The Soul

I grew up Catholic. In religion class I was told that I had a soul. I always wondered what this was and where it was. I wondered why it was considered separate from me. Eventually I concluded that I didn’t care about something that wasn’t me.

“If you sin your soul will be tainted,” a nun told me once. “Your soul won’t go to heaven.” 

“Sure, but what about me?” I asked. “That’s great for my soul, but what happens to me after I die?”

I never got a satisfactory answer to that.

Over the decades I meditated and visualized and tried to find my connection to Spirit. It’s only recently (when I wrote my book The Old Soul) that I twigged on what those nuns were trying to tell me. (I don’t think they understood it either. It’s what happens when you perform a ritual or repeat dogma without any understanding.)

For some reason there is a physical universe and an angelic realm. Materialists never understand this distinction because they believe that when you die, you’re dead. This low consciousness belief I call the Man is Meat Theory of Life: When the body dies your consciousness disappears from the universe forever. Uh, no.

The point of life is to get beyond these childish ideas and to find the higher self; to understand your personal connection to God/Spirit. Materialists (fascists, communists, Nazis, dictators of every stripe) don’t understand this. When they come to power they tear down churches and religious buildings in an attempt to prevent the people from finding their connection to the divine.

What exists in the angelic realm? Souls. Souls are non-corporeal consciousness that yet have personalities. Personalities develop because of the experiences gained while incarnating in the physical universe. Joe is meek and mild, Karen is boisterous, Pete is sensitive, Mary is compassionate. These traits develop by living lives in various environments and cultures on earth. 

There’s only one problem: The body can’t contain the energy of the soul.

When you incarnate you have to leave most of your consciousness behind. The part left behind is the soul.

So, the soul actually IS you. The challenge in the material universe is to discover that.

According to various spiritual leaders, channellers, and gurus, the biology contains an esoteric component: a gateway to the angelic realm and the higher self. The more of your soul you can invite into your corporeal body, the healthier you are, and the more aware you become.

“Sounds pretty simple bro, so how about a formula or a twelve-step procedure to get there?”

Well, there’s another problem I forgot to mention. The soul exists in the angelic realm, which is (for want of a better world) multidimensional. It’s beyond the linear, 3D box we’re living in. Asking a question like “How do I do find my soul?” is unanswerable because it’s utterly personal. What works for one person may not work for another. There’s no twelve-step process because that’s a linear idea. The soul is non-linear.

The Divine Plan

I’m not bright enough to understand what the divine plan is. I used to think I did, but the wiser I get, the dumber I get. All I know is that when I connect to my soul for those brief moments, I feel more ME. I wish I could be connected that way 24 hours a day.

Apparently the physical universe is very, very important, for it allows Spirit/God to experience and thus develop divine personalities, or aspects, of Itself. When you go from a divine (soul) personality connected to God, and come to earth, you experience from a completely different and isolated POV. The body is a separate unit and so human consciousness always perceives from a unique perspective. All of us literally have a different angle on life. Geometrically speaking, we always occupy unique coordinates in time and space, even during the same event. That’s why ten different people will have ten different accounts of an accident.

When  human consciousness reunites with the soul at “death,” that unique perspective caries forward. “Death” is just that portion of your consciousness that inhabited the body, returning to the soul in the angelic realm. It’s a re-uniting of awareness.

A personality results from experiencing in the physical universe from unique coordinates in time and space. Maybe that’s why it’s so important. Otherwise reincarnation makes no sense to me. Why separate yourself from a place where everything is beautiful and filled with love in order to dumb yourself down and suffer in a physical body, where you try to attain that which you already are before you got here?

Yeah, I’ve heard the stuff about incarnating to earth to advance the vibration of the planet and the galaxy, but that’s a childish explanation. Explain to me what all the suffering is for?

“This is a planet of free choice and every soul chooses to come here and participate in a Great Experiment. Over thousands of years, humanity collectively made the choice to go to low consciousness. Now we’re working on cleaning up the mess we made.”

OK, that’s a little better. But why create a “planet of free choice” in the first place that has led to so much suffering?

There’s no good answer to that, other than, “Earth is the Wild Wild West. Only the most adventurous souls come here. Nobody forced you, so enjoy the ride. It’ll be over in 80 years and you can go back to Spirit.”

I can buy that. But it doesn’t have the sacredness I associate with a divine plan. What’s sacred about suffering?

“It feels so good when you stop doing it.”

Nah. I’ve learned that there’s no value or sacredness to experiencing anything negative. You don’t learn anything except that you don’t want to suffer any more. I learned that when I had a personal bout of suicidal depression some years ago. You don’t get brownie points for feeling bad.

The answer is that we’re not supposed to suffer. Suffering occurs when we put up barriers to our own divinity. That makes sense because we’re all responsible for the decisions we make. We are free to reject the programming given to us by parents and society. The earth experience  is a gigantic, magnificent test that we all wanted to take. It’s basically a game of hide-and-seek that we all choose to play. “Can I find myself even though the magnificent part of me is hidden?” When I look at life in that way I feel lighter.

One thing I’m certain of: If I can ever bond with my soul well enough I’ll have the answers to all of the esoteric questions about the meaning of life. (Then I won’t have to write blog posts like this, and I can give you all the answers.) For reasons I don’t understand, part of the Game on earth is to hide human consciousness from the soul, and to determine whether human beings are bright enough to see their spiritual component.

I’ve tried the intellectual and scientific route to discover the meaning of life. For me it just leads to enormous complexity as our scientific understanding broadens, and more and more data becomes available. That’s a good segue into a dream I had last night.

 My Dream

I dreamed that Bernie Sanders somehow won the Democratic nomination. He was debating Trump on a stage somewhere. The two candidates were throwing down on each other, and it was pretty nasty. Everybody in the audience was really into it, shouting when their guy made a point.

Then something happened to Bernie. He’s 78 years old, and had an incident with his heart last year. Bernie was firing back at Trump when his face went white and he stopped speaking. He started mumbling, “I can’t do this anymore, I don’t want to do this anymore.”

The audience quieted. You could hear a pin drop in the place, wondering whether the old guy was going to drop over. I expected Trump to go over and wallop Bernie and declare victory. Instead, he walked slowly over to the older man with his arms apart. “Come, brother,” he said. “Let’s stop the fighting and try to work together despite our differences.”

Bernie recovered and stood up straight. He walked right into Trump’s arms and the two men hugged each other. “Come on,” Trump says, “let’s go backstage and get a doctor to look you over.”

The two men walked off the stage and the debate was over.

The media was silenced. For the first time in world history, none of the talking heads had anything to say.

That was the end of the dream. There was a really good feeling about it. The takeaway?  From something nasty, hopefully understanding and compassion for the other side will come forth. Maybe Bernie won’t win the nomination, but whoever the candidates are, understanding and compassion is what is needed.