The Seat of the Soul is Gary Zukav’s best-selling exploration of the soul’s evolutionary journey through the material realm. Published in 1989, following Zukav’s acclaimed The Dancing Wu Li Masters (which explored the connection between quantum physics and spirituality), this book earned a spot as an Oprah Winfrey favorite and gained a wide following throughout the 1990s. This guide is based on the 25th-anniversary edition of the book, published in 2014.
Origins of The Seat of the Soul
Zukav’s 1979 book The Dancing Wu Li Masters was born from Zukav’s friendship with physicist Jack Sarfatti, who introduced him to the concepts of quantum physics and purportedly ghost-wrote portions of the book. Zukav and Sarfatti were part of an Eastern mysticism-inspired spiritual movement in the 1970s, and they sought to combine ideas from the new physics and this new spiritual movement.
The Seat of the Soul veers away from a scientific perspective but extends some of the ideas from The Dancing Wu Li Masters about the spiritual nature of the universe. We can particularly see the influence of Eastern mystical traditions in Zukav’s ideas about the soul’s reincarnation and karma. Oprah Winfrey has called The Seat of the Soul her favorite book, aside from the Bible, and her enthusiastic promotion of the book contributed to its widespread popularity.
Zukav claims that humans are primarily spiritual beings living in the material world. Our souls have incarnated in order to learn lessons and fulfill a mission and, ultimately, to evolve. Therefore, Zukav says, our true life’s purpose is to become fully aligned with our souls in order to help them evolve. However, humans have become trapped in the pursuit of external power and disconnected from our spiritual nature, he says, and this causes much sorrow and suffering in the world. Zukav says we need to learn how to tune into our souls and to messages from the universe and our spirit guides, to find empowerment within, so we can properly fulfill our soul’s mission and aid in its evolution.
In this guide, we’ll look at how Zukav describes the makeup of the universe, from the highest level of divine consciousness, to spirit beings and souls, down to the lowest expression, the material world. We’ll then discuss the problems Zukav identifies with humanity’s choices on the material plane, and how we could potentially begin to make better choices, through developing our intuition and becoming aligned with our souls.
We’ll compare Zukav’s ideas throughout with the ideas of other spiritual and New-Age thinkers, like Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle, and to the religious traditions and concepts that Zukav’s philosophy draws upon, most notably Hinduism.
To understand the premise of The Seat of the Soul, we’ll begin by looking at how Zukav conceives of the universe. He says that the universe, in its essence, is composed entirely of a divine loving consciousness. Some may refer to this as “God,” while others may understand it as simply the living spirit of the universe itself.
That spiritual essence is then broken down into smaller components, Zukav explains, which consist of many different types of spirit beings, including angels, spirit guides and teachers, souls, and many other forms of spirit beings in other galaxies. All of these spirit beings are made of light energy, he says, and some of these light-energy spirit beings take the form of human souls that need to come to the physical plane to learn lessons, balance their karma, and evolve. These soul-beings are the only kind that need to incarnate this way, while the rest remain elsewhere in the spiritual realm of the universe.
Next, we’ll explain how Zukav understands the nature and purpose of our souls in coming to the material realm.
Pantheism and the Soul
Zukav’s conception of the universe being composed entirely of a divine loving consciousness is reminiscent of a pantheistic worldview. Pantheism is the belief that there is nothing supernatural separate from the universe, but that everything in existence is one divine whole, or in other words, “the universe” is identical to “God.” In this concept, “God” is not understood as a personal or anthropomorphic-type being that can act upon the world, but the “divine Unity of the world” itself. However, Zukav’s belief diverges from pantheism in the belief in separate individual souls as parts of that whole. Most pantheists would believe that the divine consciousness pervades us, and everything in the world, but that there would not be a distinct soul-being within us, as separate from others, that would stay intact after our death.
