THE SOUL IS YOUR
SPIRITUAL BODY

Having a soul could be the most useful thing in your life. So far, however, usefulness hasn’t been the soul’s major attribute. We are told that the soul is our link to God, but like God, it is invisible and far removed from daily affairs. Does your soul keep you healthy? Does it help you make decisions or resolve a crisis? All our lives we have referred to the soul with reverence, a tone of voice we wouldn’t use to talk about our cars. In reality, however, most people get much farther in their cars than they ever do with their souls.

The soul has no function because it hasn’t been successfully defined. No one is waiting for the world’s religions to agree among themselves. It might seem as if the Buddhists are right to take a completely practical view—they dispense with the soul altogether, arguing that if it can’t be defined, the soul has no reality. But that position isn’t satisfying to the millions of people who believe that they have souls. (After all, we know we have a mind even though no two philosophers agree on a definition of that, either.) We can resurrect the soul from its dormant state by turning the tables: Instead of defining the soul first and asking what it does later, why not look at the need the soul fulfills first and worry about a strict definition later?

The main thing your soul does has already been mentioned: it connects you to God. In a sense the soul is like a step-down transformer. The electricity being sent through high-tension power lines is hundreds of times too powerful to go directly into your house; it would burn out every circuit in a flash. In the same way, the ultimate spiritual power can’t surge directly into you and me without harm. It must be stepped down and adapted to human life. The soul exists to perform that function.

I realize that this description seemingly depends upon the existence of God, but it doesn’t need to. Without resorting to any religious belief, we know that the universe contains almost infinite amounts of energy, and yet Nature has found a way to step down the heat of the nearest star, which burns at millions of degrees Celsius, to support life on our planet. It has stepped down the force of gravity, which is so condensed at the heart of a black hole that time and space are sucked out of existence, so that it has only enough force to hold the human body together. Finally, the electromagnetism that explodes in a bolt of lightning—explosions that once struck the earth’s surface millions of times a day in the planet’s infancy—has been stepped down to the minuscule electrical firings of brain cells, which are so weak that it takes extremely precise instruments even to detect them. (The brain’s entire electrical potential is about the equivalent of a sixty-watt lightbulb, but this charge is subdivided among 100 billion neurons, making each brain cell’s portion infinitesimal, a matter of microvolts.)

If the physical forces of the universe must be stepped down so dramatically to work on a human scale, it seems possible that God can be thought of as a universal force that must also be stepped down. But force is a materialistic term. When we think of God, we use terms like love, compassion, truth, intelligence, and creativity. However much they disagree, every spiritual tradition sees these qualities on a scale from zero to infinite. Inert objects do not exhibit love or compassion; they have no visible intelligence. That’s the zero end of the scale. Human beings are imbued with love, compassion, and intelligence, and as we look around, we believe that these qualities are visible in other living creatures. That’s the middle region of the scale. Then we project a higher reality where love and compassion become unconditional, where intelligence is so vast that it can run the universe, and where creativity can bring the universe into being. That’s the highest end of the scale, and the most contentious.

Science doesn’t acknowledge higher reality, because once you look beyond the human brain an invisible region begins. You can see a neuron and therefore claim that intelligence begins with it, but since a neuron is only made of atoms, how exactly did an atom acquire intelligence? Not to mention the aspects of the mind we most cherish—love, compassion, truth, and all the other qualities that give life meaning.

The soul serves to get us past the blocks put up by materialism, but, surprisingly, at the same time it also gets us past the faith demanded by religion. The obstacle put up by science is that everything must be material; the obstacle put up by religion is that one must believe in invisible forces without always having direct proof that they exist. As we will see, the soul can be mapped, even though it is invisible. The human body is a complex system of energy and awareness, and the soul can be defined as a subtler version of those two ingredients. Functioning as your spiritual body, the soul generates and organizes the energy of love, the energy of compassion, the awareness of truth, the awareness of creativity and intelligence. In that way it fulfills needs that are just as basic as the need of the physical body for food and oxygen.

