It’s so easy to think that our egos or minds are the enemies of becoming conscious or soul-guided. Pretty much every spiritual or consciousness teacher, guide, book, or program I have come across stresses the importance of letting go of and transcending the ego. Heck, in the last blog and podcast episode I said that the main point of doing this work is so we can let go of ego-mind control and let our soul selves lead the way. And I still think that’s true. But transcending doesn’t mean negating. It doesn’t mean that our ego-minds are the enemy or have nothing to offer. And just because it doesn’t feel good or is uncomfortable doesn’t make it bad, or wrong, or the enemy.
I know it feels like our ego-minds are the enemy because every time we try to grow as a soul or want to make a soul choice we smack up against our ego telling us, in no uncertain terms, why that would be a bad idea. And it feels like it would make sense to try and circumvent it or tell it to go away and think it has nothing but pain and problems to offer us.
It seems that every time we turn around, there is our ego rearing its ugly head, seemingly out to get us. But is it?
If we need to expand beyond our ego limits in order to grow, what is the function of our ego-minds?
I think the soul and ego are actually working together. I think the relationship resembles a teacher-student dynamic, and that the limits of our ego-minds and bodies are helping the growth and development or our soul-selves.
I also don’t think it’s just our ego-minds that are working here. I also feel our bodies have a lot of information and a lot to offer. I know it sounds redundant, but we need a body if we want to embody what we have learned. We also need a body to experience the sensations and emotions that go along with the challenges that we need in order to grow. I think we tend to focus more on ego and the mind because, quite honestly, I think our ego-minds are more challenging to work with. Also in Western culture, we tend to ignore the body. However, I think our soul-selves see the mind-body or ego-self more as a single unit expressing the same information in two different ways, one as thought, and the other as sensation, emotion and, action. So for ease of communication, I’ll refer to our ego-mind-body as our human system.
If we are going with the assumption that our souls are growing, then there is something they don’t know or understand and need to learn. This suggests that they don’t have all the answers or information they need and may need a little help in order to get it. Growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum, we need a place in which to learn, and lessons to help teach us. That’s where I think our human systems come in.
I think that our soul-selves and our human systems are working together. I think our human systems are both our souls’ teacher and classroom. Although this teacher-student dynamic is a little unique.
How I understand this relationship to work is, before we are awakened, our soul-selves hold the blueprint for the areas of development that we need, as well as the desire to grow and develop those areas. Essentially this is the what and the why – what our soul-selves want to grow around, and why they want to do it.
I think this information is embedded in our mind, body, and energy systems before we are awakened. I think of it in terms of the work Carl Jung (link) did around the personal unconscious or where thoughts, feelings, memories, actions, and experiences are stored. During this pre-awakening time, our soul-selves, with the help of our ego-minds and bodies, are creating the parameters for soul growth within our whole human system. This looks like all the situations, events, how we perceived those events and the unconscious choices we made around them before our ego-minds woke up and that includes anything learned or not yet learned from any previous life experience.
Our soul-selves have the what and the why and I think our human systems have the how. Our ego-minds and bodies hold the information about how our soul-selves need to grow as well as to help by supplying the opportunities to do that, or how our human systems are helping shape and guide our soul-selves using thoughts, emotions, and physical experiences. Our soul-selves provide the blueprint, but the blueprint can be altered by the experiences that come through our minds and bodies as well as our soul-selves responses – how we are growing and how we integrate that growth. I don’t think it is a one-way deal and there are constant communications and updates made among all of them as they guide and shape each other.
After we “wake up” then our life becomes a continuation of this process – using the unconscious embedded information that details how our soul-self is trying to grow and bringing it out in our everyday experiences to make it conscious.
At the risk of mixing a metaphor, I’m going to combine the teacher-classroom dynamic with the consciousness shifts that we have in the lock. Just bear with me, hopefully, it will all make sense.
Every time we get into the lock, we are effectively starting in a new school (by that I mean primary, secondary, undergraduate…). As we go through the grades, our human systems allow us to see what it is we are trying to do as a soul-self, or giving us the lessons we need to learn. We get different teachers and different lessons which are all the people, situations, challenges, and things we need to learn in order to understand how our soul is trying to grow. Unfortunately, growth is also not comfortable because we are stretching ourselves beyond where we are -we’re going outside our comfort zone. In school terms our assignments are time-consuming, the teachers don’t know what they’re doing and the tests are too hard.
As we go through the grades we turn our potential growth into actual growth until the lessons are learned and the teacher has nothing left to teach. We get to the point where we have grown out of that learning space. Between when we went in and when we come out is a gap or a space that is being held for us as we grow. We can’t see or feel it initially because we’re nowhere near the edge of that space. Except now, it’s providing the limit that allows us to feel how constricted we are as a soul self inside those ego/school limits. How painful it is to not expand and fully become. In effect giving us the impetus to expand and showing us exactly what we need to allow in order to move forward. We need to graduate or transcend to the next level, the next school.
Those limitations of the ego provide a space for the soul-self to expand, the opportunities in order for it to expand, then the opportunity to transcend beyond the limitations. We aren’t growing despite the limitations, but because of them. In school terms,wWe may not like the subject and we may detest the teacher, but we still need the teacher and the lessons to help us grow.
