When we think about our spiritual lives and our path of consciousness, one thing we can feel pretty confident in is that what seems to be spiritually or divinely inspired is more chaotic and random than ordered. It’s not easy through all of this chaos to discern what it is we are trying to grow around as a soul-self. While I agree that the divine does seem to work in mysterious ways, I would suggest that it’s our ego-minds that are thinking that. When it comes to how we are growing as soul-selves, I think there is order in the chaos. I think what we need to grow around as a soul-self are spiritual or universal concepts that we uniquely embody. I also think there is a deeper significance to why were are trying to learn and grow around them.
In the last blog, Our Soul Ego Relationship – A Place Of Learning and podcast episode, The Soul-Ego Relationship: Friends, Enemies, Frenemies? I talked about the way in which we need to grow as a soul is embedded in our mind-body and soul-self. I also mentioned that I think this information gets embedded before we experience our awakening. That during that time, we are creating these thoughts, feelings, memories, actions, and experiences through the unconscious choices we made at the time around these spiritual concepts. This also included any previous life experiences. This gave us essentially all the information we needed, not just the choices we made around these concepts, but why we made the choices we did so that we can discover and understand their nature.
I think what we are doing in our lives is exploring the nature of these larger concepts for deeper understanding, integration, and connection. Concepts like trust, love, forgiveness, compassion, autonomy, or the nature of duality. All these really huge and complex subjects. And I think we are trying to understand them from many different angles.
However, concepts like autonomy or trust are very large in scope and not very specific. Our thoughts, feelings or memories may actually focus on more specific aspects of these concepts. When I say what aspect of a spiritual concept, it’s because these concepts are too huge to tackle all at once. Say that we have an issue around trust. Trust is a huge concept and there are many different ways in which we may not trust. We may not trust others to help us when we need it, we may not be able to trust our feelings and emotions with others, or we may not trust others to listen to what we have to say.
I have a bit of a musical background, so I tend to think of these huge concepts as spiritual themes and then the different aspects of these themes that we are here to explore as our personal variations on those themes. I think these variations act as soul patterns and are the specific ways we want to grow as a soul-self.
What I think these variations show us, what Carl Jung describes in the personal unconscious, is how we organize our collections of thoughts, feelings, and memories that are unique to us, and the choices we make around them. So, effectively, all the information about the choices we have made, and why we made them, are being held, and that information can be organized by themes and variations on those themes.
So what we are doing post-awakening is exploring these unconscious choices that we made around these concepts or themes and why we made them so that when we are confronted with the opportunities to grow around those same themes and variations, we can begin to make conscious choices motivated by a more connected soul-self. These are seen in the situations and experiences that we run into over and over again.
As we become more conscious, what is effectively happening is that we become more aware of the themes and their variations as they manifest or come up in our lives as situations and experiences. We can see them being played out almost like watching a play except the play is our life and we are the main characters. As our soul selves become a more present force in our lives we start to view the situations that bring up these themes for us with a more detached awareness of what is really going on. Not dissociated, but when we can feel our ego selves getting worked up, our soul selves have enough presence to point out that this situation we are freaking out about is helping us out with a particular theme and variation. And if our ego minds can step aside, or at least quiet down, we can make a soul driven choice, we can embody our growth.
I want to take a few moments to bring us back to what it is we are really trying to do by understanding how we are growing as a soul and embodying that so we can appreciate why this is important. What I’m calling themes and variations represent more than disembodied concepts we are trying to understand as soul-selves. They actually have a much, much deeper significance: they represent the unknown aspects of who we are souls. The more we learn about and understand all these nuances, all these parts of who we are, the more connected we become to ourselves. The more whole we feel.
And it goes even deeper. We’re not just looking to become whole in ourselves. As soul-selves, we are also unique expressions of Source. These themes and variations are how we are unique expressions of Source. By understanding and integrating these aspects we are not only connecting with who we are as a soul and understanding ourselves as part of the whole, but we are also fully integrating and connecting with Source at the same time. We become the whole and part of the whole.
