Find your way back each day to the true you, to the one who knows you so well, all your faults and all your goodnesses, all your fears and all your dreams. This real you begs to not be forgotten but only to be included in your life. It does not judge you but wishes only the best for you. This real you loves you the way you are, like a mother loves a newborn child, and yet it knows your fuller potential. It asks you to grow a little bit more each day, to show it what you are truly made of, and to prove to it what it already knows about you, that you are capable of anything, especially of including it in your life, the true you, your first Soulmate, who loves you unconditionally and needs you as much as you need it. Together you make a great pair!
As I sit here, preparing to write, I hear Bob Dylan in the backdrop of my mind, singing, “all I really want to do, is baby be friends with you.” This is one of the many ways our High SOUL communicates with its mate, ego-Soul, in the course of everyday life.
Also, as I sit quietly, I notice a very high frequency in my ears, what I’ve heard characterized as the sound of the chakras ringing. At times the frequency and intensity of the vibration rises and loudens or strikingly disappears in one ear. It’s a kind of Morse Code of the High SOUL that accentuates agreement with a thought or happening at that exact moment.
Actually, a golden thread of connection with High SOUL weaves through synchronistic events of everyday life. Morning reading, whatever it might be, is experienced in a heightened state of awareness, where a clear light is shone upon the lesson of the day. From there, any book might be randomly opened to provide further clarification and punctuating resonance to the lesson just presented.
Dreams retrieved from ego-Soul’s nighttime journeys further amplify the central theme of the unfolding day. Dreams are ego-Soul’s awakening to other dimensions of its High SOUL relationship at subtler levels of being, independent of time and space. Understanding the messages of dreams strengthens ego-Soul’s communication with High SOUL.
Awake states that access inner silence offer a direct communication with High SOUL. When Jan channels the daily Soulbyte, she silences the thinking mind and tunes in directly to the guidance of her High SOUL.
Pathways to achieving inner silence include mindfulness meditation, intent, magical passes, Hemi-sync binaural entrainment, and biofeedback training. All of these methods train awareness to release its attachment to the marketplace of thoughts that constantly lobby for our attention.
Beyond thought we encounter a hypnagogic state, generally associated with sleep and dreaming. Suddenly we might find ourselves in a drama with characters we don’t know but are fully carrying on a dialogue with. Often, at this point, we drift into sleep and dream. However, if consciousness can remain aware as body drifts into sleep, we can journey lucidly in the subtler dimensions of being.
When Edgar Cayce traveled to this level, he was able to access the Akashic Record of all knowledge where his High SOUL dictated curative treatments for individuals seeking help. These treatments often combined many different allopathic and alternative modalities.
Fascinatingly, Cayce, in his normal waking state, had no memories of the readings. He was a simple man with no medical training or understanding. This reflects the true relationship between our ego-Soul and High SOUL.
Ego-Soul has its own intelligence, will, and desires but is terribly limited when compared to the fullness of knowledge of its High SOUL. Hence, the wisdom of developing a means to communicate with High SOUL in order to be guided to the best right decisions and actions in this life. Ego-Soul is solely responsible for navigating in this life. Why would it deny itself the guidance of its High SOUL?
Projected outwardly, we pursue a relationship with High SOUL as reflected in the search for a true traveling companion with whom to navigate this life. Inwardly, we achieve this Soulmate connection through quieting our mind and centering our awareness in the heart chakra, a true meeting place with High SOUL. Yes, a high pitch in my right ear just now confirms this guidance!
A wave of love devitalizes thought…
Time to go inward. See what happens in SOUL communication.
Virginia in 1935 at 16, her graduation photo from Julia Richman High School, Manhattan…
My Aunt Virginia, who died in 2012, left me her important papers, a partially written memoir, letters, jottings, and diary entries, which she had severely edited by slicing them out of her journals with a sharp knife, leaving behind only what she wanted posterity to see.
