction, ask yourself the critical questions of the spirit: If, by following those impulses, do you increase your level of enlightenment? Does it bring you power of the genuine sort? Will it make you more loving? Will it make you more whole? Ask yourself these questions. This is the way out of an addiction: Walk yourself through your reality step by step. Make yourself aware of the consequences of your decisions, and choose accordingly. When you feel in yourself the addictive attraction of sex, or alcohol, or drugs, or anything else, remember these words: You stand between the two worlds of your lesser self and your full self.
As you choose to empower yourself, the part of you that you challenge, the temptation that you challenge, will surface again and again. Each time that you challenge it, you gain power and it loses power.
Understanding the dynamics behind your addiction is one thing. Actually making the emotional connection to discharge the need for it is another story. Your addiction is not insurmountable. It is not overwhelming. If it continues to appear that way to you, it is because deep in your heart you do not see yourself as able to release the addiction, even if you understand why you are drawn to it. If your addiction lingers, ask yourself if you really want to release it, because in your heart you do not.
Until you fill in the inadequacies within you, you will always have your addiction. In order to release your addiction, it is necessary to enter your inadequacies, to recognize that they are real, and to bring them into the light of consciousness to heal. It is necessary to look deeply into the parts of yourself that have such power to you, to look clearly at how deep they are within you, and to see them as honestly as you can. It may be that your addiction has provided you one of the few genuine pleasures of your life. What is more important to you, your wholeness, and your freedom, or the pleasures that you get from satisfying your addiction?
Ultimately, you will take the higher path, but if you wish to put the journey off for a day or a week or seven lifetimes, that is sufficient. Your Teachers see from a perspective that does not include time. It is the depth of wisdom for you to know that you will eventually take the path of consciousness. If that is the path that you will eventually take, why wait? Yet, there are times when there is wisdom in waiting as the rest of you prepares for the journey. There is no shame in this decision. The Universe does not judge. Eventually, you will come to authentic empowerment. You will know the power of forgiveness, humbleness, clarity and love. You will evolve beyond the human experience, beyond the Earth school, beyond the learning environment of space and time and matter. You cannot not evolve. Everything in the Universe evolves. It is only a question of which way you will choose to learn as you evolve. This is always your choice, and there is always wisdom in each choice. When you return home, when you leave your personality and body behind, you will leave behind your inadequacies, your fears and angers and jealousies. They do not, and cannot, exist within the realm of spirit. They are the experiences of the personality, of time and matter. You will once again enter the fullness of who you are.
You will survey what has been learned, and you will bring these things into your next incarnation. If you choose to continue with your addiction, you choose to experience negative karma. You choose to create without compassion. You choose to be unconscious. You choose to learn through the experiences that your unconscious intentions create. You choose to learn through fear and doubt, because you fear your addiction and you doubt your power to challenge it successfully.
When you struggle with an addiction, you deal directly with the healing of your soul. You deal directly with the matter of your life. This is the work that is required to be done. As you face your deepest struggles, you reach for your highest goal.
11 Relationships
Spiritual partners recognize the existence of the soul, and consciously seek to further its evolution. They recognize nonphysical dynamics at work within the world of time and matter.
You learn to trust not only each other, but also your ability to grow together. You learn that you put your partnership most at risk by avoiding that which you are most afraid will destroy it. It is not easy to express what is inside you, especially that which makes you feel vulnerable or painful or angry or upset.
You learn the value of considering the other’s position. By becoming the other person, by truly walking into the fears of the other and then returning into your own being again, you open up the conversation to transcend the personal and become healing at the impersonal. This allows you to see each other as spiritual playmates as you work through the areas that require healing in each of you. Even into the toughest moments of your work on feelings of insecurity you can be light and remind yourself that you are spirits who have taken on the physical experience and have far greater power than you are showing in that moment of weakness.
Within our species there are degrees of soul consciousness. The significance of the evolution of responsibility is that each human being moves through levels of responsibility on its way to wholeness. In other words, as a soul chooses the lesson of responsibility, it will find itself incarnating into an atmosphere of more potential impact upon the species. The personality must also come to agree with what the soul has chosen. If you are not consciously ready, you will not be put into a position to impact many for the protection of your own soul.
As it becomes more adept at the human sensory system, at human intelligence, at the connection between the soul and body energy and what is expected within a human incarnation, its capacity to move and incarnate into more responsible centers of activity increases. Center of activity does not mean the presence of a city or a university, but an activity of karmic proportion.
soul’s center of activity refers to the degree of expansion of its karmic influence and energy influence. A soul needs to be more advanced to handle the possibilities that come from the expansion of its karmic energy influences. This is the significance of the evolution of responsibility.
Think of your consciousness in terms of physical light. That light shines, but a brighter light shines over a wider range, and a dimmer light shines on a smaller range. The extent to which your light shines is the width and depth and breadth of your karmic influence. If you are a major light you shine upon the entire globe. If you are growing into a major light but are a lesser light you shine within a different range of which you are held karmically responsible, but your potential to shift your own quality of consciousness and the quality of consciousness of others is equally enormous.
