Homecoming

Where we have been and where we must go:

We have seen that life is the journey of a soul that comes here with the experience of other lifetimes to gather knowledge and create yet more experience of Universal value.  In each lifetime, the soul collaborates with a different personality and its ego.  Of necessity, the life of an ego is a life lived in varying degrees of separation and loneliness, pressured by time into a fear-limited box out of which every one of us continually strives to do better than others. What would it be like if the ego were to commit itself to work together with the soul?

Life repeatedly gives us the opportunity for this collaboration in our crises — our dangerous opportunities . The ego looks for strengths that it can use to control or flee the danger and finds them in the “what”(s) of its life . Without the soul’s knowledge of the “who” of life that gives life meaning, the ego can only push its way through life, using its anger to get there.

However, the strength for all of this pushing usually peaks when a person is in her or his mid-twenties (along with her or his physical strength). It can only last for another ten or fifteen years. As the ego begins to fatigue, the soul, with eternity on its side, and love that puts everything in beneficial relationship, can now come forward to claim its birthright and guide the life through the crisis.

Success belongs to those who discover the way or path past the impasse that caused the crisis.  However, the quality of the success depends on that part of self which discovers the way. If the ego finds the way, it achieves penultimate success because it works in isolation and lacks the timeless, spiritual value of the experience. When the soul finds the way through the crisis, it achieves ultimate success, for it has chronicled the journey in the pages of eternity.

The soul path beyond the crisis goes through the valley of the shadow of death, where the ego fears to tread. The soul’s experience of past lives demands that the path take it through the valley into the dark night of the soul. In these moments, the soul — ship’s captain following its earth orders — asks the ego to lend its strengths to completing the task. If it has been fragmented, the soul will subtly direct the ego to seek the help of others to help it recover and integrate those fragments. They help the soul gather up its experience in collaboration with its navigator and write a story of universal value.

Ego... and soul... and healing:

Ego is finite and secular, and, because it is confined to the body you are living in now, it cannot do such work. Only that which can go out of body and perceive patterns such as these can create such situations. Does that mean that my soul goes out of body so regularly? I am certain that my soul encompasses my body, so it is always not only "inside" but "outside" where it can perceive and respond to the marvelous patterns of flow of the living Universe.

This flow manifests itself as grace. We find it in the seeming coincidences of our lives… what a friend of mine calls grace notes. There seems to be a certain grace present in all life that touches and moves little things like making the book you need to read right now jump off a bookstore shelf and land at your feet. A larger, more obvious, grace moves larger things, like making a cat run across the street in front of your car, slowing you down so you miss hitting the drunk who runs the stop sign ahead of you. An even larger and more obvious grace protects slave ships in storms that threaten to sink them, out of which come earth-changing hymns like Amazing Grace. All forms of grace are the soul collaborating with God.

Seeing grace in all things is a soul function. It is healing work — the work of becoming whole. HOPE work is soul work, the work of relationship—the sharing way. Healing  is impossible in a separated, fearful ego-state, but it can begin through an intellectual effort of the ego that eventually leads to the soul’s passion and compassion. The soul, the relator bringing us together, is responsible for all healing.

As anyone’s memory grows, it becomes more complex and so do the ego’s responses to the (immediate) physical and social world and its actions in that world. As complexity increases, the ego perceives that life is becoming fragmented — wounded — and it seeks, often frantically, to control this apparent disintegration.  The phrase, "in our wounded-ness our human-ness lies," speaks directly to the most powerful gift of life — that woundedness. Only the soul can see the gift in that which leads us to the valley of the shadow of death. There, the soul will work on it. There it will ask the ego to help with its resources of personality. There, the ego will agree to work so close to death, its arch-enemy, because the soul will help with its strength of spirit.

Would it not be easier on the ego if it knew what the soul knew? What if the master of the “what” of life and the master of the “who” of life were to come together in the “marriage of true minds” of Shakespeare’s sonnet? Would we not conceivably discover “why” The Godhead gave us life and “how” we are to live? Would we not be “coming home”?

