Seat Of The Soul

by Gary Zukav

  Authentic needs are the needs that are always met by the Universe. The Universe is that which supplies you with your authentic needs. You are always being given opportunities to love and be loved, for example, yet ask yourself how many times in your life you have squandered these opportunities.

  By learning to respond to your authentic needs and by allowing your artificial ones to drop aside as unnecessary defense mechanisms, you become more open and understanding and compassionate with others. There is a natural give and take in the course of every human life. Each human being has authentic and non-authentic needs, and that is where the natural grit for the flow between us comes from in the living environment. You begin to learn to give and take as you begin to work through an understanding of what your real needs are, and learn to compromise and give and transcend when it comes to the needs of those parts of yourself that are not genuine or do not enhance your development.

  If you see clearly through your own authentic needs, you will see that what you are really feeling threatened by when you experience an artificial need is the loss of your power, and, therefore, rather than being able to address it directly, you create an artificial need that does the speaking for you. Learn to address the real need so that you do not have to burden yourself with behavioral patterns that are not true to your own nature, that cloud you, that give you some artificial persona that you have to live up to.

  Begin by truly watching your own needs in action where they are real and where they are not, and where they are not, expect to experience a negative emotion. Work on becoming one step detached from that feeling so that you are no longer blinded by it or unaware that you are feeling it. Become a step away so that you can let it begin to work its way through you without penetrating as deeply as it does in terms of creating action and negative thoughts and emotional withdrawals and all the other reactions it creates within you. Become one step detached from it, and every time that you are able to see it you will become more and more and more detached.

  You will begin to be able to see the illusion in motion, and that is a part of authentic power.

  CHAPTER 15: POWER

  What is the nature of power? What does it mean to be a truly powerful human being?

  Power is not the ability to exert your will upon another person. There is no inner security in that kind of power. That is an attribute of time, and as time changes, that changes, too. Do you have a strong body that others cannot challenge? That will change. What will you do then?

  Do you have a physical beauty that can be used to influence others? That will change. What will you do then? Do you have a cleverness that maneuvers others? What happens when you are too tired to use it, or you miss the opportunity?

  If you are not at home in the world, you live in the fear of one who can never truly relax and enjoy Life. Is this power? There is no power in fear, or in any of the activities that are generated by fear. There is no power in a thought form of fear, even if it is supported by armies. The armies of Rome disappeared more than a millennia ago, but the force of the life of a single human that Roman soldiers put to death continues to shape the development of our species. Who had the power?

  You are only as powerful as that for which you stand. Do you stand for more money in the bank and a bigger house? Do you stand for an attractive mate? Do you stand for imposing your way of thinking upon others? These are the stands of the personality seeking to satisfy its wants. Do you stand for perfection, for the beauty and compassion of each soul? Do you stand for the power of love and the clarity of wisdom? Do you stand for forgiveness and humbleness? These are the stands of the personality that has aligned itself with its soul. This is the position of a truly powerful personality.

  Power is energy that is formed by the intentions of the soul. It is Light shaped by the intentions of love and compassion guided by wisdom. It is energy that is focused and directed toward the fulfillment of the tasks of the soul upon the Earth, and the development of the personality as a physical instrument of the soul that is appropriate to those tasks. It is the force that shapes the illusion into the images of the souls that are creating it, and not those of their personalities.

  What does this mean?

  There is a continual energy exchange between souls. This exchange is splintered when the personality is splintered. Energy, power, leaves a splintered personality through each of its different parts. If one part of you fears the loss of your job, and another fears the loss of a relationship, and another dreads confrontation with an unpleasant coworker, power flows from you without your conscious control. This is how the energy dynamics of an unempowered personality work.

  When energy leaves you in fear or distrust, it cannot bring you anything but discomfort or pain. When energy flows from your system in fear or distrust, you experience a physical feeling of pain or discomfort in the part of your body that is associated with the particular energy center that is losing power. When you fear for your ability to protect and care for yourself in the world, to pay your rent, for example, or to keep yourself safe from physical or emotional harm-when you see power as external and you feel that you do not have enough of it to insure your well-being or your safety-you experience discomfort or pain in the area of your stomach, in the area of your solar plexus. What we call anxiety is the experience of power leaving through the energy center that is located in this area of the body. An anxiety attack is a massive loss of power from your system through that energy center. Power losses affect the surrounding parts of the body. Power loss through this center, for example, can cause indigestion. If it is chronic or acute, it can ulcerate the stomach.

