You are Both a Soul and a Personality

Each of us is a Living Soul, existing in a radically different reality to this one.

You, as a Living Soul, live in a Soul world. You can call it the Causal Worlds—very refined, high frequency, semi-Light, semi-material worlds. You live as a Living Soul in these worlds.

But you also have a personality that exists down here on this level. On this level you have a physical body, you have a mind, and you have emotions. Each of these—the physical body, the mind, and the emotions—have their own sphere of activity in and around you. You can see the physical aspect, but the mental and emotional vibrations you cannot see. If you become clairvoyant, of course, then you can see these things; but the average person is not clairvoyant, so the average person can only feel them. You can feel people’s thoughts, you can feel people’s emotions, and you can touch them physically, but all of this is only of the personality that lives in this world.

So you are both a Living Soul and a personality, and the problem arises because there is no conscious link between these two aspects of yourself. You don’t remember yourself as a Living Soul; you know yourself only as a personality. In the education system, at home, and in church you are taught about your personality—about your body, feelings, moods, desires and thoughts—but you still cannot experience yourself as a Living Soul, as a spiritual entity apart from and beyond the personality. Therefore, you cannot experience the other Universe in which the Living Soul abides—a greater Universe, a radiant Light-Universe.

In the East they use a different language to describe the same idea.

They call the Soul Ātman, the Spirit or the Self. They say that you have Ātman (Spirit), you have Manas (the mind), you have Kāma (the desire-nature), and you have the physical body.

Whether you follow an Eastern or a Western idea, however, the basic problem is that there is a disconnection between yourself as an immortal spiritual entity and the perishable self that exists in this world. Therefore, the Ancients made an effort to connect the two, so that while living in this world they became consciously immortal. That connecting process is meditation.

So the true purpose of meditation is to link yourself up within yourself. This is why the Easterners use the word Yoga. In the Hebrew tradition it is Yichud. Yoga does not mean exercise, it means union. Yoga is the uniting of that spiritual entity within you with the material entity which you observe yourself to be.

A Good Meditation is Very Simple.

From the very beginning it is important to understand why you meditate. If you have a wrong idea of meditation, or if you meditate for the wrong purpose, then you will not attain that result which is the true purpose of meditation. This is why it is important also to choose the right kind of meditation. During the past six thousand years, people have forgotten the true idea of meditation and have devised intellectual exercises that actually take you away from that idea of union.

The problem, however, is that the more complicated the exercise, the less chance you have of succeeding. This is why we have to clarify what meditation actually is. A good meditation is very simple; it has to be simple, because a complex meditation will keep you tied to mental activity. The very complicated forms of meditation keep the mind actively engaged in some visualization or thought-process, so you remain on that level. You (your consciousness) cannot move up or down and you cannot unite within, because you keep activating your mind. The whole idea of a good meditation is to quiet the mind, to make the mind completely still. And you have to understand very scientifically why that is so.

You have a physical body, you have an astral or emotional body and you have a mind body, and each has a different frequency of vibration. Your physical body vibrates very slowly, your emotional body vibrates faster, and the mind body vibrates faster still. And then there is your Soul, which has a very rapid and fine vibration, and you cannot perceive it unless you cultivate that vibration. So you cannot ever perceive the Soul by simply remaining on the physical brain level, because the brain’s rate of vibration is too slow. Nor can you perceive the Soul by feeling, because the emotional body is still too slow. Even by thinking, you cannot perceive the Soul, because your mind body is still too slow. Any meditation that continually over-stimulates your physical, emotional, or mental processes will develop only those levels of your personality; it will not connect you to the Soul level. So, to perceive yourself as a Living Soul, you have to go beyond physical, emotional, and mental processes.

The Soul Realizes that Something is Missing.

The higher purpose of meditation, which is to unite yourself as a Living Soul.

If you were taught that you are only this personality, and you are content with such an image of yourself, and you cannot visualize yourself to be something deeper, then the idea of meditation will be meaningless. You will say to yourself, “I already am what I am! I already am a successful bank manager,” or “I already am a multi-millionaire!” You have a fixed idea of what you are, so there is no reason to be anything else. That is a limitation. It is why hundreds of millions of people never enter the spiritual life, never seek Union with the Absolute, never come to know themselves as living, immortal Souls. They are already satisfied with their image of themselves. They may be happy in whatever role they are in, and therefore they say, “This is all there is. I am quite happy as I am. Why should I meditate?” And that is fine, too.

However, there comes a time in everybody’s existence, in the long life-cycle of the Soul, that no matter how successful you are in the world, you are still not happy. Even if you are the richest, most powerful, most influential person, you are still not happy inside. This is when the Soul realizes that something is missing. The personality is doing all these things in the world, but something is still missing! Then you become very restless inside. You start searching for something else, because the Soul inside you sends down little messages to the brain which say, “Go and find something better!” You pick up these little messages and they inspire you to look for something that makes your life more meaningful. This is a reaction of the personality to an impulse from the Soul within.

Excerpt from The Journey Within, (P41-44)

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• The Questions Who Am I, Determines Your Life
• The Law of Your Being
• The Way of Happiness is the Way of Light