Every microconsciousness, or individual soul, affects the macroconsciousness depending upon its quality of Light, upon the frequency of its consciousness. A soul that agrees to incarnate into a lifetime in which it has significant potential to affect the lives of many is a great soul. The quality of power of such a soul is great. It is global. Its capacity to touch the lives of millions, and, indeed, billions of human beings is very real, and so will be its karmic debt if it fails in its task to advance humanity. It will have the karmic responsibility of billions of souls upon its own. Great souls upon our planet, like all souls upon our planet, must make decisions moment by moment. As you look upon the many souls of our Earth who stand in major positions to maneuver the lives of thousands, or millions, or billions of human beings, allow yourself to distinguish them from their personalities. Even though a soul has the ability to influence the lives of billions of people, or even the entirety of humanity, its personality is tempted.
When a soul chooses to participate consciously in more inclusive levels of interaction, it becomes capable of participating directly in the liberation of its family, or its group, or its community, or its nation from the negativities that are present and active at those levels. It also runs the risk of contamination by those negativities. In other words, a soul that seeks to bring a higher quality of consciousness to a more inclusive level of human interaction runs the risk of being contaminated by the fear, or the anger, or the selfishness of that level.
At the level of soul contact, a great soul deals not only with its own fear, its personal fear, but it also takes on the evolution of the collective fear of the species. The weight of that is where a great soul risks contamination on a great level, but its possibility of releasing the fear from the collective consciousness of the species becomes also possible.
Some have chosen to align themselves, like mannequins, with the dying consciousness of the five-sensory human that has existed within the collective consciousness of each of our nations. They have chosen, in other words, to represent a system that is disintegrating, and so their own systems are disintegrating before their eyes. Their comrades are corrupt. Their governments are corrupt.
This is the archetypical pattern that was put into place within our species by the Teacher, Jesus. It is what He symbolized as He moved through His lifetime in the way that He did. He released the negative karmic patterns of the collective unconscious that had accumulated to His time. In each great soul it is the same pattern—the pattern of taking on the whole through the power of his or her own consciousness to transform it. When a soul reaches for authentic power and chooses consciously to bring that power into the levels of interaction that it shares with other souls, it enters this dynamic. It brings to a collective energy system the consciousness of authentic power, and through that power engages in the transformation of that collective. Your evolution toward authentic power, therefore, affects not only you. As the frequency of your consciousness increases, as the quality of your consciousness reflects the clarity, humbleness, forgiveness, and love of authentic power, it touches more and more around you. As your temptations become greater, so does your ability to make responsible choices. As you shine brighter, as your Light and power increase with each responsible choice, so does your world.
12 Souls
The soul process moves through degrees of awareness. Animals, for example, do not have individual souls. They have group souls. Each animal is a part of a group soul. Each horse is a part of the group soul of horse, each cat is a part of the group soul of cat, and so on. A group soul is not the same as an individual soul.
The dolphin soul, for example, evolves through each particular individual dolphin. The particular advancements of each particular dolphin advance the soul of the dolphin itself. The collective is enhanced by the accomplishments of the individual dolphin. The same mechanism works within the human kingdom. With each of our individual advancements, the group soul of humanity—what we call our collective unconscious—evolves. In this way, evolution continues within the dolphin species, as within all species.
Unlike an animal, you have an individual soul. You are an individual energy system, a micro of a macro. As part of the micro, you have all the power of the macro calibrated to an individual form of certain energies.
If you wish to offer comfort to the dolphin soul, image from the heart of the dolphin consciousness that your energies are moving below deep warm clear soothing water. As you feel yourself emerging into the aquatic kingdom, let yourself begin to radiate your thoughts to these fellow creatures that share our planetary home. Image that you are sending them love as they continue their evolution and leave the Earth school, that you grieve with them and yet you know that, like you, they are immortal. Send these thoughts. Let them know they are not leaving without human beings’ understanding. Let them hear you say, “I am one who understands.” Can you do that? It will make their grieving journey of value.
There comes a point when the physicalness experience no longer serves the soul’s awareness, and, therefore, the soul chooses to learn in the nonphysical realm. It may choose to learn, for example, through the task of becoming a nonphysical guide.
In other words, there is no larger spiritual human soul beyond the soul of humanity. Beyond that comes the experience of master, the experience of moving into advanced levels of Light that is no longer specific to human.
We are destined to evolve beyond the nature of duality. Duality is that which is understood in time and space. As you evolve beyond that, and also when you leave your physical body and journey home to your nonphysical plane of reality, you will not exist in dualism, and that sense of the wrathful, or sorrowful, or fearful self that you think of as present to you now will evaporate. It has no power in the realm beyond duality where there exists the perfection of all that is. When you leave your physical form, you will join the nonphysical level of reality that is appropriate to your vibrational frequency at the time that you leave your incarnation. Where do advanced human souls go? There are many forms of Life that exist as advancements of this one. There are literally millions of options. There is life in numerous galaxies. There are millions, indeed, billions of other life-filled planets. There is not one planet that lacks a level of active consciousness, some of which is akin to our human form, and some of which does not come close to our form, but remains consciousness as we understand the term. There exists a realm that the religious language of the West would call the Angelic kingdom.
Does the law of karma apply to nonphysical beings? The law of karma is universal in the sense that there is not a Life form that is not responsible for its energy, but karma cannot be understood in terms of nonphysical dimensions in the same way that we understand it. An Angel does not have the barriers that we have. An Angel sees something, for example, and we do not. The difference is a barrier. An Angel does not have our barriers, and so it cannot create the karma that we do. It has a level of sight and knowledge that prevents certain actions from happening simply because of the depth of knowingness that is of its rank in creation.