  When you fear that your ability to love or to be loved is threatened, when you fear, for example, expressing your own love or receiving love from another, you experience physical discomfort or pain in the region of your chest, near your heart. What we experience, literally, as heartache is the experience of power leaving in fear or distrust through this energy center. Have you lost a mate, or a child, or someone very dear to you? Sort through your experience. Determine what it is that you felt. You will discover that your body hurt, that you were in pain in the vicinity of your chest. That is the experience of power leaving through that energy center. That is what a heartache is, the loss of power through your heart center. Chronic or acute loss of power through the heart center results, literally, in an attack of the heart. There is more to myocardial infarction, to heart attack, than cholesterol in the blood and other conditions of the physical system.

  Every distress and every dysfunction of the physical body, every illness, can be understood in terms of power loss to an external circumstance or object through one of several energy centers within the body. You lose power when you rage against an injustice. You lose power when you are threatened by another person, or other people. You lose power when you distance yourself from your fellow humans out of resentment or bitterness, or a sense of disappointment or unworthiness or superiority. You lose power when you long for something or someone, when you grieve, and when you envy another. Beneath all of these is fear, fear that you are vulnerable, that you are not able to cope without the person or the situation that you miss, that you are at a disadvantage without that which you envy. You lose power whenever you fear. That is what a loss of power is.

  You do not stop losing power by refusing to recognize your fear, by anesthetizing yourself to what you feel. The road to authentic power is always through what you feel, through your heart. The way of the heart is one of compassion and emotional perception. Therefore, it is never appropriate to suppress an emotion, or to disregard what you feel. If you do not know what you feel, you cannot come to know the splintered nature of your personality, and to challenge those aspects and those energies that do not serve your development.

  By remaining in your power you do not become a static energy system, one that hoards energy to itself. You become a stable energy system, capable of conscious acts of focus and intention. You become a magnet for those who are illumined an
d those who want to be. At issue is the manner in which energy flows from you. When energy leaves you in any way except in strength and trust, it cannot bring back to you anything but pain and discomfort. An authentically empowered human being, therefore, is a human being that does not release its energy except in love and trust.

  What are the characteristics of an authentically empowered human being?

  An authentically empowered person is humble. This does not mean the false humility of one who stoops to be with those who are below him or her. It is the inclusiveness of one who responds to the beauty of each soul, who sees in each personality and in the actions of each personality the soul incarnate upon the Earth. It is the harmlessness of one who treasures and honors and reveres life in all its forms. Are you concerned for the Earth? It is the humble who have never harmed the Earth.

  What does it mean to be harmless?

  It means being so strong that you need not harm a creature. That is what it means: you are so able and empowered that the idea of showing power through harm is not even a part of your consciousness. Without genuine humility, you cannot have this kind of power because power leaves you when you feel that the situation that you are in, or the people that you are with, do not command your respect.

  A humble spirit walks a familiar world. People are not strangers to it; they are its companions upon the Earth. A humble spirit does not ask for more than it needs, and what it needs, the Universe provides. A humble spirit is content with the fulfillment of its authentic needs, and is not burdened with artificial needs.

  Humble spirits are free to love and to be who they are. They have no artificial standards to live up to. They are not drawn to the symbols of external power. They do not compete for external power. This does not mean that they do not take pride in what they can do well, or that they do not focus their efforts to produce the best that they can, or are not spurred onward by their fellow humans when that is appropriate to the situation.

  To compete means to strive for something in company or together, to aim at something, to try to reach something, to seek after something with others. If the something that you aim for is prestige or notice or a gold medal instead of a tin medal, it is your personality that is motivating the competition. You are striving to empower yourself at the expense of others, to assert your superiority over another, or over other human beings. You are striving for external power. By striving for this reward and that reward, you ask the world to assess and acknowledge your value before you can value yourself. You place your sense of self worth in the hands of others. You have no power even if you win every gold medal that the world can produce.

  If what you seek is the joy of giving without reservation, of giving with purpose and joy and consciousness all that you have to the effort that you and other souls are creating jointly, your competition is the expression of your soul. When the effort that finishes last in time has the same value as the effort that finishes first, when the quality of the immortal, timeless soul is honored instead of the time-bound personality and body, when your giving is not impeded by fear of vulnerability, when the size or color or shape of what you receive or do not receive does not matter, you will know the power of a humble spirit.

  An authentically empowered person is one who forgives. Forgiveness is not a moral issue. It is an energy dynamic. When most people forgive they do not want those that they forgave to forget that they forgave and forgot. This kind of forgiveness manipulates the person who is forgiven. It is not forgiveness. It is a means of acquiring external power over another.

  Forgiveness means that you do not carry the baggage of an experience. When you choose not to forgive, the experience that you do not forgive sticks with you. When you choose not to forgive, it is like agreeing to wear dark, gruesome sunglasses that distort everything, and it is you who are forced every day to look at Life through those contaminated lenses because you have chosen to keep them. You wish everyone else to see the world that way because you wish to see the world that way, and it is indeed the world that you are looking at, but it is only you who sees it. You are looking through the lenses of your own contaminated love.

