1: THE DOOR TO CONSCIOUSNESS
Investigating the Soul’s Existence
Souls can be found throughout the universe in numbers that are so large they cannot be comprehended. Regardless of their location, all souls have the same purpose: to evolve.
—THE AUTHOR’S CAUSAL GUIDES
The universe is bigger than any of us can possibly imagine. And though it might seem empty and remote, the reality is very different.
The cosmos is packed with excitement. And it’s not just colliding galaxies, bubbling nebulas, collapsing suns, and ferocious black holes. Throughout the universe there is life: living species and great civilizations, chaos and crisis, noise and clutter, struggles and drama in abundance.
The Door to Consciousness leads to the awareness that the universe is a place of infinite possibilities, and that what we see here on the Physical Plane is just a very small part of it.
Scientists currently estimate there to be seventy thousand million million million stars out there, and the actual number might be much greater. That’s at least ten stars for every grain of sand on all the beaches and deserts on our entire planet. (Think about it the next time you’re on the beach.)
If you left planet Earth in a spaceship traveling at the speed of light, you’d reach the moon in a couple of seconds. About eight minutes later you’d zip past the sun, ninety-three million miles away. If you started out after breakfast, you’d easily make it to Pluto, way out there at the edge of our solar system, in time for dinner.
How much longer do you think it would take to cross our galaxy, the Milky Way? Another few hours? A day or two? A week? A month? Several years? No, to cross the Milky Way would take you a good one-hundred thousand years. And remember, that’s at the speed of light.
If, however, you wanted to see what’s at the very edge of the known universe, you’d still be traveling billions of years later.
The universe is vast. Once you start to get a grasp of just how big it is, the idea that there are other species sharing it with us isn’t that hard to accept.
The single reason that the universe is so full of living creatures is that life is simply not that hard to create.
Back in the 1950s, Stanley Miller, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry working in a lab at the University of Chicago, conducted an experiment designed to recreate the circumstances that gave rise to life on our planet.
He added an electrical spark to a mixture of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor and came up with the amino acids that are found in the proteins that create living matter.
As a result of his experiments, Professor Miller became confident that life could be found in abundance throughout the universe. Some people have questioned Miller’s assumptions about the chemical makeup of Earth’s early atmosphere. Nevertheless, it’s clear that, given the right circumstances, life can emerge from a few simple elements.
Wherever life takes hold, it multiplies. Our little planet is proof of that. It’s home to an enormous variety of species, of which 2.1 million have been classified. The actual number could be as large as one hundred million. Species are dying out before we’ve even had the chance to discover them.
Is it really surprising then, given the scale of the universe and the fact that life flourishes when it gets the opportunity, that there would be billions of species with souls out there?
In our galaxy alone, there are between twenty and thirty million species with souls: conscious, rational beings, aware of their own individuality.
So, where do they all come from?
The soul is part of a consciousness that fills every part of the universe. It permeates the Physical Plane by the process in which species become ensouled.
—THE AUTHOR’S CAUSAL GUIDES
The soul’s purpose is to evolve. And the only way to do that is to experience life on the Physical Plane. It’s not enough to simply observe our world and hope to know what it’s like to be here. To really find out what being human is all about, a soul has to leave the Universal Consciousness and become part of a physical body.
Once it does this, the game begins. The soul will then be here for a complete chain of lives, during which it will be exposed to everything the Physical Plane can throw at it.
Although it will briefly visit the Astral Plane between incarnations, the soul won’t rejoin the Universal Consciousness until all its lives here are completed.
Personal Evidence of the Soul’s Existence
So, how do we know the soul even exists? For some people, there is simply no question. David is just one of several of my clients who has had firsthand experience that has left him with no doubts whatsoever.
I know you must have heard this kind of story before. In this medically advanced world of ours, more people than ever are being brought back to life after dying. In fact, near death experiences are getting to be so common, you might even know someone who had one.
But the reason I include David’s account of his near death experience is to illustrate how such an event can shape the entire course of an individual’s life.
David was eleven years old when he became the first kid in his Long Island neighborhood to have a ten-speed bike. On a Monday afternoon in 1967, he left home on his bike to go to the store. The time was 3:05. He remembers nothing that happened after that.
An hour later, at exactly 4:05, David was hit by a car. The driver was so drunk she didn’t realize she’d hit him, or that she’d dragged him forty feet.
When the police turned up, David had no pulse and his breathing had stopped. They pulled a sheet over his face and had his body taken to the hospital.
As they broke the bad news to his mother, David’s hand suddenly fell from the stretcher beside them. Within seconds, doctors and nurses leaped into action and began trying to resuscitate him.
Meanwhile, David was undergoing a classic near death experience, or NDE.
Immediately after the accident, David found himself “suspended in black,” experiencing a profound sense of peace. He sensed he was moving, but couldn’t see anything. After a while, he began traveling toward a bright white light. He could sense a presence behind it.
As he looked into the light, he heard himself say, “I’m not ready yet.” He gradually turned until the light was behind him, and started moving away from it. He felt the light slowly fade away until he was suspended in black once more.
He peered down and saw himself lying in a hospital bed, with his mother and his best friend’s mother standing facing him. He gradually floated back into his body, opened his eyes, and asked, “What am I doing here?”
