Authors: Gary Zukav
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, they 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.
Because spiritual, or sacred, partners can see from this perspective, they engage in a very different dynamic than do husbands and wives. The conscious evolution of the soul is not part of the structural dynamic of marriage. It does not exist within that evolution because when the evolutionary archetype of marriage was created for our species, the dynamic of conscious spiritual growth was far too mature a concept to be included. What makes a spiritual, or sacred, partnership is that the souls within the partnership understand that they are together in a committed relationship, but the commitment is not to physical security. It is rather to be with each other’s physical lives as they reflect spiritual consciousness.
The bond between spiritual partners exists as real as it does in marriage, but for significantly different reasons. Spiritual partners are not together in order to quell each other’s financial fears or because they can produce a house in the suburbs and that entire conceptual framework. The understanding or consciousness that spiritual partners bring to their commitment is different, and, therefore, their commitment is dynamically different. The commitment of spiritual partners is to each other’s spiritual growth, recognizing that that is what each of them is doing on Earth, and that everything serves that.
Spiritual partners bond with an understanding that they are together because it is appropriate for their souls to grow together. They recognize that their growth may take them to the end of their days in this incarnation and beyond, or it may take them to six months. They cannot say that they will be together forever. The duration of their partnership is determined by how long it is appropriate for their evolution to be together. All of the vows that a human being can take cannot prevent the spiritual path from exploding through and breaking those vows if the spirit must move on. It is appropriate for spiritual partners to remain together only as long as they grow together.
Spiritual partnership is a much freer and more spiritually accurate dynamic than marriage because spiritual partners come together from a position of spirit and consciousness. How spiritual partners merge and move their concept of partnership is a matter of free will. So long as they recognize that they bring the consequences of their choices into their partnership, and know the full extent of their choices, that is what influences the manner and direction that the partnership goes.
Spiritual partners commit, to a growing dynamic. Their commitment is truly a promise toward their own growth, to their own spiritual survival and enhancement, and not to their physical.
The archetype of spiritual partnership is new to the human experience. Because there is not yet a social convention for spiritual partnership, spiritual partners may decide that the convention of marriage, reinterpreted to meet their needs, is the most appropriate physical expression of their bond. These souls infuse the archetype of marriage with the energy of the archetype of spiritual partnership, as do marriage partners who have discovered in their togetherness that their bond is actually one of commitment to mutual spiritual growth rather than to physical survival or security or comfort.
Just as external power is no longer appropriate to our evolution, the archetype of marriage is no longer appropriate. This does not mean that the institution of marriage will disappear overnight. Marriages will continue to exist, but marriages that succeed will only succeed with the consciousness of spiritual partnership. The partners in these marriages contribute through their participation in them to the archetype of spiritual partnership.
When you bring the consciousness of your soul to your intention-setting process, when you choose to align yourself with your soul instead of with your personality, you create a reality that reflects your soul rather than your personality. When you look upon the experiences of your life as karmic necessities, when you react to your experiences as the products of an impersonal energy dynamic rather than the products of particular interactions, you bring the wisdom of your soul into your reality. When you choose to respond to life’s difficulties with compassion and love instead of fear and doubt, you create a “heaven on Earth”-you bring the aspects of a more balanced and harmonious level of reality into physical being.
The introduction of consciousness into the cyclical processes of creation at the point of intention, and at the point of reaction, allows choice. It permits the selection of alternatives. It brings consciousness to the process of evolution. Your intention and attention shape your experiences. What you intend, through the density of matter, through the densest level of Light, becomes your reality. Where your attention goes, you go.
If you attend to the negative aspects of life, if you choose to focus your attention on the weaknesses of others, on their faults and shortcomings, you draw to yourself the lower-frequency energy currents of disdain, anger and hatred. You put distance between yourself and others.
You create obstacles to your loving. Your energy and influence move slowly through the realm of the personality, the arena of time and space and matter. If you direct your energy into criticism of others with the intention to disempower them, you create negative karma.
If you choose to focus your attention on the strengths of others, on the virtues of others, on that part of others that strives for the highest, you run through your system the higher-frequency currents of appreciation, acceptance and love. Your energy and influence radiate instantaneously from soul to soul. You become an effective instrument of constructive change. If your intention is to align your personality with your soul, and if you focus your attention upon those perceptions that bring to you in each situation the highest-frequency currents of energy, you move toward authentic empowerment.
As you come to recognize the power of your consciousness, that what is behind your eyes, so to speak, holds more power than what appears in front of them, your inner and outer perceptions change. You cannot become compassionate with yourself without becoming compassionate with others, or with others without becoming compassionate with yourself. When you are compassionate with yourself and others, your world becomes compassionate. You draw to yourself other souls of like frequency, and with them you create, through your intentions and your actions and your interactions, a compassionate world.
As you come to seek and see the virtues and strengths and nobilities of others, you begin to seek and see them in yourself also. As you draw to yourself the highest frequency currents of each situation, you radiate that frequency of consciousness, and change the situation. You become more and more and more consciously a being of Light.
To become aware of the relationship between your consciousness and physical reality is to become aware of the law of karma, to see it in action. What you intend is what you become. If you intend to take as much from life and others as you can, if your thoughts are of taking instead of giving, you create a reality that reflects your intentions. You draw to yourself souls of like frequency, and together you create a taking reality. Your experiences then reflect your own orientation, and validate it. You see the people around you as personalities who take, rather than personalities who give. You do not trust them, and they do not trust you.
The creative dynamic of intention, the relationship between intention and experience, underlies quantum physics, our species’ most profound attempt to comprehend physical phenomena from the perspective of the fivesensory personality. Quantum physics was born of an intense and cumulative effort to understand the nature of physical light.
It is possible to build a device that reveals the wave-like nature of light, that causes light to produce phenomena that can only be produced by waves. It is also possible to make a device that detects particles of light, as though they were tiny pellets, and to measure the force of the impact of each particle. Yet, it is not possible for light to be described as a wave phenomenon and a particle phenomenon at the same time. In other words, it is not possible to describe the nature of light-literally, the shape of physical light-apart from the experimental apparatus that is used to determine it, and this depends upon the intention of the experimenter.