Welcome to the Jenni Carroll Perspective. I’m really excited for today’s episode... because we will be discussing some of the wisdom from one of my favorite books of all time, one that significantly shifted my perspective and brought me to a new level in my own spiritual understanding. The book is The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav. Okay, so I will admit that Gary Zukav first came to my attention via Oprah. I was absolutely fascinated by his ideas when I saw that first interview in the late 90’s. There is so much wisdom in The Seat of the Soul, and truly is, what I believe to be one of the most significant spiritual teachings of our time.
It would be too hard and take too long to share all of the ideas from this book, at least in one episode, but today I want to focus on a few of the ideas that are related to the subject of purpose, the theme for this season. In fact, in our last episode we touched on the principle of Authentic Empowerment which really is the primary premise and foundation for The Seat of the Soul. For today, I’d like to share some of what I see as the most important, most relevant teachings from this book as related to purpose. We will further explore the concept of Authentic Empowerment, as well as define some important concepts - parts of us like our personality and our soul and the relationship between the two. We will also look at the purpose of the human life, our earth school and the difference between a Five-Sensory Perspective and a Multi-Sensory Perspective. Finally, we will touch on the concept of Intention and how much it influences the trajectory of our lives.
In order to fully understand the principle of Authentic Empowerment, it is first necessary to get clear about some of the ideas that serve as its foundation. The first is our personality. As we have previously discussed, our personality is like a costume - a cloak or garment whose threads make up our unique earthly wiring, woven together to embody our strengths, our skills, and our talents as well as our weaknesses, deficits, and limitations. The personality serves a very real purpose. It essentially is the toolbox we are given to function and manage through life. A fun way to look at it is if earth were a private club, our personality is our ticket in, without it we wouldn’t be admitted into the party. Our personality IS our humanness. As a costume or garment, however, it only reveals a small part of who we actually are, and in a very concrete way often keeps hidden our authentic selves.
The soul, on the other hand, embodies our true self. The soul is immortal and isn’t limited by the strengths and weaknesses of our human selves. Our soul is much, much more, much greater than our human personality or identity. Why? Because the soul is connected to Source, to the Divine.
In The Seat of the Soul Gary Zukav tells us that our “soul is not a passive or a theoretical entity that occupies a space in the vicinity of your chest cavity. It is a positive, purposeful force at the core of your being. It is that part of you that understands the impersonal nature of the energy dynamics in which you are involved, that loves without restriction and accepts without judgment.”
Another truth about the soul, albeit one that might be hard to conceptualize, or frankly, to believe, is that our personality, our human life, is not the only experience of the soul. Our soul’s perspective is vast, it is beyond what we can imagine from our human or personality-driven vantage point. While it is absolutely okay that we might not fully understand or embrace this truth, what is important to remember is that our human lives, while purposeful and important make up only one relatively small aspect of our greater selves and consequently our greater perspective.
According to The Seat of the Soul, the personality includes parts of us that need healing as well as parts of the soul that serve as strengths, tools or “power sources.” What is important to understand is that even though our personality is a costume, it also is an intentional costume. The personality isn’t random, it’s not a lottery ticket we were lucky or unlucky enough to draw. Instead it is thoughtfully designed and created for each of us with a very real intention. That intention is to offer us both the necessary strengths and challenges that together will compel us to work on the parts of us that require healing.
The strengths that the personality receives from the soul are forms of love, compassion and wisdom. Negative thoughts and feelings are never part of the soul. Only the personality can feel anger, shame, guilt and fear. Only the personality can have thoughts of hatred, judgment, or sadness. It can be interesting to notice yourself in this way, as you observe thoughts and feelings and even actions that you choose, pay attention to whether these parts belong to your personality or to your soul.
So the essence of the relationship between the personality and the soul is purpose. The personality is the workhorse, it does the work. And we need to give the personality some credit, as it does this work in a very real way in our physical world... an environment that holds endless opportunity for struggle, pain and sacrifice. So what is the purpose of all of this hard work, this struggle? Good question. The personality’s goal is Authentic Empowerment. According to The Seat of the Soul, Authentic Empowerment is achieved when our earthly personality aligns with the greatness of our soul.