According to Zukav, our souls are essentially small parts of the divine consciousness, so they’re inherently connected to that, and are made of light energy. Our bodies and minds, however, are products of the material world. They’re intertwined with our souls, but not the same, he says. Your body is simply a mortal vehicle that your soul is spending one of many lifetimes in; your body and mind will die, while your soul is infinite and timeless. Therefore, Zukav says, while you only live one time as the human being you are, your soul has already likely lived many lifetimes, and may live many more, in other bodies. He does say that although your “personality” or “lower self” is not typically aware of the other lifetimes of your soul, when you develop your intuitive sense, you may sometimes become aware of these other lives. This is why some people have past life memories.
The Bhagavad Gita and the Soul
Zukav’s philosophy was clearly inspired in part by Hinduism. The Bhagavad Gita, one of the seminal Hindu scriptural texts, discusses the body and soul as “the field and the knower of the field.” In this metaphor, the “knower” of the field is your true self, or what Zukav is thinking of as the “soul.” The field is composed of your body and your mind, and the thoughts and sense perceptions that arise from those, which can be obstacles to the soul, as they are susceptible to false understandings or illusions. Similar to Zukav’s ideas about the soul being a part of the divine whole, The Bhagavad Gita says that it’s crucial for us to understand the difference between these two aspects of ourselves, and to realize our souls are all part of Brahman, the ultimate reality.
According to Zukav, the extent to which your lower self is aware of, and connected to, your soul will determine your life experience. The more disconnected you are from your soul, the more conflict and negativity there will be in your life; a person who is totally out of touch with their soul will be “evil” or schizophrenic, Zukav says. By contrast, a person who’s totally aligned with and in touch with their soul will be enlightened.
As far as souls on Earth, Zukav says that all human beings have individual souls, but the rest of the living material world does not. Animals, plants, and minerals have “group souls,” he explains, meaning that all the animals of a specific species are connected, sharing a single soul. So, for example, all elephants are imbued with a small portion of the one elephant soul. This is why animals behave on basic instinct, he explains, while humans act with individual consciousness and choice.
So, Zukav says, animals have a collective consciousness, but all species are not equally conscious. There are greater and lesser degrees of consciousness in different animal species. As these collective animal souls evolve, he says, the soul essence can move into higher forms of animals, and eventually can evolve into a singular human soul. So, according to Zukav’s description of the universe, the human soul is the highest-evolved form of spirit being that manifests in physical form. Beyond the human soul there are only non-material spiritual beings, such as spirit guides and angels.
While each human has an individual soul, according to Zukav, we also have collective consciousnesses with groups of people who share some identity category with us. For example, all women have a spiritual connection to one another, as do all men, all people of a specific race, nationality, religion, and so on. Therefore, as your soul evolves, Zukav says, you’ll contribute also to the evolution of other souls within those groups you belong to.
Aristotle and the Soul
The idea of differing types and degrees of souls in the living world can be traced back to Aristotle, who conceived of a hierarchy of life and consciousness. He believed that plants have a “vegetative” soul which enables them to simply grow and reproduce, while animals have a “sensitive” soul that additionally allows them to feel pleasure and pain. Humans, at the top of the hierarchy, have a “rational” soul, which in addition to the functions of plants and animals, allows them to think and reason. Unlike Zukav, however, Aristotle did not conceive of the soul as something separate from the body, or as something immortal that lived on after death. The soul, in his view, is essentially what animates the body to do what it’s meant to do.
So now that we understand that we all have an immortal soul dwelling within us, we’ll discuss what the purpose of that soul is in manifesting in the material world, in our bodies. Zukav says that the main purpose of the soul in coming to live on Earth is to evolve. However, this is a spiritual evolution, rather than a biological one. He says we typically understand evolution as a physical process of species moving toward greater complexity, but there is also a spiritual evolution taking place—the evolution of our souls.
Zukav says that all souls in the universe are evolving, but only some have to do it through material manifestation. He explains that the purpose of the soul’s journey in the material world is for it to learn lessons, heal, and balance its karma. The soul needs to enter a series of bodies, he says, and live out many lifetimes to experience many different aspects of material life in order to heal itself. So, being a vehicle for our soul’s evolution is actually our purpose in life, though we often don’t recognize that because we’re not attuned to our souls.
