Seat Of The Soul

by Gary Zukav

  It is in this invisible realm that the origins of our deepest values are found. From the perspective of this invisible realm, the motivations of those who consciously sacrifice their lives for higher purposes make sense, the power of Gandhi is explicable, and the compassionate acts of the Christ are comprehensible in a fullness that is not accessible to the fivesensory human.

  All of our great teachers have been, or are, multisensory humans. They have spoken to us and acted in accordance with perceptions and values that reflect the larger perspective of the multisensory being, and, therefore, their words and actions awaken within us the recognition of truths.

  From the perception of the fivesensory human, we are alone in a universe that is physical. From the perception of the multisensory human, we are never alone, and the Universe is alive, conscious, intelligent and compassionate. From the perception of the fivesensory human, the physical world is an unaccountable given in which we unaccountably find ourselves, and we strive to dominate it so that we can survive. From the perception of the multisensory human, the physical world is a learning environment that is created jointly by the souls that share it, and everything that occurs within it serves their learning. From the perception of the fivesensory human, intentions have no effects, the effects of actions are physical, and not all actions affect us or others. From the perception of the multisensory human, the intention behind an action determines its effects, every intention affects both us and others, and the effects of intentions extend far beyond the physical world.

  What does it mean to say that an “invisible” realm exists in which the origins of our deeper understandings are located? What are the implications of considering the existence of a realm that is not detectable through the five senses, but that can be known, explored, and understood by other human faculties?

  When a question is asked that cannot be answered within the common frame of reference, it can be classified as nonsensical, or it can be dismissed as a question that is not appropriate, or the person who is asking the question can expand his or her consciousness to encompass a frame

  of reference from which the question can be answered. The first two options are the easy ways out of a confrontation with a question that appears to be nonsensical or inappropriate, but the seeker, the true scientist, will allow himself or herself to expand into a frame of reference from which the answers that he or she is seeking can be understood.

  We, as a species, have been asking the questions, “Is there a God?”, “Is there a Divine Intelligence?”, and, “Is there a purpose to life?”, for as long as we have been able to articulate questions. The time has now come for us to expand into a frame of reference that allows these questions to be answered.

  The larger frame of reference of the multisensory human allows an understanding of the experientially meaningful distinction between the personality and the soul. Your personality is that part of you that was born into, lives within, and will die within time. To be a human and to have a personality is the same thing. Your personality, like your body, is the vehicle of your evolution.

  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.

  Your soul is that part of you that is immortal. Every person has a soul, but a personality that is limited in its perception to the five senses is not aware of its soul, and, therefore, cannot recognize the influences of its soul. As a personality becomes multisensory, its intuitions-its hunches and subtle feelings-become important to it. It senses things about itself, other people, and the situations in which it finds itself that it cannot justify on the basis of the information that its five senses can provide. It comes to recognize intentions, and to respond to them rather than to the actions and the words that it encounters. It can recognize, for example, a warm heart beneath a harsh and angry manner, and a cold heart beneath polished and pleasing words.

  When a multisensory personality looks inside itself, it finds a multitude of different, currents. Through experience, it learns to distinguish between these currents and to identify the emotional, psychological and physical effects of each. It learns, for example, which currents produce anger, divisive thoughts, and destructive actions, and which currents produce love, healing thoughts, and constructive actions. In time, it learns to value and to identify with those currents that generate creativity, healing and love, and to challenge and release those currents that create negativity, disharmony and violence. In this way, a personality comes to experience the energy of its soul.

  Your soul is not a passive or a theoretical entity that occupies a space in the vicinity of your chest cavity. It is a positive, purposeful force at the core of your being. It is that part of you that understands the impersonal nature of the energy dynamics in which you are involved, that loves without restriction and accepts without judgment.

  If you desire to know your soul, the first step is to recognize that you have a soul. The next step is to allow yourself to consider, “If I have a soul, what is my soul? What does my soul want? What is the relationship between my soul and me? How does my soul affect my life?”

  When the energy of the soul is recognized, acknowledged, and valued, it begins to infuse the life of the personality. When the personality comes fully to serve the energy of its soul, that is authentic empowerment. This is the goal of the evolutionary process in which we are involved and the reason for our being. Every experience that you have and will have upon the Earth encourages the alignment of your personality with your soul. Every circumstance and situation gives you the opportunity to choose this path, to allow your soul to shine through you, to bring into the physical world through you its unending and unfathomable reverence for and love of Life.

  This is a book about authentic empowerment-the alignment of the personality with the soul-what that involves, how it happens, and what it creates. To understand these things requires an understanding of things that appear unusual to the fivesensory human, but they be come natural once you understand evolution-that five sensory perception is a journey leading to multisensory perception-and that you were not always meant to be fivesensory.

  CHAPTER 2: KARMA

  Most of us are accustomed to the belief that our participation in the process of evolution is limited to the duration of a single lifetime. This belief reflects the perspective of the fivesensory personality. From the point of view of the fivesensory personality, nothing of itself lasts beyond its lifetime, and there is nothing in the experience of the fivesensory human that is not of itself. The multisensory human, too, understands that nothing of itself lasts beyond its lifetime, but is also aware of its immortal soul.

  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 fivesensory human, are the experiential entirety of its existence, are, for its
soul, the unique and perfectly suited instruments of a particular incarnation.