A complete map of the soul would be at least as complex as the human brain. However, here’s a simple map that will turn out to be extremely useful.

A glance at this diagram suggests an exciting possibility: the soul can bring even more of God into the human realm. For millions of people, God’s infinite love has been stepped down too far. They experience only a fraction of the love they should, and even that love comes and goes; it sometimes weakens to the point that their lives seem to have no love at all. The same is true of intelligence and creativity. Millions of people function day to day using the same routines, the same conditioning from the past, the same fixed reactions. Yet there is no reason to believe that God’s infinite qualities must be so diminished when they reach the human level. Looking around, we see countless examples of people who possess enormous reserves of love, creativity, and intelligence. The existence of a Saint Francis, an Einstein, or a Leonardo da Vinci indicates that human potential can reach amazing heights. Why and how did their souls step down so that so much potential still came through—a gush of genius—while for other people the step-down yields barely a trickle?

The answer lies at the level of the soul. Just as physical disease can be traced back to distorted energy patterns at a subtle level of the body, any limitation of the mind can be traced back to distortions of energy, only the level is even subtler, the level of the soul. Not that we want to isolate the mind. The body’s energy is dependent on the mind, and once we find out why our thoughts, beliefs, wishes, and aspirations are not being fulfilled, removing those obstacles will serve to liberate the body even more.

Speaking personally, I find a great emotional release when the soul becomes a practical aspect of life. “Who am I, and why am I here?” The two questions go hand in hand. To answer them, religion says, “You’re a child of God, and you are here to reflect God’s glory.” Science says, “You’re a complex lump of molecules, and you are here to do what those molecules dictate.” Both answers have produced as much trouble and misery as they have alleviated.

Religion is disturbing because it seems optimistic on the surface but deeply pessimistic underneath. What could be more optimistic than seeing yourself as a child of God? You fit into a divine plan stretching back to the dawn of creation. As this plan unfolds (in the Christian West, at least), it will redeem every soul that loves God. Underlying this scheme is dark pessimism, however, because God may hate us for our sins, and even when we strain not to disobey divine commandments, we unwittingly make mistakes. Worse, the divine plan seems to allow room for immense pain and suffering that God either can’t or won’t prevent. Our purpose in life comes down to guesswork and desperate hopes that we don’t fall into disgrace. Who can find the light when the path lies in the dark? Perhaps the plan is knowable only to God.

The other ready-made answer, proposed by science, is disturbing for the opposite reason. It is pessimistic on the surface and has just enough optimism underneath to keep us from losing hope. Science denies that life has any purpose. Existence is trapped between inflexible laws (gravity, entropy, the weak forces) on one hand and randomness on the other. The most cherished aspects of life, such as love and beauty, are reduced to random chemical firings in the brain. The most valued behavior, such as self-sacrifice and altruism, comes down to genetic mutations that have no purpose other than survival. Taken at face value, no one would choose to live according to such a fixed, meaningless worldview, but science provides a mitigating layer of optimism with its belief in progress. If we are learning more day by day, so if technology makes life easier with each new invention, the pessimism of science can be ignored. You can turn up your iPod if the void begins to seem intolerable.

A clear path to your soul is available, but just as we’ve seen with the body, drastically new thinking is required. We need a new set of breakthroughs, each one rooted in a new reality that isn’t bound by the flawed materialism of science or the flawed idealism of religion. Are you meant to be more loving and creative, happier and wiser? Some people do become more loving as their lives unfold, but others turn in the opposite direction. Some people become wiser, while others cling to ignorant beliefs. Opposites keep clashing. We take the bitter with the sweet because we have to. What this indicates is that there are just as many breakdowns in the nonphysical part of life as the physical. Each breakthrough will take us past these breakdowns. At the same time we will acquire true knowledge of the soul to replace mere wishful thinking. Reaching the soul means fulfilling the deepest aspirations of the human heart.