Everything we do, from the thoughts we have to actions we take, to how we show up each day for ourselves and for others; the constant stream of choices we make, all are in service of working to align with our soul. Gary Zukav writes “the conflicts of a human life are directly proportional to a distance of which the energy of the personality exists separately from the soul... When a personality is in full balance, you cannot see where it ends and the soul begins.”
So clearly, when you understand the role of the personality and its goal of Authentic Empowerment, it becomes easier to see the purpose of the human life for what it truly is - the opportunity to participate in an earth school to do hard work in a physical environment to further our necessary growth and healing. But also, and this is important: the one factor that most influences the level of challenge or difficulty in our human experience is how connected (or not) we are to our greater selves. The more aligned we are with our soul, the more we understand both the purpose and limits of our human personality. The more we choose to acknowledge and connect with the energy, awareness and wisdom of our soul, the easier and more extraordinary our human life becomes. It is possible to reach a point where our personality seamlessly flows with the intention and energy of our soul, and, according to Zukav “you cannot see where it [the personality] ends and the soul begins.” SO cool, don’t you think?
If you have listened to other episodes, you have probably heard me discuss the foundational principle of Intrinsic Worth, our innate value present from birth that is not dependent on who we are or what we do. This worth comes from our true selves, our soul, the part of us that already embodies love, compassion and wisdom. The more we can understand this greater part of ourselves and connect with it, the easier our lives become. And not only do our lives become easier, it also becomes easier to fulfill our greatest purpose - to approach ourselves and the external world, to make all of our choices via the wisdom we ALREADY have. Knowing and accepting our Intrinsic Worth, which is to say connecting with the truth of our soul is absolutely, 100% a cheat sheet, a map, an instruction manual. It helps us not only succeed in our mission, but doing so in a way that feels good, joyful, purposeful, extraordinary.
Many of us struggle to see our Intrinsic Worth because our perspective is based only on our five senses. In The Seat of the Soul, the significance of this is discussed. When we operate only from our five physical senses, we focus our efforts on control. We see the environment as negative, powerful. As a result, we strive to overcome the environment through an attempt to exert power over it. How? Through what we believe embodies power in our physical world - money, status, control over others and our environment. Instead of seeing our goal as healing, we see it (at least on an unconscious level) as survival. We adhere to the evolutionary principle of survival of the fittest. We use our strengths to focus on our human longevity through prioritizing the needs of our personalities.
When we operate from a Five-Sensory Perspective, as most of us do, we are at a serious disadvantage. We can’t see the forest for the trees, so to speak. We get caught up in the specifics.... all that is happening to us, around us but also within us - our negative thoughts and feelings. We see life as unfair and ourselves as victims. Or at least as victims in particular circumstances or situations. When something happens that we don’t like, we focus on negative feelings (blame, shame, judgment, guilt) and experience life as unfair and unjust and something to be feared.
But, when we connect with our greater selves, we become Multi-Sensory. We are no longer limited by a perspective that is based on physical senses alone. Even as we continue to use our physical senses to function and participate in our lives, we begin to understand ourselves differently. We can see beyond what is wrong, past what we don’t like. We understand that there is greater purpose, a bigger reason for the struggles and pain we experience. Our perspective gets bigger, wider, deeper. We no longer miss the beauty of the forest for the obstruction of the tree.
According to The Seat of the Soul “to the extent that a person is in touch with spiritual depths, the personality is soothed because the energy of consciousness is focused on its energy core and not on its artificial façade which is the personality.”
And also, “From the perception of the Multi-Sensory human, the physical world is a learning environment that is created jointly by the souls that share it, and everything that occurs within it serves their learning.”
In other words, every experience we have big or small, meaningful or insignificant, positive or negative is not random, instead is present for a reason, and creates an opportunity for growth, healing and purpose.
It is so easy and natural really, to see ourselves as victims, to focus on all that we experience that feels unfair. Yet, there is so much power in widening our perspective and understanding the greater meaning behind everything we experience even when we are suffering greatly because of it.