  Each personality contributes, in its own special way, with its own special aptitudes and lessons to learn, consciously or unconsciously, to the evolution of its soul. The life of a mother, a warrior, a daughter, a priest; the experiences of love, vulnerability, fear, loss, and tenderness; the struggles with anger, defiance, emptiness, and jealousy -all serve the evolution of the soul. Each physical, emotional and psychological characteristic that comprises a personality and its body-strong or weak arms, dense or penetrating intellect, happy or despairing disposition, yellow or black skin, even hair and eye color-is perfectly suited to its soul’s purpose.

  The fivesensory personality is not aware of the many other incarnations of its soul. A multisensory personality may be conscious of these incarnations, or experience them, as its own past or future lives. They are in its family of lives, so to speak, but they are not lives that it, itself, has lived. They are experiences of its soul.

  From the point of view of the soul, all of its incarnations are simultaneous. All of its personalities exist at once. Therefore, the release of negativity that occurs in one of the soul’s incarnations benefits not only itself, but all of its soul’s other incarnations also. Because the soul, itself, is not confined to time, the past of a personality, as well as its future, is enhanced when a personality releases currents of fear and doubt. As we shall see, the release of negativity by a personality benefits a great many other dynamics of consciousness as well. Some of these can be perceived by the fivesensory human, but appear to him or her neither as dynamics of consciousness, nor as related to his or her inner processes, such as the consciousness and evolution of his or her sex, race, nation and culture. Others extend far beyond the perceptual ability of the fivesensory human. A conscious lifetime, therefore, is a treasure beyond value.

  The personality and its body are artificial aspects of the soul. When they have served their functions, at the end of the soul’s incarnation, the soul releases them. They come to an end, but the soul does not. After an incarnation, the soul returns to its immortal and timeless state. It returns once again to its natural state of compassion, clarity and boundless love.

  This is the context in which our evolution occurs: the continual incarnation and reincarnation of the energy of the soul into the physical arena, into our Earth school.

  Why does this happen? Why is it necessary even to speak of personalities and souls?

  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 splintered ness 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. Therefore, you can see within a person’s personality the splintered suffering of the soul from which it was formed, as well as the grace that the soul has earned, which is the loving part of the personality.

  Consider how powerful the soul is if it can have a part of itself that experiences great love, a part of itself that experiences fears, a part that is perhaps neutral, a part that experiences schizophrenia, and a part that is dramatically compassionate. If any of these parts are incomplete, the personality that the soul forms will be out of harmony. 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. Each personality is unique because the configuration of energy of the soul that formed it is unique. It is he 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.

  The personality does not operate independently from the soul. To the extent that a person is in touch with spiritual depths, the personality is soothed because the energy of consciousness is focused on its energy core and not on its artificial facade, which is the personality.

  The personality sometimes appears as a force running rampant in the world with no attachment to the energy of its soul. This situation can be the origin of what we call an evil human being, and it can be the origin of a schizophrenic human being. 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. We consider ourselves responsible, for example, for the good deed that brings our neighbor and us together, or for responding to it positively, but we do not consider ourselves responsible for the argument between us and our neighbor, or for responding to it negatively. We consider ourselves responsible for having a safe trip if we take the time to check the condition of the car before starting, but if we speed around a car that, in our opinion, has been traveling too slowly, and almost cause an accident by doing that, we consider the other driver to be responsible. If we feed and clothe ourselves through our successful business, we credit ourselves. If we feed and clothe ourselves by burglarizing apartments, we blame our difficult childhood.

  For many of us, being held responsible is equal to getting caught. A friend who returns each year to his native Italy told me, with a twinkle in his eye, of a dinner out with his family. When the bill came, my friend’s father, who is fastidious, examined each scribbled item. After some study, he deciphered the last entry and recognized it to be a short expression that translates, roughly, “If it goes, it goes.” He called the waiter and asked, “What is this item?” The waiter shrugged, “It didn’t go.” Many of us feel that if a clerk gives us too much change, and we take it, our life has been affected only to the extent that we have come into an unexpected gain. In fact, each of our acts affects us in far-reaching ways.

  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.

  This is the way that we learned abo
ut physical reality as children, and that we refine our knowledge of it as adults. We learn the effect of crying when we are hungry, and we repeat the cause that brings us the effect that we desire. We learn the effect of putting a finger in a light socket, and we do not repeat the cause that produces that effect.

  We also learn about intentions and their effects through our experiences in physical reality, but learning that intentions produce specific effects, and what those effects are, proceed slowly when our learning must be done solely through the density of physical matter. Anger, for example, causes distance and hostile interactions. If we must learn this solely through physical experience, we may have to experience ten, or fifty, or one hundred and fifty circumstances of distance from another and hostile interaction before we come to understand that it is the orientation of anger on our part, the intention of hostility and distance, and not this particular action or that, which produces the effect that we do not want. This is predominantly the way that a fivesensory human learns.

  The relationship of cause and effect within the domain of physical objects and phenomena reflects a dynamic that is not limited to physical reality. This is the dynamic of karma. Everything in the physical world, including each of us, is a small part of dynamics that are more extensive than a fivesensory human can perceive. The love, fear, compassion, and anger that you experience, for example, are only a small part of the love, fear, compassion, and anger of a larger energy system that you do not see.

  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.