During our recent move to Virginia I came across the box where I had stored her stuff since her death and decided it was time to sort through it. What I found has been a treasure trove of family history, as well as an introduction to a complicated, fiercely intelligent, strikingly independent and delightful young woman.
I knew Virginia intimately my whole life as my aunt, my Godmother, and my spiritual mother, but as I poured over what she chose to leave behind I learned what she had never shared; her deepest struggles to figure out life, to live and love to the fullest, to use and be respected for her intellect. She was determined to not just do what was expected, to marry the first appropriate guy that came along with a decent job. She wanted true love, a soulmate, and she stuck to her guns about it, taking a unique stance for a young woman growing up in the 1920s and 30s, delaying marriage until it was right, in spite of the many attempts to marry her off.
She did meet her true soulmate when she was 30, a vibrant, brilliant young graphic designer who was making a name for himself in the New York graphic design world of 1950. It was a love affair that swept them both off their feet and into a whirlwind of intense love, emotion, and deep spiritual connection. He proposed to her on the first night they met and she accepted, though she was inclined to take things a bit slower than he. It turned out he was right to want to speed things up because it all ended tragically when he died suddenly and unexpectedly two months after they met, on the operating table during an emergency appendectomy of an allergic reaction to an anesthetic.
His death left her desolate, but it didn’t stop her; she sought to recapture that love and intense connection in another, and another. She gained insight and wisdom the hard way, by living and learning, by looking deep into her yearning heart and by using her keen mind. She once said, “It seems that you just keep on and that’s not even so bad, so long as you keep struggling!” The “struggle” she refers to is the soul’s yearning for something that only the heart will recognize when it finally comes around.
Virginia was born in 1919 and lived through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and World War II. She lived most of her life in New York City, though she loved the countryside. When she was growing up the family always had a house elsewhere to venture to on weekends and during the summer months, a shack on the beach at Rocky Point, a farmhouse in Orange county, and later a permanent home in Dutchess County.
She held various positions in publishing, having worked at Harper’s Magazine, McGraw-Hill and the World Press Review. She was active in international relations during World War II, working at the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (CDAAA), The United Nations Association, and for Professor and Legal Scholar Clyde Eagleton at NYU’s Graduate School of International Affairs during the founding of the United Nations.
Virginia was an insatiable reader, her library was vast and all-encompassing. She found something of interest in every book she ever read and every person she ever met. A prolific letter writer, she maintained lifelong friendships with several international pen pals, from her teen years until her death, or theirs, many of whom she never met in person. And, always, she aspired to being a “real” writer, like many of the great writers she met during her years in publishing.
Recently, Chuck wrote a blog that included insight into one of our most intriguing human psychological traits, one that we all innately possess, that of projection, and the power we have within us to use the mirror of self-reflection to achieve a higher state of self-realization, especially by confronting our feelings of self-importance.
He wrote: We begin by assuming responsibility for the fact that we, as individuals, reflect the reality we see without. Although it may be difficult to face this shadow truth, it is also quite empowering. You can read the whole blog here.
Among my aunt’s papers I found more than a few pieces that directly confronted her own struggles with this most common trait, the power of projection in the search for a soulmate. As Chuck wrote in Soulmate 101: At the psychological, or spiritual dimension, the soul mediates our spirit’s longing for itself in matter. The root of desire is this attractive force of spirit seeking appropriate matter to realize itself, or to manifest as a physical reality. To accomplish this, soul uses the psychological mechanism of projection.
Virginia was a jazz aficionado. As she wrote when she went to her first jazz concert at Town Hall in 1942: “I was struck dumb. I felt exactly as though I had been slugged with a baseball bat… I had come home. This was the music I had longed for, without knowing it. I knew it at once, though.” After that she could not get enough of jazz. She went to as many concerts as she could, read as many books on the subject as she could find, scoured the record stores for albums, learning as much as she could about this new music that was, as she wrote, “something to believe in.”