An Angel does not fear death. It has no physicalness. It is only that it is immortal. It is with all that is. It has no doubt. It sees and lives in Light, so the ingredients that create karma for the human experience are not part of its personal reality.
Imagine that your personality, your characteristics, and part of your nonphysical self wish to remain intact and not proceed on their evolution. The process of the soul discharging the aspects of personality does not happen. A combustion and congestion occurs within the energy system. Usually this happens when a soul cannot accept that it must move on and release a particular incarnation. In some instances, a soul holds on to a personality because that personality was particularly successful or powerful in its lifetime. The congestion in the process of evolution that occurs produces the phenomena that we refer to as evil spirits, ghosts, or possessions. These spirits choose to remain Earthbound, within the Earth’s auric field. Are they evil? They are negative, yes, but evil is another issue. Do they encourage negativity? Yes, but that is part of the law of attraction; their own energy is drawn to like forces of energy, or like forces of weakness. Within this realm, these spirits can create additional negative karma by pursuing malevolence.
A soul has no beginning and no end, and yet some souls are older than other souls. Both are true. All souls come directly from the Godhead, and yet there is no single way that souls are formed individually. Both are true. Understanding the soul becomes paradoxical only if you apply a type of thinking that holds the notion of beginning. All that is can form itself into individual droplets of consciousness. Because you are part of All that is, you have literally always been, yet there was the instant when that individual energy current that is you was formed. Consider that the ocean is God. It has always been. Now reach in and grab a cup full of water. In that instant, the cup becomes individual, but it has always been, has it not? This is the case with your soul. There was the instant when you became a cup of energy, but it was of an immortal original Being. You have always been because what it is that you are is God, or Divine Intelligence, but God takes on individual forms, droplets, reducing its power to small particles of individual consciousness.
This is a process that parallels the process of your personality, which is of your soul, expanding into your higher self, and thereby coming into the full power of your soul incarnate. It also parallels the process of your personality and higher self reentering the fullness of your soul when you leave the Earth. As an individual soul, you remain an individual soul. You are both individual and one with All that is. The individual unit of evolution is the soul. This perception is new to us because, as a species, we have not before been aware of the existence of the soul. In our religious thoughts we acknowledge what we call the soul, but we have not, until now, taken it seriously enough to consider what the existence of the soul means in terms of everyday experience, in terms of the joys and pains and sorrows and fulfillments that make a human life. We have not turned our attention to the needs of the soul. We have not considered what is required by the soul in order to be healthy. We have not studied the soul, or sought to help it attain what is necessary to its evolution and its health.
we do not know of the soul. We do not know how these physical functions serve the soul, or are affected by it. We seek to cure dysfunctions of the body by controlling its environment at the molecular level. In other words, our approach to healing is based upon the perception of power as external. This type of healing can be helpful to the body, but it does not, and cannot, heal at the level of the soul.
The body is the instrument of the soul. If the piano player is sick, does it help to repair his or her piano? What an instrument produces depends not only upon the state of the instrument, but also upon the musician. If the musician plays the blues, or soars with joy, the instrument follows. Even a tuned and polished instrument cannot soar with joy if the musician chooses sadness or grief. In the case of your soul and body, the instrument becomes the blues, or soars with joy.
Is it chance that one person develops heart disease, while another develops cancer? Even though disease states have correlations to factors of diet, exercise, lifestyle, and heredity, these correlations cannot mask the fact that life, for some people, is a heartbreak, while others allow themselves to be consumed, to be eaten alive, by the negative experiences of their lives. Can bypass surgery or chemotherapy heal that? Are the numerous ways that physical dysfunctions occur without meaning?
This does not mean that it is inappropriate to care for the body, or to see a physician in times of illness. Even though the physical is not as real, so to speak, as the nonphysical, it is, nonetheless, the lowest, densest projection of spiritual matter, and, therefore, it must be honored. It must be honored. The body needs rest, and it needs care, but behind every aspect of the health or illness of the body is the energy of the soul. It is the health of the soul that is the true purpose of the human experience. Everything serves that.
13 Psychology
Psychology means soul knowledge. It means the study of the spirit, but it has never been that. Psychology is the study of cognitions, perceptions, and affects. It is the study of the personality. Because psychology is based upon the perceptions of the five-sensory personality, it is not able to recognize the soul.
When we see the personality in dysfunction, we do not think of what this reveals about the soul. Yet the personality is specific aspects of the soul reduced to a physical form. Therefore, dysfunctions of the personality cannot be understood without an understanding of the soul. The fears, angers, and jealousies that deform the personality cannot be understood apart from the karmic circumstances that they serve. When you understand, and truly understand, that the experiences of your life are necessary to the balancing of the energy of your soul, you are free to not react to them personally, to not create more negative karma for your soul. Pain by itself is merely pain, but the experience of pain coupled with an understanding that the pain serves a worthy purpose is suffering. Suffering is meaningful. Suffering can be endured because there is a reason for it that is worth the effort. What is more worthy of your pain than the evolution of your soul? This does not mean that you become a martyr. When you understand that by consciously serving the evolution of your soul you contribute the most that you can to your world, you become one who contributes consciously to the well-being and spiritual development of those who share the human learning experience with you. If you are unkind to yourself you will be unkind to others, and if you are negligent of yourself you will be that to others. Only by feeling compassion for yourself can you feel compassion for others.