When David told me the story, he stopped at this point to stress that the whole experience hadn’t been in the least scary, and even when he came back to his physical body, he still had the overwhelming sensation of tranquility.
Many people who have experienced NDEs have talked about returning with a clear understanding of what their life is about. As an eleven-year-old, David was no exception. “I knew I had a purpose—a job to do,” he told me. “I wanted to help people, and I decided then to become a doctor. And I also wanted to fly. That wasn’t anything to do with the NDE. I’d been obsessed with flying since I was five.”
He joined the Navy, became a fighter pilot, and graduated as a doctor from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. He then fulfilled another ambition by becoming a flight surgeon.
Since his NDE, David has consistently followed his soul’s direction to help others. Recently, as an obstetrican, he’s begun using cutting-edge craniosacral therapy in the delivery room, with astonishing results.
“I’ve never been conventional,” he said. “I’ve always felt compelled to do what I was compelled to do. What the NDE did for me was to make me sure that what I’m doing is what I’m supposed to be doing.”
In many ways, David was fortunate. Not only did his NDE give him a clear insight into the life his soul had planned for him, but it allowed him to experience what it’s like to survive death—to be conscious, yet separate from his body.
But what about those of us who haven’t been to the other side and back? How can we discover our soul’s purpose? How can we be certain that such a thing as a soul even exists?
Searching for the Soul
A March 11, 1907 New York Times article describes a doctor named MacDougall, who claimed to have weighed the soul. He placed his dying patients on a bed, which sat on a giant set of scales. At the moment of death, Dr. MacDougall found his patients suddenly lost as much as an ounce.
I’m no scientist, but I can tell you with certainty that the soul weighs nothing. It exists as energy. A cup of soul would weigh as much as a cup of electricity, which is nothing—and also beside the point. Proof of the soul’s existence is not going to come from weighing the dead and dying.
On the other hand, plenty of evidence for there being a soul comes from those who have died and come back.
The relative ease with which some children can communicate with the spirit world extends to their own souls. Often children can recall a past life with such accuracy that investigators can validate it—especially when the location is close to where they currently live.
One such investigator, Dr. Ian Stevenson, author of Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, has documented thousands of claims of past-life memories. He spent years traveling around India investigating, in a thoroughly scientific manner, children who remembered people and locations from previous lives.
Stevenson interviewed many children who claimed to belong elsewhere, or who had difficulty accepting their humble circumstances after a lifetime of greater affluence. He witnessed children being reunited with their previous families, often identifying individuals by their nicknames, or being able to describe changes made to the family home since their death.
A fellow academic is quoted as saying once said of Dr. Stevenson, “Either he is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known as the Galileo of the twentieth century.”
He may be right, but let’s look, for a moment, at the Galileo of the seventeenth century.
Long before Galileo, humans knew of the existence of most of the planets in our solar system. On a clear night, they could see Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn. That still left three more planets to be discovered (or perhaps two, now that Pluto has been downgraded). But with no way to get a closer view, that was the accepted view of the universe for thousands of years.
Galileo became the first astronomer to view the night sky with a telescope, radically altering our understanding of the universe.
As for the soul, it can’t be seen at all. No new and improved optical device is going to suddenly bring it into view. Without weight, mass, or density, it can’t be seen, touched, or measured.
In fact, it could be argued that the soul doesn’t exist at all.
And neither does the planet Neptune.
Except, of course, that it does. But that wasn’t always the case. It was only discovered in the nineteenth century. Not, initially, because astronomers actually saw it, but because they noticed irregularities in the orbit of Uranus.
In the same way that fluctuations in the orbit of Uranus pointed to the existence of Neptune, the soul’s existence can be demonstrated not by examining it directly, but by observing its invisible influence on the part of us that we can see: our beliefs and behavior.
Like Neptune, and all the other planets, the soul has always been there. Humans just haven’t formally discovered it yet.
But what exactly is the soul? And what does it do for us?
Its most significant effect is to make us creatures of almost unlimited reason. Rats may learn to press a certain button for food, and chimps may be able to use a stick to catch termites, but we’ve learned to build computer chips, create complex societies, and explore this and other planets.
None of this would have happened without a soul to keep pushing us forward. Its purpose is to evolve, and whether we like it or not, that’s our purpose too.
Like an iceberg, the biggest part of you—your soul—is hidden beneath the surface. It exerts its influence silently, yet it affects every single thing you do. It gives you your individuality, your personality, and your ability for abstract thought.
It’s the age and type of the soul, and the degree to which we connect with it, that gives us all such radically differing views of the world. It’s the reason one person will risk imprisonment to protest a war, while another will eagerly volunteer for combat.
It’s what made Mother Teresa devote her life to helping the poor, while Donald Trump devotes his to making money. It’s why one person will hold a candlelight vigil outside death row to protest an execution, while a DJ at a radio station celebrates the event by playing “Another One Bites the Dust.”
Your soul influences where you live, your choice of friends and partners, what job you do, how you vote, who or what you worship, and where you stand on issues like stem cell research and abortion. In other words, everything.
Which is why, if you’re ever going to figure out your purpose in life, it’s essential to understand who you are on a soul level.
In the next chapter, we’ll investigate the first of the ten elements that make up the Instruction, and discover how multiple lifetimes of hardship, joy, love, death, and countless other experiences affect the way you see the world.