The following example of soulmate projection and reconciliation was written when Virginia was 38. She was facing the end of one soulmate projection and was soon to meet another soulmate, her husband-to-be, Max Kaminsky. Max was a well known jazz trumpeter and cornetist and she had been one of his biggest fans, meeting him shortly after that first concert she went to in 1942. They lost contact for many years then met again when she was 39 and he was 50. Eventually, they married and wrote My Life in Jazz together, a memoir of his long career as a jazz musician. Their marriage was intense and loving, and it lasted until Max’s death in 1994, the day before his 86th birthday. Here is Virginia’s reflection:
August 9, 1957
“Dad was talking tonight about how much the old-time performers gave of themselves—and it suddenly struck me—more forcibly than ever before in my life—how little I give of myself.
This is one of my worst blocks—I noticed it in myself in the car tonight with the two women [whom she frequently rode from the city with on weekends to visit the family farm in Dutchess County]—all they really want is pleasantness. I used to be so touchy, thinking that if I gave of myself they would have a power over me—is that it— or was it that I expected so much of them that when they misunderstood I became hurt, disappointed and offended.
But it’s a prison—one I’ve made all by myself. I’m a secretary because I act like one—goddammit—a stuffed shirt. What I have to get thru my thick head is that I am free-free-free, just as free as I choose to be and that it’s not those “other” people who are holding me back—it’s me.
I don’t have to believe in the role Jacques [the man she was in love with at the time] has assigned to me. I am perfectly free to love him if I choose—and in that way it’s none of his business—as long as I don’t, overtly or insidiously, ask for his love in return. That’s the counter, [the] balance—you are free just so long and in proportion to how little you try to exact from others.”
In this piece, my aunt reflects beautifully on herself, coming to a deeper realization that she is responsible for how she feels and views the world. In her analysis, she fully owns her own part in the unfolding of her life, deciding that she can choose as she pleases, as long as she doesn’t take what is not freely given, even energetically.
Here she breaks the mirror of her own self-reflection, withdrawing her projection and owning her own inner soulmate, preparing to live it in her physical life. In fact, it was a pivotal moment; without her even knowing it, she was preparing to enter a new reality, opening the way for further true self-realization. And as we know, she did meet her true soulmate, Max, shortly after this, perhaps because she was finally ready.
At the time, she held a limiting belief about herself, that she was only a secretary. Shortly after this, her papers reveal, she decided to give more of herself and volunteered to read to the blind. She ended up as a volunteer reader for many years, reading to law students, to college and high school students, when called upon. But the actual truth is that she grew far beyond the secretary self that she so bemoaned, eventually becoming the senior editor at Harper’s Magazine. I used to see her name on the masthead, third one down from the top, after the editor-in-chief and the managing editor. And she did become the writer she had always yearned to be.
Having opened the box containing my aunt’s things and discovering what she valued and chose to pass on, I too ask myself, do I give enough? Do I do enough? Am I kind enough?
Do any of us give enough? Are any of us kind enough? How much do we hold ourselves back because of our limiting beliefs, because of our entrenched defenses, our sense of entitlement, our regrets or resentments? Why are we so offended all the time?
I thank my aunt for the little bits she left behind, modest and humble in their number yet full of profound insight into a woman’s struggle to find her place in the world, and to matter.
For many, the search for their missing half is their primary mission in life. Though reflected in physical instinct, this drive actually issues forth from the spiritual plane, as the search for one’s soulmate. But what is a soulmate?
Plato suggested that humans were originally androgynous, composed of a male and female head and body bonded together as one. When the Olympians came to power, Zeus, concerned with curtailing the human’s growing power, had them separated into two bodies, male and female. Thus, rather than rival the gods, the primary task of the human became finding their missing halves.