The “Masters” and the Soul
Zukav doesn’t explain why, or from what, our souls need to heal. But in Many Lives, Many Masters we can find some ideas about the soul’s incarnation that are similar to Zukav’s. In this book, psychiatrist Brian Weiss describes the experiences of a patient who appeared to have past life memories and who received guidance from spiritual “masters.” Weiss says, according to those “masters,” the purpose of life is for the soul to learn universal values, like love and faith, through its experience in corporal form. He says that physical incarnation is necessary because we need both spiritual wisdom and intellectual knowledge to understand all of life’s lessons, and that intellectual knowledge can only be gained with the mind/brain.
Like Zukav, Weiss also says that the soul exists within a system of karma, with debts being created across its many incarnations, and one of our goals in life is to balance that karmic debt, by living good lives.
Along with the soul’s evolution, Zukav says all of humanity is evolving toward “enlightenment”— it’s the natural path of our species to go this way. But we have free will, so we can consciously choose which direction to go in our lifetimes; choosing to walk a spiritual path, or choosing worldly pursuits. When your body and soul are totally aligned, he says, you will realize the interconnectedness of everything, and you’ll make choices that assist your soul toward its conscious evolution to enlightenment.
An important part of the soul’s healing, Zukav says, involves balancing its karma. Karma is an impersonal law of the universe that equates to “what goes around comes around,” or, for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. So, Zukav explains, everything that happens to you in life is related to the karma of your soul.
The karma of your soul is also what determines your personality characteristics, he says. Your temperament, your dispositions, and so on, were created based on what your soul needs to learn in this lifetime, to balance its karma. And, all of your reactions to life experiences will determine whether your soul balances its karma or creates more karmic debt, Zukav says.
When you act out of anger, for example, anger will come back to you. After you (or your soul in a subsequent lifetime) experience these negative results enough times, he explains, you will eventually learn the lesson to not act from anger. As long as you’re acting unconsciously, from your lower self, you will keep having to learn these kinds of lessons the hard way.
Zukav explains that after you die your soul will go to have its karma weighed out again, to determine what it still needs to learn. He says that karma has no value judgment. If you recognize that the bad things that happen to you are a result of your soul needing to balance its karma, you will refrain from reacting negatively. If you react in a hostile or vengeful way, Zukav says, you only create another karmic debt that must be paid later, in your lifetime, or your soul’s next one. Therefore, he says that nothing that happens in the world is ever really “unfair”—everything is a soul experiencing what it needs to experience to balance its karmic energy. So making value judgments, such as judging something as right or wrong, or judging people as better or worse, only creates negative karma. Zukav says that we need to practice compassion and “non-judgmental acceptance” even toward those who harm us. He calls this “non-judgmental justice”—the ability to observe everything as being a product of karmic balance and not judging it. This is the way to balance your soul’s karmic debt.
Balance Your Karma
Karma is a central concept in the Hindu belief system—the word itself means “action,” as it’s essentially a measure of the energetic impressions formed by all your actions. Deepak Chopra describes it as like a “software” that runs your life. He says that, according to the Hindu Vedantic tradition, karmic energy is created and stored in your soul across many lifetimes, so it affects who you are and everything you do in this lifetime. You’re constantly creating karma with your words, deeds, thoughts, and lifestyle, whether it’s intentional or not. Chopra says all of the karmic energy you generate will be returned to you in the same measure, but that you can control whether that brings you happiness or suffering by directing your actions to create good karma. He gives some advice for increasing your positive karma, including:
Choose to act in ways that will serve the highest good, for yourself and others.
Be forgiving of any wrongdoings against you. Remember any harm that’s been done to you was a result of your own karma, so forgive and move on.
Practice gratitude. Remember when bad things happen to you, it’s a balancing of a karmic debt—so be grateful for it.