So, I think the natural question, the one I know that I have had and to be very honest, sometimes still struggle to fully understand is the WHY. Why is all of this necessary. If our greater selves are already loving, kind and compassionate, then why must we suffer in all of this hard work?
In The Seat of the Soul, Gary Zukav answers this question. He tells us that our soul is on a mission to become fully complete. He writes, “The splintered aspects of the soul, the aspects that require healing need to interact in physical matter so that each part of the splinteredness can become whole.” We are back to the school. There is something about our human lives, the journey through a physical world with its many obstacles and challenges that allows us to do very real, hard work to heal the parts of us that are broken.
In helping us to further understand the healing of the soul, he goes on to explain that the process requires a balancing of energy. This idea takes us to the principle of Karma. He makes it clear that Karma is not a moral concept. Instead, it is an energetic principle of responsibility and balance. Learning to take responsibility for our mistakes while simultaneously adjusting our intention to reflect our greater selves is Karma’s purpose.
He writes, “In order to become whole, the soul must balance its energy. It must experience the effects it has caused. The energy imbalances in the soul are the incomplete parts of the soul that form the personality. Personalities in interaction are souls that are seeking to heal. Whether an interaction between souls is healing or not depends upon whether the personality involved can see beyond itself and that of the other personality to the interaction of their souls.”
So, if we have unbalanced energy within us - which we all do or we would not be enrolled in earth school in the first place, then we must embrace our Karma and make choices that will fulfill our Karmic debts without creating new ones.
While most of us aren’t engaging in cruel or barbaric behavior, thankfully, we might however, be inadvertently creating more karmic debt as we do our best to navigate the process of balancing our energy. For example we might let our emotions get the best of us and speak or act in a way that is unkind or uncaring. We might use others to further our own gain or take credit for something that wasn’t our work or idea. We might separate or ignore when we could collaborate or invite.
Another important and common aspect of this to consider is while sometimes difficult, it is actually crucial to stop seeing the world as unfair. Because, when we choose to see the world as unfair, as others being wrong or bad, we are engaging in a narrative of superiority, of self-righteousness which actually creates more karmic debt. Instead, we must look at all of what we believe to be unjust or wrong, with an attitude of non-judgmental justice. In other words, we must do what we think is right without seeing ourselves as better than others. We are all here on a journey and with a purpose. When we operate from a place of judgment we are only adding to the problem, creating yet another obstacle that we must ALL overcome.
A great example to use as an illustration of this point is politics, something that we can all relate to and I think most of us are aware of the current divisiveness in American politics. Many of us hold strong opinions about what is right and what is wrong. However, even if you see others whose beliefs are in direct opposition of your own, is important to shift from an attitude of judgment to one of acceptance and grace. This does not mean that you shouldn’t take action towards what you feel is best, what is authentic for you. Vote, support those who need help, live your life in accordance to what you feel is the right thing to do. BUT, refrain from passing judgment. If it serves a greater purpose, express your views, but always in a neutral, non-critical way. Avoid getting caught up in emotional debate, especially if the discussion or narrative turns negative. Because if you don’t, as well-meaning as you think you might be, you are only contributing to the shared Karmic debt.
Finally, I would like to take a moment to comment on the significance of Intention. Gary Zukav reminds us that our point of power is our intention. Intention sets into motion the experiences that can fulfil our Karmic debt, bringing us closer to alignment with our soul. Or, alternatively, can serve to create more deficits, more problems that take us father from Authentic Empowerment and will force us to relearn the lessons we are being taught. If we are not aware of our underlying intentions, they will play out unconsciously. The principle of intention is another foundational idea and one that we will definitely explore in a future episode.
My loving suggestion is to consider yourself from a different perspective. What is present besides the elements of your personality? What aspects of your soul find their way into your daily life? Are you setting an intention and making choices that will move you closer to Authentic Empowerment?
Thank you so much for joining me today as we continue to explore purpose and some of the amazing teachings to be found in The Seat of Soul. I can’t more highly recommend getting a copy of this amazing work by Gary Zukav for your own further exploration.
You are light and you are love.
