by Gary Zukav
The next layer of your reality is your school, or the place where you work. This level of reality is also a cocreation, and is more impersonal than the reality that you share with your family. Not all of the perceptions that are central to your personal reality are central to this reality. For example, you may have discovered that when you pray, you get answers, but this perception is not necessary to the functioning of your university, or your business. It may not be appropriate to share this perception with the person sitting beside you in the lecture hall, or with the receptionist in the front office.
The next layer of your reality includes those people that you come into contact with in the course of your living, such as the people from whom you buy your airline tickets, the people at the grocery store, and the bus drivers and the merchants in your town. The beliefs that you hold as a participant in this and other more impersonal layers of your reality also are not all as intimate and personal as the beliefs that you hold in your personal reality. In these arenas you share your personal beliefs that you feel are more aligned with the larger general atmosphere of beliefs upon our planet.
In other words, as you move outward from your personal reality, you move outward in bands of energy that are shared by more and more individuals with whom you have a great deal in common vibrationally. 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.
Not all the people on our planet know that there is a place called “Europe.” “Europe” is a majority perception upon our planet, but not a universal perception, such as “air. ” Consciously receiving answers to prayers is not a majority perception upon our planet. Therefore, you are free to tell the people at the grocery store that you hear answers when you pray, but you may decide not to share that perception for your own sense of safety, because you realize that their consciousnesses may not be able to accept that.
The next layer of your reality is your town or city, the next is your state, or area of the country, and the next is your culture, or nation. A nation is an aspect of the personality of Gala, the Earth’s soul, which, itself, is developing its personality and soul-hood. The group dynamic that is the United States is a personality aspect of Gala, as are the group dynamic that is Canada and the -group dynamic that is Greenland, and the group dynamic that is each nation. The individual human souls that participate in the evolution of these aspects of Gala form these group energy dynamics and, at the same time, their own developments are served by the karmic energy properties of these nations.
Consider the United States, for example, as simply one unit of energy that is evolving with a particular consciousness. The individual souls that pass through this collective consciousness expand it, create actions, create thought forms, create causes and effects, and that is how it accumulates karma. The relationship of these souls to their nation is like that of cells to a body. Your consciousness affects every cell in your body, and every cell in your body affects your consciousness. There is a mutuality. Each individual in the collective consciousness that is called the United States can be thought of as a cell in that nation, in dialogue.
The Earth school and the Earth are not the same. The Earth is a planet. With or without humanity, it would be. The purpose of the planet is double, so to speak. It has its own evolution, and part of its evolution includes the housing of a species called human. The Earth has agreed to interact with the human species, and to allow the development of this species to merge with its own consciousness. Part of this agreement can be understood as an
agreement that matter will be cocreated upon this planet with the consciousness of the Earth. Since the Earth now has creative residents, it responds to their energy. Our Species and the Earth form a mutual response system. This happens in the same way that Nature exists, and is also a cocreative adventure.
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 o1 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 groin energy system.
You contribute to the creation and the evolution of each of the collective consciousnesses in which you participate. If a person is French, he or she contributes to the evolution of the group consciousness that is called French. If a person is Catholic, he or she contributes to the group consciousness that is called Catholic.
In other words, the dynamic of creating reality operates at more than one level. While you are here you participate in the creation of both personal reality and impersonal reality. Just as you can participate in the creation of a building that will remain long after you are gone, you participate in the evolution of group energy dynamics that will remain after you are gone.
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 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.
As you move down from the top layer of the inverted pyramid to the layer beneath it, your experience reduces from being a part of the whole of human evolution to being a part of the evolution of male or female energy. In the next layer down, you become part of the evolution of Caucasian, or Negro, or mongoloid. In the next layer down you is part of the evolution of the energy field of the United States. In the next layer down you are part of the evolution of an individual whose experiences will include an aspect that participates in the evolution of military, an aspect that participates in th
e evolution of teacher, an aspect that participates in the evolution of father, and so on. Layer by layer, that is what the reality of each individual looks like.
From the top layer, which is all humanity, all humanness, each layer downward locates you more individually and more specifically.
The most impersonal consciousness, the human species, is the first layer. This consciousness then takes on personal attributes. It is personal that you are part of the United States. It is personal that you are a white male part of the United States, or a brown female part. These are parts of your personal experience and characteristics that serve the evolution of the whole. A university, by analogy, is a group dynamic. Each of the schools of a university-undergraduate, business, medicine, law is also a group energy system, a less Inclusive collective of group energy of souls in evolution. What happens within the schools affects the whole of the university itself. Then within a particular school there is the experience of a certain class, which is more personal, and after that the experience of the student himself or herself, which is intimately personal.
The reality of each individual is created b 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.
CHAPTER 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 t balance its energy, those characteristics become unnecessary and are replaced by others. This is how you grout As you come to realize, for example, that anger leads no where, 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.
Your dispositions, aptitudes, and attitudes reflect your intentions. If you are angry, fearful, resentful, or vengeful, your intention is to keep people at a distance. The human emotional spectrum can be broken down into two basic elements: love and fear. Anger, resentment, and vengeance are expressions of fear, as are guilt, regret, embarrassment, shame, and sorrow. 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 creates 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. Their causes, their reasons, and their contributions to the evolution of the soul, and to the evolution of the souls with whom the soul shared its life, are revealed. What has been balanced, what has been learned, brings the soul ever closer to its healing, to its integration and wholeness.
If the soul sees that it is necessary, it will choose, also with the help of its Teachers and guides, another incarnation. It will draw to itself the guides and Teachers that are appropriate to what it seeks to accomplish. It will consult with other souls whose evolution, like its own, will be mutually served by interactions within the physical arena. Then it will undertake again the massive, voluntary reduction of its energy, the infusion of its energy into matter, the calibration of its energy to an appropriate scale and range of frequencies, that is an incarnation into the learning environment of the Earth school, and the process begins again.
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.
The introduction of consciousness into the cyclic process of creation through which the soul evolves permits the creation of a world that is built upon the consciousness of the soul, a world that reflects the values and perceptions and experiences of the soul. It allows you to bring the energy of your soul consciously into the physical environment. It allows the consciousness of the sacred to fuse with physical matter.
The world in which we live has been created unconsciously by unconscious intentions. Every intention sets energy into motion whether you are conscious of it or not. You create in each moment. Each word that you speak carries consciousness-more than that, carries intelligence -and, therefore, and is an intention that shapes Light.
When you speak of a “marriage,” for example, you invoke a particular consciousness, a particular energy. When two people marry, the
y 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.