Pay attention to astrology. It can provide you with real insight into your life.
Seek out a spiritual teacher who can help guide you.
Find your dharma, or life’s purpose, and live in alignment with it.
Practice meditation. It’s the most powerful tool for spiritual growth.
Your actions are tied not just to your soul’s karma, Zukav says, but to that of other souls as well, through “collective consciousnesses.” He explains that your individual reality is one point of consciousness, but you also constantly contribute to energetic exchange with the people around you—your families and friends, peers, random people you interact with, as well as those whom you share identity categories with, your whole society, and ultimately all of humanity. Everyone’s choices have effects on how these “collective consciousnesses” develop, Zukav says, and therefore on many layers of reality. For example, if you’re an American Buddhist woman, you’re part of the collective consciousness that is “women” and that of “Americans” and that of “Buddhists” and so on. And you’re helping to shape the collective realities of those groups—up to and including the collective consciousness of humanity.
Identity and Connection
It’s unclear why specific kinds of identity groups would necessarily have any spiritual link to one another. For example, while it’s understandable that people who belong to the same religion would have a spiritual bond, one’s nationality is an accident of birth, can change over one’s lifetime, and in most cases is not spiritually meaningful. Additionally, the category of race is inherently problematic, as we can’t scientifically distinguish racial groups, and very few humans now belong to a single “racial” group. Sex and gender categories have similar problems as well.
Zukav’s theory about the collective consciousness groups that we all belong to is reminiscent of the concept of the karass, invented by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle. In this exploration of the fictional religion of Bokononism, Vonnegut describes a karass as a group of people who are spiritually linked with one another, to fulfill some cosmic purpose, usually unknown to them. However, Vonnegut distinguishes a karass from a granfalloon, which he defines as a group of people who share some observable commonality, such as members of one’s country or one’s gender. These categories have no spiritual significance, while a karass is spiritually and energetically linked. You can only recognize a member of your karass by a sort of gut feeling you get about a person, but your energies will be intertwined throughout your lifetimes.
As spiritual beings living in the material world, Zukav says, our true essence is light energy, which flows through us from the universe. So, all of our interactions and behaviors on the material plane have an energetic component as light vibration, he explains: Negativity creates lower vibration energy, and positivity creates higher vibrations. These vibrations are felt by us as our emotions. Higher-vibration emotions, for example, are love and compassion, whereas anger and resentment are lower-vibration emotions. Zukav says this is why you feel lighter and higher when you’re happy, and heavy and dull when you’re unhappy. He also says that lower-vibration people can drain others of energy, and higher-vibration people can raise others up.
Because of these emotional frequencies, Zukav explains, you also will attract others of similar vibration to you, so if you consciously raise your energy, you’ll attract higher-energy people and you can co-create a more enlightened reality together. He says that this energy can be directed by your thoughts, so positive thoughts will create more positive emotions and therefore higher vibration, and vice versa with negative thoughts. So, by consciously choosing your thoughts, Zukav says, you can consciously raise your vibration, and therefore become brighter light energy—this is why we say such high-vibration people are “enlightened.”
The Law of Attraction
The idea that energy attracts like energy is called the law of attraction, which dates back to the New Thought Movement of the early 19th century. This concept is central to the book The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne, which says that your thoughts generate a magnetic energy that will pull that same frequency of energy toward you. Similar to the concept of karma, the law of attraction can affect you negatively or positively, and it happens whether you are conscious of it or not. Byrne argues that you can use this to re-create your life, by consciously directing your thoughts to generate the energy you want to attract. According to Zukav you should try to attract other positive light-energy people to your life, and The Secret tells us that to do that, we should begin with visualization. If you want to attract a certain kind of partner or friends to your life, envision them. Think about every detail of the kinds of qualities they would have, and then believe that they exist and they’ll come to you. Then make space for that person or people in your life, and be open to finding them.