A spiritual psychology is necessary to answer these questions, a new discipline of the spirit that is truly of the spirit, that has as its focus the soul of the human being. Human evolution, and the evolution of the spirit in matter, is a very specific evolution. It is not haphazard. It is not chaotic. It is very specific. When certain necessary processes of the maturation of the union of matter and spirit are not honored, the spirit breaks down. Psychologists have attempted to explain these breakdowns in the terms of psychology.
The characteristics of a personality, the qualities that make one personality different from another, cannot be appreciated without an understanding of the karma that created those characteristics. They cannot always be understood in terms of the history of the personality because they may reflect experiences that predate the personality, in some cases by centuries. At issue, therefore, is not the effects of anger, jealousy, bitterness, sorrow, and so forth upon the personality, but upon the soul. An understanding of each of the personalities, each of the lifetimes, of a soul is not necessary. The numerous, numerous lifetimes of a soul are not equally central to the development of each of its personalities, but without awareness of the experiences of those lifetimes that bear directly upon the struggles of your personality, you cannot understand the extent of what is being healed through your experiences, or seeking to come to conclusion.
The healing power at the core of psychology is the power of consciousness. Seeking out, facing with courage, and bringing into the Light of consciousness that which is unconsciousness, and, therefore, in a position of power over the personality, is what heals. When that which needs to be made conscious is not recognized to exist—such as the experiences of lifetimes that were lived in other places and at other times—it cannot be healed in this way.
Experiences such as these are not meant to cause meaningless pain. There is not one act in the Universe that is not compassionate.
Without an awareness of your karmic interactions, of the experiences of other lifetimes of your soul, you are not able to understand the depth of the potential awakenings that can result from your interactions with a parent, or a sibling. The exploration and understanding of intuition will be a central part of spiritual psychology. Intuition is the voice of the nonphysical world.
Psychology does not even recognize the intuition, except as a curiosity. Therefore, it does not recognize the knowledge that is obtained through the intuition, and, therefore, this knowledge is not processed by the intellect.
Spiritual psychology is a disciplined and systematic study of what is necessary to the health of the soul. It will identify behaviors that operate in opposition to harmony and wholeness, in opposition to the energy of the soul. It will consider the broad-reaching elements of negativity, and how many forms of negativity there are, and the effects of these upon the soul. Anything that increases separation within a person shatters the soul or in some form diminishes its strength, not to be confused with its immortality. The soul, as it reduces itself to fit into a physical incarnation, has the blueprint of holism in it. A genetic spiritual pattern, so to speak, of holism is there and present, and when the personality operates outside of the genetic pattern of holism, dysfunction results.
When the personality engages in these behaviors, it is as though it feeds its body arsenic again and again. It is just like that. These behaviors distort and contaminate and destroy the strength of the soul, in the same way.
The personality of a shattered soul is unaware. There is a continual interaction between your personality and your soul. The question is are you aware of it or are you not? If you are not aware of it, then it is not direct. It is indirect through having to move its currents through the density of doubt, through the density of unawareness. If you are aware of the guidance from your higher self, and are receptive to it, that receptivity allows guidance to flow instantly and immediately. If you are unaware and deny that there is any level of higher wisdom and guidance to your life, then the guidance must come through the density of physical events. Awareness first enters into an unaware personality through crisis. When the personality is not attached to, or is apart from, clear soul energy, it becomes seduced into the physical matterness of life. That always results in a personality crisis because the necessary strength and guidance that are meant to flow into the personality have been cut off. The personality that is unaware of, or denies the existence of, its higher sources of wisdom cannot draw upon its guidance, its intuition, or any of the guiding mechanisms of our species. Therefore, crisis results.
The personality, including the five-sensory personality, is neither positive nor negative. It is a tool of the soul, a natural part of incarnation. The development of the five senses was a celebration in which the intellect was expanded and our species was allowed to learn through physical matter. The quest for external power came to be generated by insecurity not because of the limitations of the five-sensory personality, but because of the choices that were made by our species to learn through fear and doubt instead of through wisdom.
We are coming to the end of a phase of evolution that was written long before we existed. When the learning and evolution of our species was designed, it was designed to complement cycles, great cycles that work within the Universe, within our galaxy and within others. These cycles move within physical form at certain speeds, serving certain purposes and balances of energies.
This is what this present situation and moment upon our Earth is about: the birth of very different opportunities, opportunities to release patterns that are no longer necessary. The more Light, literally, the more en-Lightened that you are, the more you will choose different ways.
14 Illusion
Each interaction with each individual is part of a continual learning dynamic. When you interact with another, an illusion is part of this dynamic. This illusion allows each soul to perceive what it needs to understand in order to heal. It creates, like a living picture show, the situations that are necessary to bring into wholeness the aspects of each soul that require healing. The illusion is a learning vehicle. It is of the personality. You will leave the illusion behind when you die, when you return home. Yet a personality that lives in love and Light, that sees through the eyes of its soul, metaphorically speaking, can see the illusion and simultaneously not be drawn into it. This is an authentically empowered personality. The illusion is exquisitely intimate to the needs of each soul. Always each situation serves each person involved. You cannot, and will not, encounter a circumstance, or a single moment, that does not serve directly and immediately the need of your soul to heal, to come into wholeness. The illusion for each soul is created by its intentions. Therefore, the illusion is alive at each moment with the most appropriate experiences that you can have in order for your soul to heal. The illusion is malleable. This does not mean that what is created jointly within the illusion does not have an independence of the individual souls that participated in its creation. It means that there is no perception that cannot be healed, just as there is no intention that cannot be changed, or replaced with another.
