Looking Within: Understanding the Journey of the Soul
Admittedly, there are a lot of things I’ve experienced that I wish I could just show people. Not use words, but rather send them a download telepathically that they can play and absorb with their minds in order to understand it. For some of the most memorable experiences in life, words either fall short or do not suffice at all.
In this case, they may barely suffice, but I will try.
The Nature of My Own Spirituality
For most of my life, I thought of myself as something close to an atheist, though I was born with a strong spiritual sense. Spirituality, as I define it, is as simple and inherent as self-awareness. It does not constitute a belief system of any kind. It stems off of senses and experiences as one learns to explore and uncover their own selves.
Therefore, exploring spirituality was always a natural experience for me and did not have any external influence. It was and is a personal journey and also as natural of a part of me as my own leg or eyeballs.
I also have never been one to just believe things without personal experience or evidence backing it, no matter the social pressure or any other reason. And, to look or cling to anything external would be to entirely ignore the messages and discoveries that I was finding by looking within.
However it wasn’t until about a year ago, at age 31, that I came to some major realizations that my mind had previously somewhat sensed but not fully realized.
It came as a result of years and years of being introspective. Of exploring the nature of the identities we develop on Earth all the way down to extraordinarily subtle clues my intuition picked up on as I continued my exploration of the soul (I won’t and can’t get into debates of reason on what the soul is and why, for to do so would lose the message in details that won’t get us anywhere).
“I wish I were a real girl” – Me at Age 6
Part of it stemmed from the fact that I’ve always had a sense of not feeling like this body, or me as I was experiencing myself, was the full “me.” In my day-to-day experience of this life for as long as I can remember (even reaching far back to as young as 5), there has ALWAYS been an undertone of feeling like the part of myself I identified with the most was not the one interacting here on Earth on a daily basis, or doing anything that I do here – working, talking, writing, being a human, and so on.
All of these things felt (and still feel) secondary to me, but for most of my life I didn’t know why and I didn’t pay all that much attention to it. They just felt like things I had learned to do and that I was doing what I needed to do to live.
But overall, this life for me has always felt like a dream.
It has always had a sense of surrealism to it, for me. I’ve always had a sense that beyond just being involved with it, I was kind of just watching it and trying my best to fit in.
This persistent underlying feeling is what led me to delve even deeper then to ask the question, “where then, am I?” – or what part of my being or what circumstance do I need to experience myself in to feel like I am fully expressing or being “me?”
The answer came to me, but it took a long, long time.
I don’t think I will ever feel like fully “me,” until the death of this body. What I realized is that I am very in tune with my soul or “higher self”, and have been able to feel its presence strongly throughout my lifetime.
Exploring the Soul Deeply Requires a Specific Understanding of the Nature of Our Identities
What can seem mind-boggling through all of this is that to be able to explore the soul’s “identity” requires a very specific and important harmony of almost what I see as two separate identities (that are also essentially one) at once: our identities/personality as created by our Earthly lives as well as our soul identity.
I had made a mistake at age 21 when I still had much to learn and I was pursuing my soul (or higher states of consciousness) through consistent meditation with the aim of “getting somewhere.” I had already had a prior spiritual experience and thought I needed to bring another one on to “get farther” in my understanding of my existence.
My problem was that I was not yet ready for the lessons I was seeking, and I was bringing them on by force and by a very linear perspective of progression.
We bring on our own understanding by the willingness to have an open mind and also to seek, but the right perspective is also absolutely necessary.
We have to be truly ready. And reason for this is that the soul is massive.
Our souls extend far beyond what we understand ourselves as here on Earth, and being able to understand yourself as a soul means you are ready to not just understand, but EXPERIENCE your connection and your core to all of creation itself.
This often means letting go of what you think you are. Of what you have learned to define yourself by, which has influences from everything we can think of. From school and peers and how they define us, from how our parents might have defined us, what society has told us is important to measure ourselves by, to more subtle things like what our ideologies are and how they match with others’. The list goes on.
Most people may not have even thought of beginning the work of erasing these ideas (why would they if they don’t question it too much, or are too busy to question it?) and do not understand what it would require.
Many people take recreational drugs to experience a brief period of opening up to other experiences of themselves or of life. To learn new lessons and gain new spiritual insights. I totally understand the draw (meditation did the same for me – it was my drug); but here too, I feel as though more often than not they are not doing the legwork to be able to bring these experiences on through their own intellectual and spiritual development.
Therefore, the experiences of themselves in these new realms are fleeting. When your intellectual, conscious, spiritual development does not match that of the experience you are having, your understanding will ultimately be limited and you may not even get the results you desire.
The Soul Contains Knowledge and Memories Beyond Time and Space As We Know It
Receiving messages and discoveries from this part of me often felt like they came from a timeline that was not anything I would ever be able to put my finger on. I believe it’s because these realizations came from a part of me that this knowledge was already IN, and were not only relevant to this lifetime, but I was only now in my lifetime uncovering it.
However, it’s clear to me now that the knowledge was not just coming from a linear time frame such as “before” this life or what have you, but that my brain was interpreting it as such.
The nature of the knowledge was timeless, deeply buried, yet always available. It was only the contrast between this fact and the point in time of being able to be consciously aware of it that gave it a sense of being from a long, long time ago.
Every time I would uncover something it also felt the opposite of mystical. It felt natural, normal, and completely made sense. It would feel like I was simply remembering something I already knew, but not from any definable point in my current existence.
Some of What I’ve Learned – In a Nutshell
- The soul has had a journey of its own, that is separate yet also one with the journey we have in our current lifetimes.
- I still don’t personally know for sure if we live multiple incarnations. Previously, I was never one to believe in past lives (again, what reason would I have had to believe that? How would I be able to really know?), but it was by journeying within my soul over years of time that I saw, and experienced memories and knowledge that led me to understand myself in an infinitely more massive way. I do know that our essence, our energy does not die. We do not exist in the Earthly shell we have defined as ourselves forever. Our essence exists as a form of energy that is one with a palpitating whole, and it is beautiful, vibrant, and full of love.
- The soul has its own store of knowledge and memories, that are also separate yet one with our current lives on Earth. It’s no wonder they are so difficult to remember; as this knowledge and memories are not recalled in the same way we would recall any other knowledge or memories from our lives on Earth. So for many of us, we wouldn’t know where or how to look for these soul memories.
- We have to learn to listen to ourselves and realize how much external messages might be detracting us from what’s within. The more we get in touch with our own selves, the more we will realize our true nature and begin to remember things that are buried what seems to be infinitely deeply within our essences.It is by doing this that we will reach heightened levels of compassion for all of creation as we realize that although we have separate manifestations, at our core we truly are all one.