The biggest challenge our souls face in incarnating on Earth, according to Zukav, is that they are constrained by the choices we make with our rational minds, which think from a less enlightened perspective. If you are not consciously in touch with your soul and listening to its guidance, he says, you will make decisions based on the desires and fears of your lower self, your physical form. And yet those choices will affect your soul’s karma and therefore its chance for evolution. Next, we’ll discuss the mistakes humans make, according to Zukav, when we don’t live attuned to the guidance of our souls.
Zukav explains that we humans dwell mostly within our lower, materialist selves, and have created a whole world based on this. We live a life of the mind instead of the heart, he says, so we don’t make proper choices about our behavior, we don’t hear our spirit guides, and we dismiss messages because we lack spirituality. Because of this, humans have created a world built on pursuit of external power instead of internal power, Zukav says.
The soul’s approach to the world is one of honoring all of life as sacred, and refraining from harming any other life, but our lower selves don’t perceive the world this way. A perspective of honoring life is to see that everything has spirit and is equally divine. When we don’t honor life as divine, Zukav says, we judge some things and people as better than others, we create hierarchies, we exploit nature and other humans, and we accumulate resources, even to the detriment of others. In nature, animals don’t do this. Although some eat other animals, Zukav says that’s all a part of the cycle of life. They don’t take more than they need—the cycle of life is a balanced act of species offering up energy to others. If we revere and honor life and the natural world, he says, we’ll act within that same framework.
Zukav explains that living life according to this principle of honor may require challenging social norms, because it’s not the way of mainstream society. As flawed humans, perceiving the world through our materialist lens, he says, we are all fragmented beings. Often we’ll feel conflicted about how to act because our material and spiritual aspects are in conflict with one another. For example, parts of us are peaceful and parts of us may be violent. So, according to Zukav, when we have to make a choice about how to act or react in life, we need to choose which one of those aspects of ourselves to indulge. A human who doesn’t even believe in, or is not in touch with his/her soul, he says, will often make the wrong choices, and thus we’ve created a world with much suffering and violence.
The Quest for Power
Zukav argues that finding our authentic internal power means tapping into the spiritual world outside of us, to which our souls are connected. By contrast, in his book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari argues that moving away from religion and the belief in an all-powerful God has actually empowered humans to improve the world. When humans can’t rely on a deity to solve their problems, to heal illness, and to prevent suffering, he says, they must find the resources within them, to do those things for themselves. Harari explains that this is the basis for Humanism, the philosophy that humanity is essentially empowered by their own rational minds, to create meaning and purpose in life without need for a belief in the supernatural.
Harari admits, though, that this humanistic drive toward empowerment through scientific advancement has led to the development of technologies that may ultimately destroy us, and the Earth. Zukav would connect this to the loss of reverence for life. Perhaps another non-supernatural approach to this problem could be Atheopaganism, a recently established non-theistic religious path that puts honor and reverence for the natural world at the center of its ideology.
Ultimately, Zukav argues, the divide within us is always between fear and love. Fear is at the root of all other negative emotions, such as anger, jealousy, grief, and sorrow. While love is at the root of all positive emotions, such as joy, contentment, and gratitude. These emotions lead to corresponding behaviors, Zukav says—if we act from fear, according to our lower instincts, we behave in harmful ways such as lying, cheating, and manipulating. If we act from love, according to our heart, we will have peaceful, respectful behaviors toward others. Also, he says, we’ll continue to attract those same emotions and behaviors toward us, because of the law of attraction—energy attracts like energy. All of these choices will result in the kind of world we create on the material level, Zukav explains, as well as how our soul progresses in this lifetime.
(Shortform note: Episcopalian Bishop Robert O’Neill explores the idea of fear as the opposite of love through the narrative of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. He says that when the story is analyzed, it becomes clear that the persecution of Christ was based in fear, and that fear, when spread to a large group, created a mob mentality that ultimately killed the savior, who represents love. In the end, however, he points out that the resurrection of Christ represents the ultimate triumph of love over fear.)