Homecoming:

The ego and the soul work in the same domain, the body, our ship of life. To review my earlier comparison of the two, ego is impulsive and soul is subtle and shy. Ego is afraid or angry, sensing through fear-based physical feelings. Soul is aware, sensing through intuition — direct knowledge. When ego recognizes soul’s presence and agrees to collaborate with it, we truly have our ship on course, directed by a crew, not just one individual.

In primitive societies that recognize the presence of soul, this integration of ego into soul takes place comfortably, progressively, nurtured from womb-time onward through all stages of growth and development. To them, The soul of newborn infant opens its wings and looks around in silence to see if it is in the right place. It then quietly shuts its wings and sleeps for five years while the infant, born with limited sensory experience (hearing) spends about six months learning to develop and use sight, smell, taste, and skin sensations to evaluate its physical environment. The infant develops into a child over the next four to five years by learning how to emotionally evaluate its environment¾ it hard-wires its limbic system. Now the soul opens its wings and gives a shout to announce its presence to the elders. They recognize its true nature and make it welcome with a name that honors its divine nature and sacred path. It shuts its wings again while the ego with which it is to work goes about developing its strengths. All the while, the elders keep making gentle reminders to the child as to its soul’s mission. When it is twelve or thirteen, it unfurls its beautiful spirit wings and shows its true nature —  its Self — to all in the society. The society’s Elders encourage the new, young adult to sing its soul-song, to dance its soul-dance, to cry its soul-cry. Now its spiritual growth begins in earnest, propelled by the drive of the sex hormones that put it in relationship to members of both genders for the rest of its life. Its ego strengths will peak when this person is in its twenties, and then begin to fade after about ten years. If the soul has discovered a source of nurturance, the adult will mature beyond the waning strengths of the ego into a human being with a wisdom focus on serving humanity with the highest good in mind.

When the ego first hearkens to the clarion song of soul, it may pull back in confusion. However, soul can reassure the ego and call it back to listen to soul’s alluring song and cry and to witness its beautiful dance. Soul, coming from a place of pure love, calls to ego to join it in life. When ego commits itself to dance and sing with soul, their human home becomes a whole self...and s-he heals.

Earlier, I said that we shall find our healing in our awareness that we are more than ego-directed body-minds; we are spiritual beings called souls. When we accept this awareness, we shall stop trying to shape soul to ego’s temporal and secular perceptions of reality and encourage ego to accept soul’s eternal and sacred image of that reality and surrender into soul’s embrace. Thus we shall come to truly experience that each individual human life is a one-of-a-kind work of sacred art.

Attuning ego to soul is a journey of homecoming. The spiritual return of homecoming begins when we realize that each finite, individual life is part of the journey of an eternal soul.

The soul knows that its journey is an inner, personal journey without measure. It knows that the body that has lived a unique story. It knows that the ego is essential to its journey through eternity. The ego would like to believe what soul knows, but its need to be separate holds it back. When the soul guides the ego through crisis, and the ego hears the lovely soul-cry, its old belief system falls apart. When the ego hears the soul acknowledge it for its strengths of form, talent, and temperament that helped it skillfully navigate the ocean of life, the ego now believes what the soul knows.

When the ego discovers that it is essential to the soul’s journey, it agrees to a partnership with the soul, and healing accelerates. The soul, never sleeping, now holds the ego in its loving hands and lets the ego get the rest it needs. The partnership heals the life... the person comes home to the Self.

Healing—becoming whole—is a birthright. It begins when the ego discovers that it shares its life with the soul that has come to be that life. When ego finds out that it is essential to soul’s journey, it agrees to a partnership with soul, and healing accelerates. Soul, never sleeping, now holds ego in its loving hands and lets ego get the rest it needs. The partnership of ego and soul heals the life...a sacred journey of coming home to one’s Self.