Seat Of The Soul

by Gary Zukav

  The splintered personality is not content. The contentment that it feels in one moment is replaced by anger or fear or envy in the next moment as conflicting aspects of itself struggle with each other. Your responses to the struggles between the conflicting aspects of yourself determine the way that you will evolve, consciously or unconsciously, through the experience of negative karma or positive, through fear and doubt or through wisdom. Your struggles themselves do not create karma or determine the way that you will evolve, only your responses to them.

  If your struggle with the conflicting parts of yourself is conscious, you are able to choose consciously the response that will create the karma that you desire. You will be able to bring to bear upon your decision an awareness of what lies behind each choice, and the consequences of each choice, and choose accordingly. When you enter into your decision-making dynamic consciously, you insert your will consciously into the creative cycle through which your soul evolves, and you enter consciously into your own evolution.

  This requires effort, but is it really more difficult than living through the consequences that follow a decision to act in anger, or selfishness, or fear when you know that with each decision to act without compassion you yourself will experience the discord, or fear, or anguish that you create in another? Is it not worth the effort to project yourself ahead into the probable consequences of each of your actions, at each point of choice, and see how you will feel in each instance, how comfortable you will be with each of the consequences, if doing that will allow you to harvest love, compassion and authentic 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.

  When it becomes necessary, for example, for the physical, emotional body of a person to heal, a dramatic shift in nutrition is often required wherein a person must release every one of his or her eating habits and take on the habits of eating certain foods that are much higher in vibration. Ninety percent of the person’s personality may not want to do that, but the ten percent that is choosing that path for the sake of health and wholeness has more power ultimately than the ninety percent that is fighting to remain where it is and have its own way, because the Universe backs that ten percent and not the ninety percent.

  Think in terms of what it means to make decisions and try to cause the rest of you to fall into alignment with them, of responsible choice, and as you move into the healing of who you are and the conscious journey toward what it is you want, recognize that the Universe backs the part of you that is of clearest intention.

  You are constantly receiving guidance and assistance from your guides and Teachers, and from the Universe itself. When you choose consciously to move toward the energy of your soul, you invite that guidance. When you ask the Universe to bless you in your effort to align yourself with your soul, you open a passageway between yourself and your guides and Teachers. You assist their efforts to assist you. You invoke the power of the nonphysical world. That is what a blessing is: the opening of a passageway between you and nonphysical guidance.

  A personality that is conscious of its splintered-ness, 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. It is the energy through which your soul is given the gracious opportunity to have a dry run at a life lesson, at a situation that, if you can see clearly, can be removed and healed within the confines of your private world of energy and not spill into a larger energy field of other souls. Temptation is a dress rehearsal for a karmic experience of negativity.

  The entire dynamic of temptation is the compassionate way of allowing you to see your potential pitfalls, and cleanse yourself before you can affect the lives of others. It is a form of decoy in which the negativity is compassionately drawn from you, if you can see that before you create karma. As you respond to the decoy, you cleanse yourself by becoming aware and not having to actually live through the experience. You cleanse yourself without creating karma and interaction with other souls. How exquisite is temptation. It is the magnet which draws your awareness to that which would create negative karma if it were allowed to remain unconscious.

  In other words, temptation is a thought form that is designed to draw possible negativity from the human energy system without harming others. The soul understands that. Left to its own device it would operate completely within the human energy system, without spilling over and contaminating the collective conscious.

  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 resists 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 fivesensory, 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.

  Temptation is the gracious way of introducing each soul to his or her power. When you are seduced or threatened by external circumstances, you lose power. They gain power over you. With each choice that you make to align yourself with the energy of your soul, you empower yourself. This is how authentic power is acquired. It is built up step by step, choice by choice. It cannot be meditated or prayed into being. It must be earned.

  When you choose to release anger, for example, you create an energy template around which your experiences will form. This energy pattern will draw to the surface the anger within you in order that you can release it. When you choose to challenge and to release a negative aspect of yourself, that aspect comes to the foreground. Everything starts to serve that purpose. Your dreams show you the archetypical dynamics of your anger. You find yourself continually in situations that generate anger within you. Your life appears to be distorted around anger, because that is the aspect of yourself that you have chosen to challenge, and the Universe has responded to your choice with compassion.

  When you consciously invoke growing, consciously invoke wisdom, you consciously invoke the parts of yourself that are not whole to come into the foreground of your life. With each recurrence o
f anger, or jealousy, or fear, you are given the choice to challenge it, or to give into it. Each time you challenge it, it loses power and you gain power. Each time you are tempted to become angry, or jealous, or fearful, and you challenge that feeling, you empower yourself. There would be no accumulation of strength inside if the choices that you make did not require discipline and intention.