Bringing spirit down to earth

Religion made a terrible mistake when it consigned the body to the “lower” physical world while the soul was lifted to the “higher” spiritual realm. A functioning soul is not so very different from a functioning body. Both are involved in the same things—awareness and energy—that make life possible. “I am my body” and “I am my soul” are two faces of the same truth. The problem is that we have lost contact with the soul. It wasn’t created to be useless; we made it that way.

Imagine yourself sitting in a doctor’s office, waiting nervously for your appointment. Your eye is distracted by a rose garden outside the window, or a solitary tree. Consider how these plants live. A seed begins to grow, and inside the seed is the plant’s entire life. As it grows, a rose or a tree isn’t tempted to deviate from its programmed existence. In harmony with its environment, a rose effortlessly expresses its beauty, and a tree its strength. Human beings, however, are not tied to a preset plan. We have more latitude to shape our own destiny.

Somewhere along the way, we used that free will to make a choice to divide the body from the soul. The body became identified with sin, and the soul with God; the body with Earth, and the soul with Heaven. But if you take a functional approach, there’s no need for such a division. We don’t say that roses have a body and a soul. Everything about them, from the subtlest information in their genes to the prick of their thorns, unfolds as one life. A rose’s perfection—so rich, velvet, aromatic, and intensely colored—is present here and now. The same is true of you, if you can get past the split that cuts your soul off from daily life.

There is no reason for anyone to dream of a lost Paradise, a garden from which the first man and woman were banished. Paradise moved inside us to become a vision of infinite possibilities. Your chance to evolve is right here, right this minute, in this very body. Your soul can step down much more of God’s perfection than you can even imagine. The limited degree of love, intelligence, and creativity that you experience in your life barely hints at the untapped possibilities.

To resurrect your soul, you must do the opposite of what your past conditioning tells you to. Instead of turning to a higher power, you turn to yourself. Instead of leaving your body behind, you take it on the spiritual journey. Instead of condemning physical desire and temptation, you follow desire into the unknown region where the soul resides.

It’s strange to say, but even when you lost contact with your soul, your body didn’t. Cells keep the faith. They have been using “higher” awareness since you were born. Here’s a practical example: It’s become a medical cliché that we use only 10 percent of our brains. In a sense this claim is a trick, because the 90 percent that isn’t being used wasn’t made for thinking. There are billions of cells known as glia (Greek for “glue”) that surround your brain cells to hold them in place. Glia outnumber neurons about ten to one. For a long time they were viewed as second-class citizens in the brain, serving as little more than structural reinforcement, like rebar in cement. No one suspected the glia’s secret role, which turned out to make for a fascinating spectacle. Glia are like starbursts or hedgehogs, with dozens of tiny strands emanating from their centers.

When an embryo in the womb is ready to develop a brain, there’s a huge challenge ahead. How can a few hundred or thousand stem cells turn into the billions of brain cells required? It’s not sufficient for stem cells to divide madly until they reach the right number (although they do that, too). The brain has many parts, and the neurons responsible for sight or hearing, for example, must get to their proper locations, while other neurons responsible for emotions and higher thinking must get to their proper destination, too.

To do that, each stem cell goes on a migration. The journey is often as long, relatively speaking, as the flight of the arctic tern, which flies almost from pole to pole. In the stem cell’s case, it can migrate almost from one end of the embryo to the other. Migrating stem cells line up by the millions, nose to tail, and travel along the strands of the glia. Under a powerful microscope you can view their journey and marvel at how the stem cells that need to go to one region turn off the main highway and follow the exact glial strand that leads to their final home, while the next bunch of stem cells takes a different turn. Each move is purposeful and guided. The brain grows from the inside out, so newcomers travel past older brain cells to form layer after layer of tissue. When researchers discovered that glia served as guides for this incredibly complex process, their reputation grew enormously. It grew even more when it was found that after serving as guides, glia can turn into brain cells themselves.