Even after a personality becomes conscious and aware of its illusion, and sets its intentions accordingly, the karmic obligations of its soul must still be met. Karma is karma. Energy is energy. The awakened personality understands this, and therefore, does not respond to the experiences and the events of its life with anger, fear, sorrow, or jealousy, which would create additional negative karma for its soul, but with compassion and with trust that the Universe, in each moment, is attending to the needs of its soul. This draws to it other souls with the same frequency of consciousness.
The human emotional system can be broken down into roughly two elements: fear and love. Love is of the soul. Fear is of the personality. The illusion of each personality is generated by and sustained by the emotions that follow fear, such as anger, rage, vengefulness, hatred, jealousy or envy, loneliness, spite, sorrow, despair, grief, regret, greed, lust, arrogance, alienation, self-pity, lethargy, guilt, resentment, and feelings of inferiority and superiority.
When the personality is unconscious, every emotion of fear, or that follows fear, produces a negative behavior, a behavior that creates negative karma for its soul.
If you are unconscious of the part of yourself that is angry, for example, if you are unaware of yourself as a splintered personality, you will enact the anger of that part of yourself without thinking. You will strike out, or withdraw, or ridicule, or in some way express your anger. Your anger will spill out of your private energy sphere and into the collective energy of those around you, creating negative karma.
Behind fear is powerlessness. As you reach outward to fill the places within you that are empty of power, you learn, one by one, that those places cannot be filled in that way. Eventually, whether in this lifetime, or after a thousand lifetimes, you will turn toward authentic power. This is the unconscious way of learning. It is learning through the experiences that are created by the unconscious parts of the personality, and through the experiences that are created by unconscious reactions to those experiences.
Therefore, how are you to judge a soul that is involved in this learning process? What step, or steps, do you abstract and say, “This is wrong,” “That is worthy,” “Here she has succeeded” and “Here he has not”? You cannot judge the learnings of a soul on the basis of how that learning takes place without creating negative karma. In other words, a soul is capable of being examined in process. Just as you can ask yourself, “Where does my anger come from?” and realize that it springs from a multitude of dynamics, some of which were set into motion centuries ago, or longer, and that are only now coming to completion, that it is a current of energy within you that you are seeking to release in order to heal your soul and balance its karmic energy, you cannot try another as if you were a judge in a court for a single angry experience. Rather you would have to see clearly that there is a process unfolding and add to that the factor of karma.
Do you see perfection completed by each human being, except that they are, in their own process, perfect and worthy? It is the process that is worthy and perfect at all times, and in that you complete the task fully.
How is it possible to know what to pursue within the illusion and what not to pursue? Ask yourself what is the difference between your essential needs and your adopted needs, or perhaps another term might be artificial needs. What are your genuine needs, and what are the needs that you have created for other reasons, to control, or to maneuver others, or to gain attention? Distinguish these in your mind.
For example, is your irritation at the neighbor’s noise a result of a genuine need that is going unmet, or a created need? Does your annoyance with the sounds that the garbage truck makes, or your desire to have the clerk at the grocery store treat you politely, reflect an essential need or an artificial one? Learn to distinguish your real needs, what you truly need as a human being and a soul, from the needs that you have adopted for reasons that are based on external power and do not emerge from the needs of your soul. Once you get a clear sense of that you can begin to separate yourself from your artificial self, and then you are in a position to choose clearly how you wish to respond, and to hold yourself accountable when you allow your artificial needs to take over.
Authentic needs belong to the soul. You need, for example, to love and to be loved. You need to express your creativity, whether that is in raising a family or leading a country. You need to cultivate your spirit, to work consciously at aligning your personality with your soul. You need to be counseled with the impersonal wisdom of your nonphysical Teachers, and the guidance of your nonphysical guides. These are some of your authentic needs.
It is not possible for you to experience the complete emergence of your soul when you are clouded over by artificial needs. When that happens all you can see are artificial needs, and you see them as being ever so important, ever so significant, but are they really? As you look at your not-as-authentic needs, can you see how they drain energy from you? So long as your priorities come from your lesser self, you cannot touch your higher self in a direct way. Authentic needs are the needs that are always met by the Universe. The Universe is that which supplies you with your authentic needs. You are always being given opportunities to love and be loved, for example, yet ask yourself how many times in your life you have squandered these opportunities.
If you see clearly through your own authentic needs, you will see that what you are really feeling threatened by when you experience an artificial need is the loss of your power, and, therefore, rather than being able to address it directly, you create an artificial need that does the speaking for you. Learn to address the real need so that you do not have to burden yourself with behavioral patterns that are not true to your own nature, that cloud you, that give you some artificial persona that you have to live up to.
15 Power
When energy leaves you in fear or distrust, it cannot bring you anything but discomfort or pain. When energy flows from your system in fear or distrust, you experience a physical feeling of pain or discomfort in the part of your body that is associated with the particular energy center that is losing power.
When you fear that your ability to love or to be loved is threatened, when you fear, for example, expressing your own love or receiving love from another, you experience physical discomfort or pain in the region of your chest, near your heart.
