Soul Development
by Diane Linsley
I once sat in a three-hour session with a Zen teacher in Boulder,
Colorado. He led me through the Mondo Zen process, which
helped to dissolve my ego boundaries until I experienced a kensho,
which is a short-lived but profound experience of the Transcendent.
When the kensho came to an end, I watched with fascination as my
ego gradually reconstructed itself. I started crying, and the teacher asked me what I was thinking.
I told him that I was seeing my ego as a visual metaphor. It looked like a huge building. I could see many things about the building that I wanted to change, but I didn't know how, and I felt ashamed. At the same time, I was experiencing a profound feeling of self-compassion.
He replied that this is why we do spiritual work. We don't go into the Transcendent to escape from the suffering of the ego. We do it in order to see the ego more clearly. It's a humbling experience to see what we need to change. Each time we go through this cycle, the ego matures a little more.
The Different Parts of Ourselves
We are made up of different parts or layers. When we incarnate, we put on these layers, as if we are putting on clothes.
Various spiritual traditions use different systems and terminology. In this article, I'm using very basic terms and concepts.
1. Pure Awareness - Also called Spirit in some traditions. This is hard to describe because it has no physical, mental or emotional aspects. It is pure awareness without any content. You may only be aware of it when you have an experience of witnessing, but it's always present in the background.
2. Soul - Also called the Individuality or the Individual Spirit. All of your mortal, premortal and afterlife experiences are stored in the soul. The soul progresses as it acquires more experience.
3. Astral - Before incarnating, the soul is given an astral body. This body includes emotions, imagination, and creative potentials. During an out-of-body experience (OBE or astral projection), your attention moves from the physical body to the astral body. Your soul doesn't leave the body (or you would die). Only your focus of attention shifts from one body to another.
4. Etheric - The etheric body (energy body) contains your life force or chi. The etheric body maintains the health of the physical body. Within days after death, the etheric body dissolves.
5. Physical - Now it's time to incarnate in a physical body.
6. Ego-Personality - The ego isn't a body. It's a construct like a map. I like to call it your map of reality, which includes all of your beliefs about yourself and the world. Your map of reality was created by you (mostly unconsciously) to help you function in the physical world. Your true self is the map maker - the person holding the map.
The Purpose of the Ego
Your ego-personality is unique to this lifetime. Along with your physical body, it was created to help your soul experience mortality. Your soul is a unique individual, but it's not the same as your ego-personality. You can verify this by doing spiritual work that takes you beyond the ego.
The ego is not necessarily a "bad guy," as some people believe. It is simply the most recent step in human development. For this reason, it's still immature. The ego is what distinguishes us from animals. Animals lack the problems of the ego, but they also lack the freedom that comes with ego.
The soul learns from having an ego that presents all sorts of challenges. The soul's job is to work with this unruly ego and help it mature. Those whom we call great souls are people who worked very hard to master their egos. The soul develops its character traits by working on the ego.
You can't permanently get rid of the ego, but you can experience moments of egoless awareness, as I did in the Zen experience. This can help you separate from the ego long enough to see it more clearly.
You have built-in ego voices that help you function in the physical world. These voices have jobs to do, but they are at different stages of maturity in each individual. Immature voices cause many problems. This becomes clear when you do Voice Dialogue, which is a highly effective spiritual practice.
"The ego is frightened by death because ego is part of the incarnation and ends with it. That is why we learn to identify with our soul, as the soul continues after death. For the soul, death is just another moment." ~Ram Dass
The Soul's Purpose
"Call nothing thy own except thy soul. Love not what thou art but what thou may become." ~Dale Wasserman, Man of La Mancha
The purpose of life is to bring into physical reality the potentials we have, which were created in the astral body before incarnating. We grow as we work on bringing these potentials to fruition.
In Christian terms, this means that our purpose is to become what God created us to be. This may sound like predestination, but it's not. It is the soul's greatest joy to become the magnificent soul that God intends it to be. You will certainly never be happy trying to be someone else! And why settle for anything less than your highest potential? God helps us to become what he desires us to be. We just have to trust in Him and do our part.
The Higher Self
In my early forties, I had several spiritual experiences, including meeting my higher self, enlightenment, and a near-death experience.
My year-long experience of enlightenment was profound, and it was miserable to come back to the ego. Eventually, I came to understand that the soul needs the ego-personality in order to progress.
Of course, the ego must be killed in the sense of being transcended. Until you have transcended the ego, you are its slave. The ego that has been mastered by the soul is a valuable servant.
The higher self is the soul's highest potential - what the soul is working toward. An encounter with your higher self is a life-changing experience that helps you see what you are capable of. The higher self is outside of space-time, existing as a future possibility.
When I saw my higher self, it seemed to be a thousand years in the future. It was overwhelming, but it gave me an idea of where I am heading. The higher self is my soul's ideal self. And it's my future self - way out in the future!
You came into this world with nothing, and you will leave with nothing except for a more developed soul.
Pure Awareness
While reading Ken Wilber's book, The Simple Feeling of Being, I desperately wanted to understand what he was talking about. I decided to meditate every day on the question, "Who am I?"
One day, as I lay in a recliner and repeated this question over and over, all physical sensations vanished as I went into the state of "body asleep, mind awake." I kept going deeper and deeper. Finally, the last sounds and images of the astral body vanished as I went beyond the astral into pure awareness.
This state was absolute "no-thing-ness" - like outer space with no stars. There was awareness, but no objects of awareness. I don't know how long I was in this state because there was no sense of time.
Then I saw a flash of light like a supernova exploding out of the darkness, and everything began to come back in reverse order, piece by piece, until I was "re-incarnated" as my whole self again. When the last layer (ego) came back, I exclaimed, "Wow! That was amazing!!"
Having an intellectual understanding and having an experience are two different things. I often have spontaneous experiences first, and then I go looking for explanations. Alternatively, I may read about a concept and then have a personal experience to verify its truth. I wrote this website in the hope of encouraging you to have your own experiences.
Here's a higher self meditation.
Be well,
Diane Linsley
Home