In what way is this not a spiritual journey? Stem cells are being guided home by a higher intelligence, acquiring wisdom along the way. Your life has been following the same hidden pattern, but instead of following glistening glial strands, you are guided by your soul. It holds the blueprint of God’s intentions just as a blueprint on paper holds an architect’s intentions. Everything a cell can do must come from somewhere. It would be foolish to believe that brain cells act randomly; otherwise, stem cells would float about aimlessly with nowhere to go. Our best proof that brain cells are aware and intelligent is that they act aware and intelligent.

But the soul isn’t confined to stem-cell journeys happening under the dark cover of the skull. Your soul brings guidance from the outside as well as the inside. You can sit in a chair and reach a life-changing insight, or a great teacher can walk in the room to deliver it. One event takes place inside you, the other outside. But both are events that alter awareness. Once you reconnect with your soul, you aren’t restricted to only a few levels of existence: they all open up to the same ever-expanding consciousness. And at every level there is guidance.

The brain connection

The most practical way to think of the soul is as a connector. But if that is what your soul is doing, connecting you to subtle, invisible levels of life, there have to be junction points with your body. In particular, we need brain connections. As it stands, the brain is the great obstacle to the soul. Neurologists don’t feel the need for any invisible explanations for love. They can exhibit brain scans showing that various areas of the cortex and limbic system light up in lovers that don’t light up in the rest of us; being in love comes down to bursts of electricity and chemicals, just as, for the geneticist, being in love comes down to a love gene (as yet undiscovered, but the search goes on).

It’s up to us, then, to prove that love comes from a higher place. If we don’t want to accept that the brain creates love out of an electrochemical soup inside the skull, where’s the evidence that it comes from anywhere else? Let’s turn back to the example of the Tibetan Buddhist monks who developed “compassionate brains” as the result of practicing a meditation on compassion. A spiritual quality was transformed into physical manifestation. The split between body and soul was erased. In Sanskrit the same word, Daya, applies to both compassion and the everyday trait of sympathy. It turns out that the brain is extremely variable when it comes to sympathy. Functional MRIs taken inside a New Mexico prison (the only program of its type) show that inmates who score high on tests for psychopathic tendencies also have distorted brain function. Psychopaths possess the least innate sympathy imaginable. They have no conscience; they can commit acts of terrible cruelty without feeling a shred of the pain they are inflicting. Watching the blood ooze from a knife wound is an indifferent act, like watching juice ooze from a steak.

Can a psychopath’s brain be turned into a compassionate brain? No one knows; the psychiatric profession has largely given up changing psychopaths either through drugs or conventional couch therapy. But we do know that the brain is malleable enough that it embraces every moral state, and that every state of consciousness requires a shift in the brain. Just thinking that you are compassionate doesn’t do the job, which leads me to conclude that compassion isn’t a mood, a moral teaching, an ethical obligation, or a social ideal. It’s a subtle activity of the brain that needs that subtle level to exist. On its own, the brain can’t produce change; it merely adapts to your intention. This gives us a slightly more sophisticated map of what the soul is doing as it steps down subtle energy to the human scale. Take anything that you want out of life. Your soul contains the potential for it to come true. Your mind brings the potential to the level of wishing, dreaming, wanting, and desiring. Your brain then produces the result; you learn how to achieve what you want.

Here’s the whole scheme reduced to a simple formulation:

• Soul carries the potential

• Mind carries the intention

• Brain produces the result

This is the basic flow chart of life. It reverses the flow that science espouses, where everything must begin in the brain. But there’s no reason why the physical level has to be primary. The brain learns new skills by forming neural networks, but the desire for change itself must come from somewhere else. If you think of compassion as a skill, like learning to play the violin, it must be prompted by wanting to learn compassion in the first place. This gives us an insight into the soul’s most useful role: it motivates us to reach higher.