Indeed, the obsession, if not downright compulsion, to restore one’s wholeness, through bonding with another person, is an apt description of a primary focus of human life on earth. Notice, however, the underlying narcissistic foundation of this pursuit. To search for one’s soulmate is to search for one’s missing self. The object of the search is me not you. You are a mirror of but not my soulmate. This fundamental narcissistic truth is at the heart of many a relationship problem.
In fact, we are attracted to another through the unconscious projection of our missing other half onto the personality and physical body of another person. But how does this happen? Let’s start with the definition of soul.
What really is a soul? The Tibetan, as channeled by Alice Bailey in A Treatise on White Magic, states: “Soul… is neither spirit nor matter, but the relationship between them… the soul is the mediator of this duality.”
What, then, is spirit and what is matter?
What is spirit? Spirit is the blueprint of that which is to be born or built. Jung called spirits archetypes; designs or laws that create order and meaning. Spirits lack substance, but they exert power. Spirits have what we might call a magnetic or attractive force that draws matter to them, to give life and substance to their designs.
What is matter? Matter is dense energy. What gives matter its hardness, its material form, is energy tightly bundled together. All matter, from rocks to humans, represents different spirit designs that attracts matter to them to form all things physical.
What is the soul’s mediating relationship with spirit and matter? First of all, let me suggest that though spirit and matter are opposites, as one is invisible and the other quite visible, they are in fact different sides of the same thing. Spirit is the animating force of all things in nature: It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, and that swing is the spirit in the physical thing. A physical thing without spirit is a corpse, dead or alive. On the other hand, a spirit lacking matter is unrealized on the physical plane.
The role of the soul in human form is to oversee spirit’s unfolding in manifested—physical—form. On a most primal level, our soul, through the subconscious, directs the intricate workings of the physical body to coordinate with our spirit design for the day: wakeup, eliminate, eat, digest, dress, and drive toward our intended goal. The soul is charged with mediating our primal relationship with our physical body to remain healthy, balanced, and capable of manifesting our spirit intent.
At the psychological, or spiritual dimension, the soul mediates our spirit’s longing for itself in matter. The root of desire is this attractive force of spirit seeking appropriate matter to realize itself, or to manifest as a physical reality. To accomplish this, soul uses the psychological mechanism of projection.
Projection is theunconscious language of the soul. The soul seeks out a physical reflection of its spirit’s intent by projecting its spirit’s image upon something or someone in the physical world, attracting us to it.
Rather than interpret this projection as a form of communication, most humans take the bait and concretize the projection. “I must have that person or thing; only they will make me whole!” Even with total conscious awareness of the projection, we are overwhelmingly emotionally drawn to this other person or thing. Attraction and desire are the active energies the soul uses as tools of mediation to bring us into fuller knowledge and realization of our whole selves.
The journey of the soul toward its spirit/matter fulfillment is the comedy and tragedy of human life errors. Inevitably—frequently through disappointment—we are led to what we need in order to take responsibility for the full realization of our selves. Rather than try to control the people who reflect our soul’s projections, let us own our inner spirit seeking to materialize within our selves.
We demand the attention, love and care of our cherished other, but do we realize these same qualities in our relationship with our own physical bodies and spiritual aspirations? Are we simply leaving it to the other to provide fulfillment of ourselves? Can we learn the secret language of the soul—projection—and take full responsibility to realize the self? Can we finally realize true love of another through the lifting of the veils of our entitled projections from the actual other?
Once we retrieve our true soulmate—our inner wholeness—we are equipped to meet the other as they truly are. Gone are the compulsions of need. We are simply two separate souls sharing…
There is no greater journey than the journey within. There is no greater challenge than facing your own fears. Nothing else will bring you to truly experiencing freedom either, for there is no other journey than the inward journey to bring you to fully knowing and trusting your Self, your own true soulmate. Though you may seek outwardly for “the one,” the true one you seek to know, love, and experience life with is the true Self within. Only in discovering and merging with this true Self will your outer life be truly fulfilling. It’s never too late to meet this soulmate within, always waiting, even after years of distance and neglect, to answer your call!
