by Gary Zukav
You begin to see that what is necessary to the health of your partnership is identical with what is necessary to your own spiritual growth, that each of you holds the pieces that the other is missing. If you are jealous, for example, you will find that jealousy is what brings to the surface in your partner an aspect that needs to be healed, and that that aspect is mirrored in yourself. You begin to value your partner’s contribution to your development. You experience that his or her perceptions and observations are helpful, and, indeed, central, to your growth, that conversations between you stir deep waters.
You learn the roles of love and commitment and trust in making your partnership work. You learn that love alone is not enough, that without trust, you are not able to give and to receive the love that both of you have for each other. You learn that your commitment must be translated into a form that satisfies the needs of both you and your partner. You learn to value the needs of your partner as much as you value your own, because the partnership that you both want requires two healthy and inwardly secure individuals.
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. These are the emotions that empower words that can do either damage or can do so much healing. You learn that sharing your concerns with consideration and the intention to heal and trust in the process is the only appropriate avenue. As you approach your needs with courage instead of fear you ignite a sense of trust. The true human condition in its most perfect form has no secrets. It does not hide, but exists in clear love.
You learn not to do stupid and careless things to each other. You learn that wanting what you want is not enough, but that you must both want it deeply and create it every day, that you must bring it into being and hold it in being with your intentions. As the consciousness of each of you becomes lighter, your partnership becomes richer.
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.
The things that are the individual’s to learn in spiritual union with another individual are the group’s, the community’s and the nation’s to learn in spiritual union with other groups, communities and nations. The choice in each instance is between learning through fear and doubt or through wisdom, between the lower-frequency energy currents of the personality and the higher-frequency energy currents of the soul. If the anger of one personality toward another creates distance, shatters intimacy and causes defensiveness, the anger of one nation, or religion, or sex toward another produces the same. If the concern of one personality for another produces closeness, appreciation and mutual regard, the concern of one nation, or religion, or community for another produces the same. The dynamic is identical.
You are related to every form of Life upon this planet and beyond. As your soul evolves, you move into greater awareness of the nature of that relationship, and the responsibilities that you assume.
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.
A soul that is new to the human experience, for example, a soul that has evolved from the animal kingdom and is beginning its journey of human evolution, although there are very few of them at this point, begins within a certain frequency range, and for its own protection incarnates into a limited sphere of human life. It may incarnate into a remote region so that it can have a gentle life familiarizing itself with the human physical experience. 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.
In other words, a person that is living in a remote area in which the temptations of life and the definitions of good
and evil are far more clear, and in which there are not as many temptations, is not in the same karmic center as a soul that has chosen to incarnate as one who would have a larger sphere of influence within a family, or a community, or a nation. A 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.
As souls choose to participate consciously in more inclusive levels of interaction, they take on not only their own transformation, but also those of the larger collectives in which they participate. 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.
Within the sphere of possibilities and probabilities for the soul there exist many opportunities, including the possibility that the soul might choose, for example, its most remote path of growth instead of the one that is most natural to its energy, so to speak. If, in the privacy of his or her own spiritual choices, as he or she advances in faith and in courage and in feelings for his or her own humanity, a soul may well open that door which leads to greater awareness and to greater karmic influence and responsibility. Whereas that possibility might have existed with only a small probability at the time of the soul’s incarnation, a door that would open only under certain circumstances if this happened and then if that happened-it may become so that the soul does indeed find its way to that path.
Every micro consciousness, or individual soul, affects the macro consciousness 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 the personality, Jesus, encountered the Luciferic principle, the challenging principle of our species,
when he was offered dominion over the entire globe, the fulfillment of all that he could conceive, was he tempted? Yes, he was tempted. If he were not, there would have been no power in his choice. Were the choice of the path of glory that he chose not balanced against another of equal attraction, how could he have drawn such power from that choice? Authentic empowerment is not gained by making choices that do not stretch you.
When a soul chooses the vertical path, when it chooses to evolve consciously through responsible choice, it becomes capable of liberating itself from its own negativities. It reaches for authentic power. It takes on, so to speak, its own negativity, the unconscious intentions of the splintered parts of its personality. As a personality becomes conscious, as it evolves into a multisensory personality and becomes integrated, the frequency of its consciousness increases. It becomes whole. Its negativity’s drop away and the quality of its consciousness becomes lighter. It becomes able to see itself and those around it with compassion and clarity, with the wisdom of its soul.
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 negativity’s 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.
Great souls, such as the soul that was Gandhi, for example, run the risk of great contamination. 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.