A useful soul gives you the vision, the desire, and the will to evolve. Your mind carries that vision into the realm of thinking and wanting. Your brain receives the message and begins to give it physical shape. This process is already familiar to anyone who has learned a new skill. But when we learn to do anything now, we are only conscious of thinking and wanting. The brain isn’t accessible, since we don’t dip into it and start rewiring its connections by hand. The physical level takes care of itself once we start thinking. The soul level is also inaccessible. We don’t ask God how to ride a bicycle. Only in the isolated compartment we call spirit, where prayers occur, do we say that we are asking God. There is no need for such isolation. Every skill, from the most mundane to one as exalted as compassion, follows the same process. It’s a mental process that reverberates through the body and soul at the same time. Here are the steps involved:

1. Becoming genuinely interested.

2. Pursuing your interest spontaneously.

3. Practicing until you see improvement.

4. Sticking with your practice until the new skill is mastered.

Simple as these steps are, they require input from awareness; the whole process can’t be triggered simply by the brain. Step 1, becoming genuinely interested, requires inspiration. To be interested in compassion isn’t an ordinary occurrence in a society driven by self-gratification, even among mature, psychologically developed people. But if you read the lore of compassion that infuses Buddhism and Christianity, inspiration arises naturally. The same can happen when you are moved by compassionate acts performed in brave rescues, or by relief missions to places where people are suffering.

Step 2, pursuing your interest spontaneously, requires turning inward, because the inner landscape is the country of compassion. Once you find the place of empathy inside you, it wants to express itself. Empathy may bring discomfort (the very word compassion means “to suffer with”), so you have to overcome your natural urge to turn away from someone else’s distress. Yet in some people compassion triggers a unique kind of joy that they want to follow.

Step 3, practicing until you see improvement, requires discipline, because you must constantly renew your dedication in the face of old conditioning that tempts you to turn away from compassion in pursuit of the ego’s constant demands. Pleasure is innately selfish; therefore, no one finds compassion without a struggle.

Step 4, sticking with your practice until the new skill is mastered, requires patience, because there are many inner forces—and outer ones, too—that oppose compassion. Higher awareness doesn’t force change; it melts away old patterns so that new ones can replace them, which takes time. (Ask aid workers who have flown to a disaster in the developing world. Their idealism vanishes at the first shocking sight of real devastation. They pass through stages of despair, frustration, and numbness. Yet beneath the surface a new strength develops, one that not only adjusts to the outer spectacle of suffering, but blossoms into a much stronger empathy.)

This outline gives us more insight into what I’ve called “subtle action,” which begins in awareness and then reaches into the body. Subtle action erases the boundary between a compassionate person and a compassionate brain. Each needs the other; neither is enough on its own. Heretical as it may sound, it took subtle action to create Buddha and Christ. They established unshakable compassion in themselves by following the same steps an ordinary person would follow. Buddha and Christ didn’t realize, perhaps, that they had to transform their brains, but they were certain that higher awareness was at work. At the very least, to be compassionate while not changing the brain is a temporary achievement, subject to the winds of change. Because we were all born with the capacity to sympathize, our brains await their next instruction to expand this capacity to the level of the soul.

Garry’s story

The subtle level of the mind, which connects with the soul, is attuned to signs, omens, portents, suggestions, pointers, and prophecy—indicators of the built-in guidance that is inherent in life. Conscious thinking doesn’t have to be involved. But we are so used to thinking as the brain’s highest function that it’s easy to overlook the silent, hidden aspects of the mind until they suddenly make themselves known. Then it’s no longer possible to overlook them any longer.

“I became a seeker when my career suddenly collapsed,” recalls Garry, who is forty-five and was diagnosed with a serious heart valve defect in his early thirties. “I went through a difficult surgery that led to complications. Recovery took a long time. The other guys who had been my friends on the fast track after business school dropped me; it was like my problems had made me somehow different. And they were right. I wasn’t like them anymore. Things were shifting inside.

“I took to wandering around town, waiting for something but not knowing what. One day I was getting on a bus, and I had the thought, Am I doing the right thing with my life? The man in front of me, a complete stranger, turned around and said, ‘Trust it.’ Then, as if he hadn’t said anything, he got on the bus without another word. That moment began a series of strange incidents. I was walking past a kid carrying a boom box, and at that moment I was thinking of going back to my old job. Suddenly he turned up the volume, and the song that blasted at me was ‘No, no, no, Delilah.’