Since we live a life of the mind, which chases material pursuits, Zukav says, we’ve come to understand life as a “survival of the fittest,” so we try to control and dominate our environment and others around us. He says that the feeling of powerlessness underlies all our fears, so we try to alleviate that by seeking power. However, he explains that we perceive power as external to us, something outside of us that we can have more or less of than others, and which determines our social position and thus our value. So we’re constantly in conflict, competing with one another, vying for power. This happens between individuals, races, countries, social classes, religious groups, and so on.
A materialistic person seeks external power, Zukav points out, by dominating and exploiting others, by wanting to be better than others, and by dominating nature. When we seek external power, he says, we’re acting from fear, and when we can’t attain it, or feel a lack of power, we feel anxiety. Anxiety, Zukav explains, is the fearful feeling of disempowerment. This manifests in the body, in the throat, or stomach, or chest, he says, and we can eventually create disease by not acknowledging it.
(Shortform note: There’s scientific evidence that Zukav is correct that anxiety can manifest physically in the body as disease. In his 2011 book When the Body Says No, Gabor Maté explores the connection between stress and disease, and cites copious research that has shown a link. And, specifically, according to Maté, one of the major stress-response triggers in the body is a feeling of lack of control, which would equate to the disempowerment Zukav refers to.)
However, Zukav reminds us that we all have an internal source of power—our souls. And we can tap into that by developing our sixth sense, our intuition. When we tune into our higher intuition, he says, we recognize that true power is within us, and there’s no longer any need to seek external power. Internal power is unlimited and nobody has more or less. There’s no need to dominate, compete, or struggle for a power that’s within us. We see everyone as equal and act from love and compassion. Zukav calls this “authentic empowerment.” (Shortform note: Brené Brown warns in The Gifts of Imperfection that a major barrier to developing our intuition is our brain’s wariness due to an overwhelming need for certainty. She argues that the key to overcoming the need for certainty is embracing faith, or moving forward with trust despite not knowing what’s ahead.)
So, now that we understand how our lower selves may be preventing our souls from evolving, how do we correct this so we can find our soul’s purpose and follow it? Zukav explains that this involves developing our intuition, listening to our heart, and tuning in to our emotions, which will allow us to be guided by our soul. And, he says, we must learn to seek our internal power and let go of our pursuit of external power. We’ll take a look next at how he advises going about doing these things.
To understand what our soul needs in this lifetime, we need to learn to listen to our hearts, Zukav says, which begins by attuning to our feelings. When we’re in touch with our deeper emotions, we can understand them as messages from our soul and from other spirit guides out in the universe. This constitutes an intuitive way of knowing and understanding the world with the heart rather than the mind, which Zukav describes as a sixth sense. This means valuing emotions and being in touch with our feelings. This deeper awareness of our feelings, he says, will guide us in decision-making. If you’re not sure whether to pursue a particular course of action, tuning in to the feelings in your heart will tell you which way to go.
Intuition, as Zukav defines it, is the sense beyond our ordinary five senses that’s connected to universal wisdom. It’s your soul speaking to your higher self. According to Zukav, we tend to emphasize knowledge of the mind and spend much time developing it and training it, yet we don’t spend time developing our intuitive knowledge. In fact, we often dismiss it entirely. He says when we have a “gut feeling” or a hunch about something, we need to pay attention to those things, and not dismiss them. Those are products of our intuitive sense.
Align With the Spiritual Realm
In The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, Deepak Chopra says that aligning with the spiritual realm is crucial for a successful purpose-filled life. Like Zukav, he argues that without that connection to something spiritual, you’ll have an incomplete and inaccurate perception of reality. Chopra also says that lack of connection leads to a life of fear and anxiety, since you’ll have no higher guidance, and you’ll get caught up in shallow material pursuits, which are ultimately unsatisfying. In order to begin to align yourself with your soul, or the spiritual realm outside of yourself, try the exercises in the Shortform guide to The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.