  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 the soul begins with understanding that we are drawn automatically as a species to come to terms with power. Each human being is experiencing the causes and effects of his or her choices, his or her desires to fill in the empty, powerless places within him or her. This dynamic can be described in terms of an insecure humanity, but that is just the obvious. The mechanism at work is the journey toward genuine, authentic empowerment.

  This is why each human being struggles so deeply with power: the lack of it, the acquisition of it, what it is really, how one should have it. Underlying every crisis, emotional, spiritual, physical and psychological, is the issue of power. Depending upon the lens that you wear to interpret your crisis, you will either step closer to your soul or closer to the Earth.

  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.

  CHAPTER 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.

  Recognition of your own addictions requires inner work. It requires that you look clearly at the places where you lose power in your life, where you are controlled by external circumstances. It requires going through your defenses. Even when striving for clarity, or when outer circumstances-such as an injury caused by driving drunk, or a marriage wrecked by promiscuity-provide evidence of an addiction, the personality often clings to a perception of its addiction as a mere problem, initially, as a small problem, then as a bigger problem, and then as a significant problem.

  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. We do not want to do that because it is our nature to resist change. Therefore, we resist acknowledging our addictions.

  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.

  An addiction can be anesthetized. A sexual addiction, for example, can be made dormant within a relationship by a fear of losing the security of the relationship, but it cannot be healed without a recognition that it is there, and an understanding of the dynamic that lies beneath it. Unless this takes place, it will break through the relationship, or the facade of monogamy, at those moments when the personality feels most insecure, or most threatened. At these times, the personality will feel a sexual attraction to others.

  Sexual addictions are the most universal within our species because the issues of power are tied so directly to the learning of sexuality within the human structure. Sexuality and issues of power were created within our species to complement each other. That is why each human being who is sexually out of control actually has issues of power in which he or she is out of control with his or her own power. At heart, they are identical. A person cannot be in

  his or her own power center and be sexually out of control or dominated by the sexual energy current. These cannot exist simultaneously.

  What is the dynamic behind sexual addiction?

  The experience of addictive sexual attraction is a signal to the experiencer that in that moment he or she is experiencing powerlessness, and is desiring to feed upon a weaker soul. This is the dynamic beneath all addictions: the desire to prey upon a soul that is more shattered than oneself. This is as ugly to look at as it is to experience, but it is the central core of negativity within our species.

  Sex without reverence, like business without reverence, and politics without reverence, and any activity that is done without reverence, reflects the same thing: one soul preying upon another weaker soul. The way out of a sexual addiction, therefore, is to remind yourself when you feel that attraction, that you are, in that moment, powerless, and desiring to prey upon a soul that is weaker than yourself.

  In other words, when you are feeling the draw of a sexual addiction, consider simultaneously that you are in a mode of powerlessness that causes a desire to use others to surface within you. That desire feels like a sexual attraction. Remind yourself clearly of what it is that is being ignited in you. That does not mean that you do not physically feel a connection or an attraction, but, underneath it, what causes you to want to act is a different dynamic, one of powerlessness.

  Allow this consciousness to penetrate deeply within you so that, at that point, if you want to act on your addiction, you need to walk through your own reality.

  If you are married, or in a monogamous relationship, remind yourself that acting upon your impulse may, or will, cost you your marriage, or your relationship. Ask yourself if what you want to do is worth that. If you are healthy, remind yourself that acting upon your impulse may cost you your health, because you do not know whether or not the partner that you have chosen carries a disease, such as AIDS. Ask yourself if what you want to do is worth that risk.

  Remind yourself that the partner to whom you are most likely drawn is drawn equally to others, as are you, that he or she has no more feeling for you than you
have for him or her. You can be assured that this is the case because the sexual attraction that you have felt for this person is a response in you of a weakness detection system, so to speak, that you have used to scan those around you. When it locates a person who is weak enough to be susceptible to you, to be seduced by you, it triggers within you the experience of sexual attraction. Will you advance your masculinity, or your femininity, by exploiting the weakness of this person? Will that gain you what you want to gain?

  Remind yourself that you both have chosen to interact sexually in ways that do not ignite your feelings because, if your feelings were awakened, they would only let you know that the person you are drawn to is no more emotionally involved with you than you are with him or her. It is one thing to think that you are sexually involved with someone and not feeling anything. It is another to face that neither is your partner feeling anything for you.

  Look closely at the dynamic in which you are involved, and you will see that when one soul seeks to prey upon a weaker soul, and a weaker soul responds, both souls are the weaker soul. Who preys upon whom? The logic of the fivesensory personality cannot grasp this, but the higher order logic of the heart sees it clearly. Is there truly a difference when two consciousnesses are trying to link into a dynamic that ultimately will lead to balance when both have identical missing pieces? What causes the need to dominate, for example, is the same that causes the need to be submissive. It is merely the choice of which role the soul wishes to play in working out the identical struggle.