“I laughed, but I wasn’t entirely amused. I felt a spooky connection with something beyond me. Soon afterwards I decided to go to a tarot card reader, and when I asked the cards if I should go on a spiritual path, the best card in the deck came up—it showed ten golden cups with a rainbow overhead and a joyous crowd dancing down below. After a while it got so I could ask myself a question and turn on the TV, knowing that the next words coming out of the set would answer my question.”

“And it never failed?” I asked.

Garry smiled. “Only when I tried to control it. The whole phenomenon had a certain innocence and surprise factor, so most of the time I was caught off guard. If I tried to push things or manipulate the outcome, nothing happened.”

“Did you get deep answers?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Not always, but each one fit the moment. It was very personal, speaking directly to my situation.”

Garry had more examples to relate, as everyone does who finds that his life is guided. No one is especially chosen for guidance. It is an aspect of life that permeates every level, for all of us. Certainly the instincts built into so-called lower creatures are a profound form of guidance. One observes salmon, for example, who live for years in the open ocean and then return to spawn in the exact same stream where they were born. Their unerring guidance is explained by smell—it is presumed that even hundreds of miles out at sea they can detect molecules of water from their native freshwater birthplace. But something more holistic is also at work, because salmon don’t respond to this smell until they reach a certain age, at which time they find the right direction, change color, stop eating, and begin to secrete large amounts of cortisol, a hormone that will increase to the point that it kills every fish soon after spawning. Timing, chemistry, sex drive, and life expectancy are precisely coordinated by an inner guidance that remains mysterious.

In Sanskrit the inner guidance that shapes a human life is called Upaguru, “the teacher who is near.” Over the past four decades the word guru has become familiar in the West to describe a spiritual teacher—the root word means “dispeller of darkness.” In other words, anyone who can guide you to see what you need to see serves as your guru. No one’s spiritual journey is shaped by a cookie cutter. Each is made up of individual moments that occur only once in the entire history of the universe. It takes infinite flexibility for your soul to understand what you need at any given moment. But every soul is up to the challenge, and therefore each daily moment contains, hidden inside it, a small, unique revelation. Zen Buddhists hold that every question already contains its own answer. Your soul takes the same perspective.

Awareness has the magical ability to merge question and answer. In Garry’s case, as soon as he posed a dilemma, a chance event or a casually overheard phrase would contain the solution. Without being aware, he would never have put the two together—you have to notice a connection before a coincidence turns into synchronicity. Someone who is unaware won’t notice that he is being guided. You may be surprised when a perfect stranger tells you exactly what you need to know and skeptical that it means anything. Yet who hasn’t opened a book at random, only to find that the information he wanted was on that page? (I know a legally blind scholar who told me with a note of triumph that on a good day he didn’t need to use the library’s microfiche catalog. He would go into the stacks and be guided to the exact book he needed, even to the point that he could pull a volume down at random only to discover that it was the right one.)

Upaguru is a mystical phenomenon only if you assume that awareness is limited to the brain; asking a question “in here” can’t produce an answer “out there.” But the wall between inner and outer reality is artificial. Awareness is everywhere in nature. Seeing how animals are guided, it’s hard to maintain skepticism on that point. Migrating whales pick up calls from their kind hundreds of miles away; migrating monarch butterflies return to the same mountainous area in Mexico without fail, even though it is their first migration home after hatching. A breakthrough can occur when you accept that awareness is what guides you. If you attune yourself to that possibility, you are reconnecting to your soul, which is nothing but awareness in its most expanded form.

Relying on the soul

Awareness comes from the soul, yet many people would say that they have never been guided, much less transformed. For centuries human beings have prayed for signs that there is a higher power. These signs are actually everywhere, but there’s a subtle difference between inner and outer guidance. One person’s insight is another person’s message from God. One person’s glimpse of inner light is another person’s angel. The realm of the soul has room for both.