Every distress and every dysfunction of the physical body, every illness, can be understood in terms of power loss to an external circumstance or object through one of several energy centers within the body. You lose power when you rage against an injustice. You lose power when you are threatened by another person, or other people. You lose power when you distance yourself from your fellow humans out of resentment or bitterness, or a sense of disappointment or unworthiness or superiority. You lose power when you long for something or someone, when you grieve, and when you envy another. Beneath all of these is fear, fear that you are vulnerable, that you are not able to cope without the person or the situation that you miss, that you are at a disadvantage without that which you envy. You lose power whenever you fear. That is what a loss of power is.
You do not stop losing power by refusing to recognize your fear, by anesthetizing yourself to what you feel. The road to authentic power is always through what you feel, through your heart. The way of the heart is one of compassion and emotional perception. Therefore, it is never appropriate to suppress an emotion, or to disregard what you feel. If you do not know what you feel, you cannot come to know the splintered nature of your personality, and to challenge those aspects and those energies that do not serve your development.
You become a magnet for those who are illumined and those who want to be. At issue is the manner in which energy flows from you. When energy leaves you in any way except in strength and trust, it cannot bring back to you anything but pain and discomfort. An authentically empowered human being, therefore…
It is the inclusiveness of one who responds to the beauty of each soul, who sees in each personality and in the actions of each personality the soul incarnate upon the Earth. It is the harmlessness of one who treasures and honors and reveres Life in all its forms. Are…
It means being so strong that you need not harm a creature. That is what it means: you are so able and empowered that the idea of showing power through harm…
A humble spirit walks a familiar world. People are not strangers to it; they are its companions upon the Earth. A humble spirit does not ask for more than it needs, and what it needs, the Universe provides. A humble spirit is content with the fulfillment of its authentic needs, and is not burdened with artificial needs. Humble spirits are free to love and to be who they are. They have no artificial standards to live up to. They are not drawn to the symbols of external power. They do not compete for external power. This does not mean that they do not take pride in what they can do well, or that they…
By striving for this reward and that reward, you ask the world to assess and acknowledge your value before you can value yourself. You place your sense of self-worth in the hands of others. You have no power even if you win every gold medal that the world can produce. If what you seek is the joy of giving without reservation, of giving with purpose and joy and consciousness all that you have to the effort that you and other souls are creating jointly, your competition is the expression of your soul. When the effort that finishes last in time has the same value as the effort that finishes first, when the quality of the immortal, timeless soul is honored instead of the time-bound personality and body, when your giving is not impeded by fear of vulnerability, when the size or color or shape of what you receive or do not receive does not matter, you will know the power of a humble spirit. An authentically empowered person is one who forgives. Forgiveness is not a moral issue. It is an energy…
Forgiveness means that you do not hold others responsible for your experiences. If you do not hold yourself accountable for what you experience, you will hold someone else accountable, and if you are not satisfied with what you experience, you will seek to change it by manipulating that person. Complaining, for example, is exactly that dynamic of wanting someone to be responsible for what you experience, and to fix things for you.
Clarity turns pain into suffering. It sees the dynamic of the personality that is the cause of the pain, and the relationship of that dynamic and that experience to the evolution of the soul. It is the perception in each moment that everything is designed for wholeness and perfection, and every aspect serves ultimately a beautiful learning. An authentically empowered personality sees the perfection of each situation and each experience for the evolution of each soul and the maturation of each personality involved. It sees perfection in the smallest details everywhere. Wherever it looks, it sees the hand of God. Clarity evaporates fear. It allows you to choose the vertical path and to stay on it. It allows you to understand the dynamics beneath your addictions—what your addictions serve and how they operate—and to make the choices that will disempower them and empower you. It allows you to challenge not merely a force that you do not understand, such as attraction to alcohol, or a drug, or indiscriminate sex, but a dynamic that you understand in terms of its causes and its effects. It allows you to choose consciously, and to know why you are choosing as you do. Clarity allows you to see the world of physical matter for what it is, a learning environment that is created jointly by the intentions of the souls that share it.
An authentically empowered person lives in love. Love is the energy of the soul. Love is what heals the personality. There is nothing that cannot be healed by love. There is nothing but love. Love is not a passive state. It is an active force. It is the force of the soul. Love does more than bring peace where there is conflict. It brings a different way of being in the world. It brings harmony and an active interest in the well-being of others. It brings concern and care. It brings Light. It washes away the concerns of the personality. In the Light of love there is only love.
16 Trust
Each soul comes to the Earth with gifts. A soul does not incarnate only to heal and to balance its energy, to pay its karmic debts, but also to contribute its specialness in specific ways. Each soul brings the particular configuration of the Life force that it is to the needs of the Earth school. It does this with purpose and intention. Before it incarnates, each soul agrees to perform certain tasks upon the Earth. It enters into a sacred agreement with the Universe to accomplish specific goals. It enters into this commitment in the fullness of its being. That is why when a soul succeeds in accomplishing its goal, in fulfilling what it has agreed to do, there is a richness and a specialness to the lifetime of that personality that is recognized and honored by its fellow souls, both physical and nonphysical. Each soul takes upon itself a particular task. It may be the task of raising a family, or communicating ideas through writing, or transforming the consciousness of a community, such as the business community. It may be the task of awakening the awareness of the power of love at the level of nations, or even contributing directly to the evolution of consciousness on a global level. Whatever the task that your soul has agreed to, whatever its contract with the Universe, all of the experiences of your life serve to awaken within you the memory of that contract, and to prepare you to fulfill it. An unempowered personality cannot complete the task of its soul. It languishes in an inner sense of emptiness. It seeks to fill itself with external power, but that will not satisfy it. This sense of emptiness, or something missing, or of something wrong, cannot be healed by satisfying the wants of the personality.