The consciousness of a great soul is symbolic of the larger consciousness, the macro consciousness, that holds the same values and fears and guilt. That macro consciousness might be the collective consciousness of the United States, or the Soviet Union, or Ethiopia. The many souls that form that collective are in continual dialogue with its own. The great soul is the person who has taken on the task of change. If he or she is able to transcend fear, to act out of courage, the whole of its group will benefit and each one, in his or her own life, will be suddenly more courageous, though they may not see how or why.
Not all souls accomplish the tasks that they have set for themselves. As you look at the individuals who are in major positions of influence upon our planet you can see whether or not they are succeeding in their tasks of advancing humanity by the choices that they have made. Some have chosen to align themselves, like mannequins, with the dying consciousness of the fivesensory 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.
These souls represent a form of power that is no longer effective, but they have failed to understand that. They draw to themselves those whose consciousnesses are aligned symbolically and in terms of beliefs to their own. They choose to walk the shifting pattern of fear and selfishness. They exhibit great paranoiac energy, and, therefore, they attract to themselves, their governments and their militaries fellow human beings that have the same paranoiac desire to destroy life, as if the destruction of life will save our planet, but it will not.
Through the decisions that they have made, these souls have refused to acknowledge that the older forms of power, the perception of power as external, no longer will be tolerated upon the Earth. Nonetheless, the evolution from external power to authentic power is occurring now in full force, and so their decisions affect only how that shift will take place. They have chosen the path of fear and doubt, of trauma and pain.
The difference between a great soul that aligns itself with openness and growth and interdependence, that transcends its fear on behalf of itself and its collective, and one that does not is that the soul that chooses openness has a different active level of courage and insight and wisdom, and the one that does not has consistently weakened under the impact of the fear of the collective. Choice to choice to choice to choice, negativity upon negativity, and a Hitler is created. The soul that was Hitler had great potential as well.
Every soul that agrees consciously to bring to a level of human interaction the love and compassion and wisdom that it has acquired is trying through his or her own energy to challenge the fear patterns of that collective. 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.
CHAPTER 12: SOULS
Each human being has a soul. The journey toward individual soul-hood is what distinguishes the human kingdom from the animal kingdom, the vegetable kingdom and the mineral kingdom. Only the human kingdom has the experience of individual soul-hood. That is why its powers of creation are great.
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.
Consider, for example, the group soul of buffalo. There is one group soul of enormous impersonal energy that is called, “buffalo.” It is an enormous expansive sphere of impersonal energy that is buffalo consciousness. It exists at a level of simply energy dynamics, not individual selfhood. That energy is in continual movement. As it heightens in frequency, it can spill over into the next level, and it also can absorb other frequencies from a lower level, so the soul continues. It is a group soul, not individual. There are not individual buffalo souls within a whole. There is only one soul energy system wherein there is no individual-hood. Instinctual behavior is the way of the group soul.
Picture a movement that looks like the mouth of the Mississippi River. As you walk up the river from that place, the river grows more and more and more narrow until it reaches but a point of power. The open mouth area is analogous to a group soul. The size of it, the collective nature of it, is the group soul. This is the nature of the souls in the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. In other words, “cat” is a cat soul, “dolphin” is a dolphin soul, and so on.
Within the animal kingdom, there are graduations of intelligence and awareness. For example, dolphin, horse, and dog are not on the same wavelength. The consciousness of the dolphin is closer to the consciousness of the ape, and then closer to the consciousness of the dog, but the consciousness of the horse is on a level beneath them.
It is possible that the human soul can be produced through the evolution of the animal kingdom as a collective energy from the anima
l soul.
How does this happen?
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.
Let us say, arbitrarily, that the consciousness of the dog soul is twenty percentile points below that of the dolphin soul, twenty points less than the intelligence of the dolphin. If the group soul of dog produces high Light consciousness, it is possible for that consciousness to release itself from the group soul of dog and advance into and penetrate the consciousness of dolphin. Likewise, it is possible, and it does happen, that human beings’ souls come from the advanced soul energy of the dolphin soul or the ape soul, and begin their process of evolution into the human soul.
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. Animals are not micros of a macro. Cats, for example, do riot have individual souls or ego energy. They are merely physical manifestations of a huge macro system. That certain cats are scared and certain are comforted is merely the different numerous millions of frequencies that interact into the group cat soul.
Animals do not evolve through responsible choice as we do. Rather, the frequency of their consciousnesses becomes Lightened in the fullness of the evolution of their soul as a group. This does not mean that animals are not capable of individual acts of love. What of an animal that lays down its life for its human? That is as legitimate a sacrifice of love of life as it is for a human, because in that instance the animal realizes that it is willingly releasing its life. That, for an animal, is graduation to the human experience, or to its next higher level.