External guidance comes to people for whom the best proof of spirit is physical. There’s an enormous body of lore about a rescue squad of angels and protectors who come to earth in times of peril. Many of these are contemporary eyewitness accounts. Travelers who find themselves stranded on a deserted road in the midst of a howling storm suddenly see headlights. A kind stranger gets out and changes a tire, fixes a carburetor, or connects jumper cables. This helper then disappears around the next bend, and the grateful recipient reports an encounter with an angel.

I was vividly struck by a vignette on television in which a woman told her story of angelic intervention. She found herself alone one Christmas with no money and two young children to take care of. She despaired of telling her children that there would be no holiday for them that year, since she couldn’t afford presents under the tree and a turkey dinner. On Christmas Day there was a knock on the door. A kindly neighbor invited the whole family to his apartment, where he provided a lavish spread and gifts for the children. The young mother, who had never seen this neighbor, was overwhelmed by his kindness. She knocked on his door a few days later to thank him, only to find that the apartment was empty. When she inquired at the manager’s office to ask where the stranger had gone, she was informed that the apartment had gone unrented for months. The manager had never seen the stranger she was looking for.

In first-person accounts like this, belief and skepticism are both beside the point, I think. We have no hard-and-fast proof either way. Skeptics are forced to prove a negative, that angels don’t exist. Believers are forced to produce an angel for the camera, and that, so far, hasn’t been done convincingly. Even so, nothing is going to stem the constant flow of such stories. The deeper issue is that the spiritual world is kept at arm’s length when it depends on angels. What happens when the angels don’t show up? That’s where inner guidance proves so valuable, because the world within is never far away.

Without the inner support that comes from your own awareness, you are left in a very vulnerable position. In one psychiatric case study, a middle-aged woman came for therapy in a very agitated state, unable to sleep and prey to fearful thoughts. A few months before, she had been happy and untroubled. But as she was walking out of a restaurant by herself one evening, a purse-snatcher ran up and grabbed her pocketbook. He barely laid hands on her, so she wasn’t hurt physically. She had little of importance in her purse and lost only the small amount of money in her wallet.

The woman told herself that she was lucky to escape a violent mugging, but over the next few weeks, these rational reassurances crumbled. She began to feel unsafe for the first time in her life. She kept reliving the incident, and the images made her increasingly afraid. Most victims of muggings experience residual anxiety, no longer feeling quite as safe as they did before. But this woman fell into deeper anxiety. In therapy she discovered that she had been masking a profound fear of death. She had made herself feel safe by believing that she led a charmed life. For this woman, who was growing older and had never examined her youthful sense of immortality, one shock was enough to crack the fantasy of that charmed life. Then the way was opened for darker energies to pour out from their hiding place.

The irony of this story for me is that people are immortal. The fantasy of immortality masks the very thing that’s true. The soul steps God down to the human level, which gives us the appearance of being mortal. But the soul is you. The fact that the soul exists gives us an aspect of the self that transcends the cycle of birth and death. We don’t have to separate the lore of angels from the lore of the soul. We do have to break the supernatural spell that religion weaves around obedience, faith, and theological dogma. Under that spell, people lose the ability to find their own inner guidance, which never sleeps and is always at hand.

To break this spell, you must rely on personal experience. The soul can be tested. You can ask your soul to produce results by running your own soul-experiment. In fact, all of the breakthroughs in this part of the book are self-experiments to prove that higher awareness can be trusted. If your first experiment has positive results, you can try another, and then another. This is the most practical way to resurrect the soul. The more useful the soul becomes, the more real it is, not as religious dogma but as a part of yourself.