Authentic empowerment and the fulfillment of the soul’s task upon the Earth, therefore, are not separate dynamics. Authentic empowerment is necessary to accomplish fully the mission of the soul, yet as you move into authentic empowerment, you move toward the fulfillment of your soul’s agreement with the Universe, and as you move toward that fulfillment—as you move consciously toward the energy of your soul—you empower yourself. You and the work of your soul upon the Earth expand together. As one grows and develops, so does the other. When a soul incarnates, its memory of the agreement that it has made with the Universe becomes soft. It becomes dormant, awaiting the experiences that will activate it. These experiences are not necessarily experiences that the personality would choose. They are nonetheless necessary to…
When the deepest part of you becomes engaged in what you are doing, when your activities and actions become gratifying and purposeful, when what you do serves both yourself and others, when you do not tire within but seek the sweet satisfaction of your life and your work, you are doing what you were meant to be doing. The personality that is engaged in the work of its soul is buoyant. It is not burdened with negativity. It does not fear. It experiences purposefulness and meaning. It delights in its work and in others. It is fulfilled and fulfilling. Interactions with your parents, and with those whom you have chosen to share your intimacy, and with those with whom—out of the billions of souls upon our planet—you share parts of your life, serve to activate within you an awareness of who you are and what you are here to do. The pains that you suffer, the lonelinesses that you encounter, the experiences that are disappointing or distressing, the addictions and seeming pitfalls of your life are each doorways to awareness. Each offers you an opportunity to see beyond the illusion that serves the balancing and growth of your soul. Within each experience of pain or negativity is the opportunity to challenge the perception that lies behind…
you to exorcise them with inner faith. That is how it happens. You…
There is no single optimal path for the soul. There are many optimal paths. With each choice you immediately create numerous paths within a choice, one of which is then optimal. In other words, the optimal path of your soul is the choice of awareness, the vertical path. Once you have made that choice, then come the various forms of enactment. In what way, therefore, does nonphysical guidance serve you? It is a partnership of challenging you to come to terms with the full width and breadth and depth of authentic power and responsible choice. It is not that you give permission to be mindlessly manipulated. It is that you give permission to be shown the fullest of your power and guided to its use.
If you are determined to have your life unfold in a particular way, and none other—if you have your heart set on using your creativity only to accumulate money, for example—consider that you build your entire reality around that. The Universe cannot help you in the same way that it can if you are trusting of it, because it cannot overshadow nor penetrate your choice.
Can you see? Let go of what you think is just reward. Let go. Trust. Create. Be who you are. The rest is up to your nonphysical Teachers and the Universe.
Take your hands off the steering wheel. Be able to say to the Universe, “Thy will be done,” and to know it within your intentions. Spend time in this thought. Consider what it means to say, “Thy will be done,” and allow your life to go into the hands of the Universe completely. The final piece of reaching for authentic power is releasing your own to a higher form of wisdom.
Remind yourself that you are supported, that you are not going it alone upon this Earth. Dwell in the company of your nonphysical Teachers and guides. Do not discriminate in terms of what you can and should ask and speak about. Just assume and live in the beauty of the bond. Do not fear dependency. What is wrong with being dependent upon the Universe, whether that is your Teachers or Divine Intelligence? You do what you do for yourself and the Universe and your nonphysical Teachers and guides are there in assistance. They will never do it for you. It is not possible for them to do it for you. Delight in the dependency. Give your guides and Teachers permission to come closer.
Try looking at life as a beautifully well-organized dynamic. Trust the Universe. Trusting means that the circumstance that you are in is working toward your best and most appropriate end. There is no when to that. There is no if to that. It is. Release your specifications and say to the Universe: “Find me where you know I need to be.” Let them go and trust that the Universe will provide, and so it shall. Let go of all. Let your higher self complete its task.