  Forgiveness means that you do not hold others responsible for your experiences. If you do not hold yourself accountable for what you experience, you will hold someone else accountable, and if you are not satisfied with what you experience, you will seek to change it by manipulating that person. Complaining, for example, is exactly that dynamic of wanting someone to be responsible for what you experience, and to fix things for you.

  Complaining is a form of manipulation, but you are free to move beyond that into the next step, which is perception and sharing without manipulation. What is at stake is not your sharing, but the intention behind it. When complaining is used instead of sharing, that is what becomes negative, but not the sharing. It is how you cast the sharing, or shape it, before-the intention with which you share. Before you share, ask yourself, “What is my intention in sharing this? Am I looking for a particular response?” Use this as a way of centering your attitude before committing energy to words. When you assume responsibility for what you experience and share what you experience in a spirit of companionship, that is the same as forgiveness.

  When you hold someone responsible for what you experience, you lose power. You cannot know what another person will do. Therefore, when you depend upon another person for the experiences that you think are necessary to your well-being, you live continually in the fear that they will not deliver. The perception that someone else is responsible for what you experience underlies the idea that forgiveness is something that one person does for another. How can you forgive another person for the fact that you have chosen to step out of your power?

  When you forgive you release critical judgment of yourself as well as of others. You lighten up. You do not cling to negative experiences that resulted from decisions that you made while you were learning. That is regret. Regret is the double negativity of clinging to negativity. You lose power when you regret. If one person grieves at his or her experiences while another is able to laugh, who is the lighter? Which is harmless? The heart that dances is the innocent heart. The one that cannot laugh is burdened. It is the dancing heart that is harmless.

  This does not mean that you do not learn from what you have experienced, and apply that in each moment as you make your decisions. That is responsible choice. If you are doing all that you can to the fullest, of your ability as well as you can, there is nothing else that is asked of a soul.

  An authentically empowered human being is clear in his or her perceptions and thinking. Clarity is the perception of wisdom. It is seeing with wisdom. It is being able to perceive and understand the illusion, and to let it play. It is being able to see beyond the activities of the personality to the force of the immortal soul. It is being able to understand what it is that is striving to come into being-the health and integration of the personality and the evolution of the soul. It is the ability to recognize nonphysical dynamics as they appear within the world of time and matter. It is understanding the laws of karma and attraction and their relationship to what you experience. It is being able to see the role of responsible choice and choosing accordingly in each moment.

  Clarity is the ability to see the soul in action in the physical world. It results from choosing to learn through wisdom instead of through fear and doubt. Clarity allows you to experience your fellow humans with compassion instead of with judgment. Can you not see the karma that another is creating for himself or herself by choosing the currents of anger or greed? Have you not made the same choices yourself? Have you not felt vulnerable? Have you not struck out at others? Clarity brings forth true compassion, the sharing of passion with others. It allows the energy of the heart to flow.

  Clarity turns pain into suffering. It sees the dynamic of the personality that is the cause of the pain, and the relationship of that dynamic and that experience to the evolution of the soul. It is the perception in each moment that every
thing is designed for wholeness and perfection, and every aspect serves ultimately a beautiful learning. An authentically empowered personality sees the perfection of each situation and each experience for the evolution of each soul and the maturation of each personality involved. It sees perfection in the smallest details everywhere. Wherever it looks, it sees the hand of God.

  Clarity evaporates fear. It allows you to choose the vertical path and to stay on it. It allows you to understand the dynamics beneath your addictions-what your addictions serve and how they operate-and to make the choices that will disempower them and empower you. It allows you to challenge not merely a force that you do not understand, such as attraction to alcohol, or a drug, or indiscriminate sex, but a dynamic that you understand in terms of its causes and its effects. It allows you to choose consciously, and to know why you are choosing as you do.

  Clarity allows you to see the world of physical matter for what it is, a learning environment that is created jointly by the intentions of the souls that share it. Therefore, it allows you to recognize the effects of the intentions that shape the personal reality of each human at work at levels of reality that are created jointly. It allows you to see, for example, the extent to which relationships between nations have been shaped by the energy of the personality and the extent to which they have been shaped by the energy of the soul, and to recognize that the energy of the soul is entirely lacking at this level, and at most others.

  Clarity allows you to see that the decision-making process within the human condition is linked to the evolution of others, and in what way. It allows you to see that you participate in the evolution of joint energy dynamics, such as the archetypes-the collective human ideas-of sacred partnership, male, female, wife, and priest through the decisions that you make. It allows you to see that your contribution to the evolution of your soul is precisely the decisions that you make at each moment, and that those decisions are embodied in the physical reality that you share with your fellow humans.