If you’re in tune with your soul, Zukav says, you'll know you have a higher guidance. Your lower self doesn’t realize this, so it isn’t able to draw upon that resource, which means you’ll have to learn lessons the hard way, in the physical realm. If you’re tuned in to your intuitive sense, you can access universal guidance and make more conscious choices based on that higher knowledge. To this end, Zukav offers some advice for working on developing your intuitive sense. He says this involves the following:
(Shortform note: Jack Canfield, author of The Success Principles, offers a more focused approach that may be easier to implement than Zukav’s advice. Canfield’s seven steps for tuning in to your intuition include devoting time each day to asking your intuition questions and acting immediately on the information you receive.)
Setting Powerful Intentions
While Zukav doesn’t explain how to set intentions, Deepak Chopra also offers some concrete advice. He says “everything that happens in the universe begins with intention” and that an intention is like a seed from which something will grow. So you must take care to plant those seeds consciously and to nurture them. Some steps to setting intentions effectively are:
Meditate, to clear your mind of its chatter and get to a place of still, quiet consciousness.
Think about your intention (what you want to manifest) while you’re in a meditative state, and then let it go—put it out there, and then stop thinking about it.
Discard any negative beliefs or criticisms from yourself or others, and know that everything will be as it should be.
Don’t dwell on the outcome, as this creates anxiety. Just let it be, and trust the universe.
Once you’ve honed your intuition so that you can listen to your heart knowledge and be guided by your soul, Zukav says, you need to let go of any pursuit of external power, and discover your internal power—the power of your soul. In this way you become authentically empowered to live out your soul’s purpose.
The spiritually powerful person realizes that materialistic power is unstable and can’t last, and therefore it isn’t truly power, Zukav says. Spiritual power comes from within, from one’s soul and that soul’s connection to the loving power of the universe. So a spiritually powerful person is:
Zukav says you can learn how to distinguish between what are your genuine needs and what are illusions by contemplating these qualities and considering whether your pursuits are aligned with cultivating those, or not. What things do you perceive yourself “needing” just because it’s conditioned into you, or because you’re seeking external power? What does your soul really need, versus what do you as a flawed five-sensory human think you need?
Be Present
In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle discusses the distinction between your true being and your ego. To learn what your genuine needs are, you first have to learn to distinguish between the two, so you can identify what is your true being. According to Tolle, the most fundamental part of discovering your true being, is to learn to be in the present. Ruminating on the past or worrying about the future will keep you disconnected from your true being and in the space of your ego, which is essentially your thinking mind. While Zukav argues that your emotions are messages from your soul that you need to tune in to, Tolle argues, by contrast, that emotions arise from the mind and so are also associated with your ego, and they act as roadblocks to connecting with your true being. So, according to Tolle, you need to begin to disconnect from both your thinking mind and your emotions, through mindfulness, to get in touch with your true nature. Then, in that still and quiet space when you are fully in the present, you can begin to assess what your genuine needs are.
In order to move in the direction of spiritual power, Zukav emphasizes embracing prayer and faith. Setting intentions and meditating are not enough, he says. These are parts of prayer. But to communicate with your spirit guides, Zukav says you need to actually talk to them, and ask them for guidance. And when you do that, you must actually believe in them, have faith that they’ll guide you, and trust them to do that.
In addition to prayer and faith, as part of the work of tapping into your spiritual power, Zukav offers a few more action items to help shift your perspective:
Open Your Heart Chakra
To understand what it means to act from your heart, or listen to your heart knowledge, we might turn to another Oprah Winfrey favorite, The Untethered Soul. In this book, Michael A. Singer offers further advice for discovering your true self, through opening your heart chakra. Chakras are understood in the Hindu tradition as energy centers throughout your body. There are seven major chakras; the one that resides in your heart center is called anahata, and is associated with love and compassion. When energy isn’t flowing freely in your chakras, they’re said to be blocked, and you must do spiritual work to unblock them. Singer tells us that your heart chakra can become blocked, or closed, due to past experiences, and that you need to consciously address these blockages to fix them. He offers some advice for opening your heart chakra, by paying close attention to the energy flow as you feel it in your heart and learning to release the negative energy. There are also many guided meditations you can use to practice opening your heart chakra, so that you’re better able to tap into your “heart knowledge.”