It is impossible for you to come full circle in this way of empowerment without prayer. It is not enough to want or to intend or to meditate. You must pray. You must talk. You must ask. You must believe. That is partnership. Think of what you are doing as entering into partnership with Divine Intelligence, a partnership in which you begin to share your concerns with the understanding that there is an Intelligence receptive to what you are saying that helps you create within your own environment of matter and energy the most effective dynamics to bring you into wholeness. You do not need to think that you create alone, but rather that you are guided strongly in ways to help cocreate in the most effective way for your healing and for the fulfillment of your contract. Consider your intentions and your meditations as part of what is done within the context of prayer. Be able to say within your intentions and your meditations, “And I ask for guidance or help,” and expect to get it. Expect to get it. Aside from your level of the responsible choice of energy and how you form that into matter,…
Relax into the present moment. Do what you need to do in the present moment. Yours is not to worry about that which we call the future. That does not mean that you do not consider the consequences of each of your choices. Taking into account the consequences of your decisions is responsible choice. It means to create strongly in the present moment. Do not lose power over the what-ifs of your life. These are unlimited and endless. Keep your power in the now, in present time. Keep your power just in the day that you are living on the Earth, and not on how to maneuver tomorrow. Use all of your worldly connections, but not out of panic and not out of fear. Do what you need to do on your end. Your choice comes in knowing appropriate timing, clear motivation, and trust. Allow your intuition to guide your timing. Take it…
Therefore, it is impossible to create any action that does not have value. You may not see it, but that is irrelevant. Live in the trust that when it is appropriate, pieces will fall into place and you will see clearly. Trust allows you to call forth your negativities in order to heal them. It allows you to follow your feelings through your defenses to their sources, and to bring to the Light of consciousness those aspects of yourself that resist wholeness, that live in fear. The journey to authentic power requires that you become conscious of all that you feel. The unearthing and healing of your negativities may appear to be an endless process, but it is not. Your vulnerabilities and weaknesses and fears are not different from those of your fellow humans. Do not despair because your humanness awakens. Feel your intentions in your heart. Feel…
Open yourself to your fellow humans. Allow yourself to experience what you feel toward them, and to hear what they feel. Your interactions with them form the basis of your growth. When you fear what you will find in yourself, or what you will find in others, if you allow yourself to hear what others have to say, you turn your back on the opportunities that the Universe is giving you to find the power of your heart, the power of compassion. It is not until you have the courage to engage in human relationships that you grow. Compassion is mutual compassion. The physical body is soothed and invigorated by the energy of the heart, and torn by lower-frequency currents of anger, rage, fear, and violence. When you treat another harshly and distance yourself from your heart, it is you that suffers as well as the other, and when you treat another with compassion, you treat yourself kindly at the same time. As your consciousness expands, and as you become aware of what you feel, you become aware of the dual effects of compassion and the lack of…
Challenge it each time that it comes up by literally realizing that when it comes up you are not in the present moment, you are not engaged in your present energy dynamic but, rather, you are letting energy leak to a future that does not exist. Each time you feel negative, stop, acknowledge that you are, and discharge it consciously. Ask what you are feeling and what is at the root of it. Go for the root of it in that instant and, as you work to pull the root, simultaneously look at the positive side and remind yourself of the greater truth that there is something spiritually profound at work, that your life is no accident, that you are under contract. Be mindful of the words that you use and the actions that you live and who you are and how it is you use your power. In other words, as you say what you say, as you make commitments, as you form the power of your life, keep clear at all times that you are what you say you are, that you put your force behind what you say, and monitor that accordingly. If you are unaware of your intention, or if you suspect that you are operating from a second agenda, ask yourself, “What is really going on?” Check your motivations. That automatically engages guidance. You will…
Trust allows the experience…
Awakeness is a blissful state, not a painful one. It is blissful. It is fully balanced and lovingly harmonious. It is all of these things and more. The vertical path means clarity, not pain. Trust allows you to laugh. You can just as easily laugh and play while you grow as become serious and overwhelmed. Spiritual partners see from the perspective…
experiences. They can laugh at the richness and the beauty and the playfulness of the Universe. They enjoy each other. They see the frustrations of the wants of the personality for what they are,…
All of what you are doing in each day is creating what is appropriate and perfect. Apply consciousness to this process. That is trust. Although what you encounter and what you do in each moment is appropriate and perfect to the evolution of your soul, the shape of the experiences of your life is determined nonetheless by the choices that you make. It is you that chooses to linger in resentment, or to be consumed by anger, or enveloped in grief, or to release these lower-frequency currents of energy. Each choice that you…
Look at the probable futures that are unfolding before our world that is built upon the energy of the personality, and the probable futures that would unfold before a world that is built upon the energy of the soul. Which do you choose? Allow yourself to become aware of what you feel. Give yourself permission to choose the most positive behavior in each moment.
Rather than a soul in a body, become a body in a soul. Reach for your soul. Reach even farther. The impulse of creation and power authentic—the hourglass point between energy and matter: that is the seat of the soul. What does it mean to touch that place? It is exciting to come of age spiritually.
The Seat of the Soul Study Guide The Seat of the Soul presents the largest picture possible—of an entire species transforming from a limited perception and brutal means of evolution into awareness of itself and its world as wondrous and spiritual growth as its means of evolution. This Study Guide will help you experience this transformation in terms of your own life and everyday experiences. Its exercises support you in looking at and appreciating yourself, your experiences, and others in new ways. It suggests experiments to deepen your understanding and ways to apply it. It encourages you to become the authority in your life and to see for yourself how to create a life of harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for Life. You can explore any question or remain with any exercise as long as you choose. You can also return to sections to get deeper insight. I have been exploring my spiritual growth for about twenty-five years, and I continue to understand the concepts in The Seat of the Soul more deeply each year, sometimes each week. The deeper you allow yourself to go with yourself and others, the more you will accelerate your growth and become a conscious heart-centered contributor to your evolution and the evolution of our species. Keep a journal while you are studying The Seat of the Soul. Each time you read it, you may find deeper meanings and new insights. Write your insights and thoughts in your journal to help you remember them, and also so that you can see over time how they have changed.
Eventually, new perceptions and values will bring you naturally into constructive cocreation with others. Although no one can do the work of your own evolution for you, the day of the lone wolf, the solitary monk, the hermit seeking enlightenment in isolation is over. Until recently our evolution has unfolded very slowly. Now it is happening at lightning speed. Within a few generations, all humans will experience the expanded perception that is emerging in millions of us.