Your Life Story Part 4
October 28, 2024
Your Life Story Part 4
Most siblings share genetics, parents, family, and the same essential environment. But brothers and sisters can give entirely different accounts of their growing-up years.
Along this line, I notice that adults also report startlingly differing perceptions of the same things. For example, I can attend a concert, lecture, meeting, or social gathering and compare my experience with others to find that we may agree on some basics, but our takeaways differ. We key into differing aspects of the experience, which ultimately defines our experience.
In our many years of presenting conferences all over the southeast and in some foreign countries, we have learned that two people rarely experience these events similarly. For example, someone may give overwhelmingly positive feedback on a given segment of the program whereas someone else who sat right next to them experienced it as too deep and mysterious. However, someone else in their feedback may focus only on the temperature in the room during that presentation. Someone else may focus on one point the speaker made, whereas another will give an overall review of the message as a whole.
What makes this so? Perception. After all, "Beauty (as well as ugliness) is in the eye of the beholder." But how is this possible? I believe that how the various ego types view the world explains why we interact with it so differently. Furthermore, our instinctual subtypes, passions, virtues and fixations all help form our basic perceptions. Everyone has an entirely different mix of all these items. These help make our life story unique.
Yet there is another more profound factor that makes our life stories. The soul. The soul is our original and most profound substance from day one. The soul is the only part of us that is continually connected with the Divine. It is the container for our Virtue, Beatitude, Essential Aspect, Idealized Essential Aspect, and Holy Idea. It knows our life purpose and it keys into the others' souls.
In the second half of life, we are more apt to pay attention to our soul and its perceptions of reality. The soul has its analysis, rationale, and explanation of our story that may not resemble the ego’s interpretation of it at all. As we age, our souls increasingly knock at the door of our consciousness and integrate all our experiences into a greater wholeness. The soul's life story is full of struggles, loves, redemption, and wholeness. It interprets these in light of our life’s spiritual worldview and our divine purpose. Yet the ego’s story of our life is seen in light of our defense against fear, our attainment (or lack thereof) of our ideal self-concept, and our success or lack of success in getting the love we desire.
Spiritual practice: Write a general outline of your life, its ups and downs, its setbacks and leaps forward, its loves and betrayals, illnesses, and physical triumphs. Gently drop into your heart. Relax and shed all preoccupations. On a sheet of paper, write from your heart a general outline of your life from the perspective of your soul. How might this outline be a story of love and redemption?
Self-inquiry: Why would you want to know your higher self's story?
Dear God,
As I write the story of my days, please show me how my every experience is for your purposes. Amen