As a final suggestion for spiritual evolution, Zukav offers a recommendation for moving humanity as a whole toward enlightenment. Since we all energetically affect one another and are all tied into the same universal consciousness, we must cooperate with one another to move humanity forward. To this end, Zukav advocates for developing the discipline of “spiritual psychology.” He says this would be a shift in the field of psychology toward examining the spiritual roots of mental illnesses. We should be approaching personality disorders, he says, as fragmentation of the self due to the soul’s karma, and to the multiple lifetimes lived by the soul. If a person’s soul has lived many different kinds of lives, their likes and dislikes and fears and fascinations may all be derived from those. So, for example, phobias might be understood as related to a trauma from your soul’s past life.
Shamanism and Spiritual Psychology
In an indigenous worldview, spirituality and psychology would never be considered separate realms; they would be approached by traditional healers as intertwining aspects of a person. In the article What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Hospital, Malidoma Patrice Somé, a shaman of the West African Dagara tribe, discusses his impression upon observing patients in an American mental health facility. From his cultural perspective, he sees people who are spiritually gifted, or undergoing spiritual crises, being restrained and prevented from going through a necessary spiritual process. He says that the characteristics viewed as “psychotic” from a Western psychology model, are viewed in the Dagara culture as symptoms of a spiritual calling or transformation, and that the response to them would be one of community support. The person is viewed as a healer being born, and the shaman and community approach them as such, guiding them through the process of integrating their spirit and mind, and emerging as a healed, and whole, person. Thus the concept of spiritual psychology proposed by Zukav is akin to a shamanic view of psychology.
The documentary film, Crazywise, explores this theme as well, and includes discussion with Western psychologists who are coming to recognize and embrace the value in the shamanic approach.
Guiding people to understand and develop their intuition would also be part of Zukav’s spiritual psychology. Intuition is the conduit for us to understand these soul-based parts of ourselves, and it aligns us with a knowledge of what our soul needs for its evolution.
Zukav also says that when we deny our soul’s existence, and therefore its needs, we cut ourselves off from all the spiritual guidance available to us. This can lead to personal crises. This is why we need to address the spiritual through psychology.
We humans chose the path we’re on, Zukav says; we were given free will. We didn’t need to choose fear and violence, and other negative courses of action. But we did. And this means we now need to find our way back toward the light and healing. Therefore, Zukav concludes, since we’re at that evolutionary turning point, where we’re learning to recognize our souls, we need guidance through spiritual psychology.
Christian Psychology
Aside from indigenous traditions, even in the modern Western world, taking a spiritual or religious approach to human psychology is not a new idea. Although the merging of the two has often been discouraged in the mainstream scientific community, throughout history, behavioral scientists have been influenced by religious doctrine in their understanding of mental illness as well as approaches to healing. Today in the Western world, Christian psychology is a fairly common practice, involving understanding the human being through the Biblical scriptures. This approach to psychology, similar to what Zukav suggests, addresses the spiritual needs of the soul, as inseparable from the mind, and rests on the premise that humans in their material form are inherently flawed.
Zukav says the spiritually powerful person has the following qualities:
This means nurturing these qualities will spiritually empower you, and bring positive karma to your life.
Reflect on where you see these qualities, or the lack of them, in your life—in your actions, your choices, and your relationships. Where do you see the biggest lack, in yourself?
How can you make some practical changes to nurture these qualities where they’re lacking?
Following the advice above, set intentions to nurture those qualities, and try a meditation practice to establish and increase them in yourself and your life. For example, if you find that you are holding grudges, meditate on the intention to cultivate forgiveness in your heart.