In Your Life: Guided by the Soul

If your inner guide is always with you, why aren’t you aware of it? Actually, you are. Every desire pushes you in a certain direction. Every thought looks forward or backward. Anyone who has a purpose in life, even if that purpose is limited to getting through the day, is following his or her own inner guidance. The real issue is how wise this guidance is. Your soul has the potential to be a perfect guide. You must first attune your mind to a subtler level, and then your brain will adapt—this is the flow of life that governs all change. Being guided is a process, and at this moment you find yourself somewhere—the beginning, middle, or end—of that process.

In the beginning, you catch just a few glimpses of subtle guidance. Usually these seem like chance events or lucky coincidences. You find that you have made a decision that benefited you, but unlike your usual everyday choices, this decision has a certain sense of rightness about it, as if it were meant to be. We’ve all had that feeling at one time or another. You then have a choice, either to say, “I had the strangest feeling that this was meant to happen,” after which you put the whole thing out of your mind, or to stop and look more closely at what happened. How you make the choice determines whether you will begin to listen to your guidance or not.

In the middle of the process, your questioning has become more urgent and important. You have seen repeatedly that various situations came out in your favor. Instead of settling for a vague feeling that God was on your side, or that fate smiled at you for a moment, you became more actively involved. You ask more personal questions: Why did this happen to me? Who or what is watching over me? Am I the one who’s doing this? There’s no guarantee that you will come up with the same answers as the rishis, the sages of India. They concluded that the higher self, which we are calling the soul, is the source of everything, including God and fate.

Today, most people fence-sit. While some develop a confirmed conviction that God is rewarding them and therefore must be worshipped, others consider God a vague belief that doesn’t impinge on everyday life; divine reward, after all, raises the specter of divine punishment. In a secular world, cause and effect don’t operate on such a supernatural basis. By fence-sitting, a person can worry about God sending bad things their way, while at the same time using practical means to gain success and avoid failure.

The end of the process comes when you stop fence-sitting. You no longer halfheartedly believe in God and fate, but you seize the reins yourself. At this point, guidance becomes an acknowledged part of you and the journey you are consciously taking. You see the truth of Upaguru—there is guidance at every moment, because the guru is inside yourself. The teacher is as near as your next breath. When I call this the end of the process, I don’t mean that it reaches a halt, but rather that it matures. The process of being guided is fully revealed, at which point you take full advantage of it.

1. How do you get to this point?

2. Realize that you are on a journey to higher consciousness, and embrace it.

3. Expand your awareness, through meditation, contemplation, and other means.

4. Ask for guidance, simply and sincerely, and then wait for it to appear.

5. Trust your finest instincts. Guidance doesn’t come in the form of fear, premonition, omens, distrust, or self-importance. All of those things exist around us; they cloud our view of true guidance, which is always a signpost to the next step of personal growth.

The last point is extremely important but also tricky. All of us have reacted afterwards to a bad event by saying, “I just knew that was going to happen. I had this bad feeling.” But that isn’t guidance. It’s the voice of anxiety having an I-told-you-so moment. The difference is that true guidance is never fearful. Your soul doesn’t say, “Watch out, bad things are about to happen.” It steers you out of the situation before things turn bad. Sometimes it guides you out of danger before there’s even the slightest hint of it. The voice of fear never does that, since it reacts to immediate threat, real or imagined. Getting past the voice of fear is important, because fear is part of the shield that keeps you from your inner self. Like the fantasy of being protected, fear is the fantasy that you are always in danger. True guidance removes these fantasies and replaces them with reality: you possess a guide inside; it can be trusted. To activate this reality, we will go deeper into how the soul connects to the everyday self.

The connecting link is the mind, and much depends on whether your mind is open to your soul or closed to it. In a state of complete openness, the mind can realize infinite possibilities, far beyond guidance and protection. In its closed state, however, the mind mistakes reality. It creates a world that’s random, impersonal, and unsafe. Because each of us unthinkingly starts off in that world, our most urgent business is to crack the shell of illusion. Higher consciousness stands ready to deliver the gifts promised in every spiritual tradition as grace and Providence. In the flow of life, those gifts are meant to be yours, effortlessly and constantly.