The Paradigm: Soul and Awareness
Beezone
We are often trapped in a conceptual prison, which we call the ego. Ultimately, created by ourselves, it dominates our perceptions and drives our interactions with the world, especially as we age. Yet, the presence of the witness—our higher awareness—can help us go beyond the narrow confines of the ego. The journey from ego to soul, and ultimately to awareness, offers a broader and deeper perspective on existence. To understand this journey, it is crucial to explore the nature of soul and awareness.
In this paradigm, awareness is undifferentiated and transcendent. In many Western religious traditions, it is often equated with God, a concept that points to something far beyond our intellectual grasp. The Hebrew tradition, for example, refers to God as “G-d,” acknowledging the ineffability of the divine. This points to the challenge we face when attempting to discuss the formless using language. Words fall short, but we must proceed with caution, recognizing their limitations.
The formless, which is God or awareness, manifests into form through a process often called the “descent.” While the term may carry judgmental connotations, it simply refers to the transformation of the formless into the material world, the beginning of creation, an individual being born. In the biblical narrative, “In the beginning, God created…” this suggests the introduction of time, which is, itself, a construct. In reality, time and timelessness coexist, part of the polarities—light and dark, positive and negative, yin and yang—that define manifestation. Without these polarities, there would be no form.
Naturally, we are left with the question: Why did the unmanifest become manifest? Why did it all begin? Many answers have been proposed, but they all fall short of satisfying the rational mind. One perspective suggests that awareness, being one, cannot know itself without creating separation. In creating form and individual consciousness, awareness allows itself to experience itself. The One becomes the many, and through this multiplicity, awareness can witness itself reflected in the world.
Yet, the ultimate answer may be that there is no answer that the intellect can grasp. As the Buddha once said, it’s none of our business. Our rational minds are simply a subsystem of the greater whole, unable to comprehend the metasystem of the universe. The human mind, trapped in its intellect, cannot know the divine mystery. Who we think we are cannot know the answer, and that is the paradox we must live with.
Awareness is timeless and unchanging, while form arises and returns to it. From the perspective of the One, nothing ever truly happens. The journey of the One into the many and back again is always present, happening simultaneously. From this vantage point, the question “Why did it happen?” becomes irrelevant. Nothing did, because everything always is.
As awareness differentiates into form, it does so through souls, each with its own unique characteristics. This diversity of souls allows for infinite expressions of God knowing itself. Souls differ based on what might be called “psychic DNA,” or karma. Karma, the accumulated tendencies and attachments of the soul, creates the illusion of separation. The soul’s journey is one of gradually dissolving these attachments, moving closer to the divine.
Karma is a continuous cycle of cause and effect, each action influenced by previous actions, creating a seemingly endless loop. The Buddha referred to this as the “Law of Dependent Origination.” We inevitably wonder where this karma started, but like many other mysteries, it cannot be answered by the intellect. What matters is how we relate to these mysteries. Instead of assuming we know, or fearing the unknown, we can approach life with an open mind, free of assumptions.
There are mysteries fundamental to existence: birth, death, suffering, and aging. Our relationship with these mysteries shapes our lives. The intellect finds the unknown threatening, and so it seeks to control and understand the world. But this control is an illusion. In truth, suffering, aging, and death are part of the natural cycle, as real to the ego as they are ultimately illusory to the soul.
The soul experiences life and incarnation differently than the ego. To the ego, the experiences of life are real, but to the soul, they are simply the working out of karma. They are relatively real, internally consistent within the context of the story or game of life, but ultimately just another plane of existence. Aging, for example, is real to the ego but not to the soul. As we awaken to our soul identity, the ego’s experience shifts, yet we must not deny the ego’s reality.
The soul works through its karma in multiple dimensions, not just the physical plane but on dream, astral, causal, and psychic planes. Incarnating in a human body is just one aspect of this. The soul uses both nature and nurture, genetics and environment, as tools in its karmic journey. From this perspective, our bodies and life circumstances are part of a much larger curriculum designed to help the soul evolve.
The ego, on the other hand, sees its curriculum differently, driven by personal desires and societal expectations. Psychology focuses on the ego’s curriculum, which is rooted in the combination of genetics and environment, while the soul’s curriculum transcends this, seeking to resolve karma on a deeper level.
Eventually, the spiritual journey and the psychodynamics of life become intertwined. Until the last shred of ego dissolves, the two cannot be fully separated. The ego’s desires, motivations, and personal history are not to be denied, but transcended. The soul’s journey involves recognizing these patterns without getting trapped by them.
In the process of incarnation, we often become entangled in the drama of our lives, defining ourselves by our personal history. But the soul’s perspective is different—it sees life’s challenges and joys as opportunities to work through karma. The key is not to reject the ego or the personal history but to release the clinging to it.
As we awaken to the soul, we also begin to glimpse the next level of the journey: awareness. Awareness is beyond the soul and its karma, beyond form altogether. It is the unmanifest, the formless, and ultimately, the true nature of reality.
The journey from ego to soul, and from soul to awareness, is the beginning to return to our true nature. At each stage, we release another layer of illusion. The ego desires, the soul yearns, but awareness simply is. To live fully as a human, we must embrace all of these layers—ego, soul, and awareness—without becoming trapped in any one of them.
In the end, the game of life is not about escaping incarnation but about embracing it fully, with the understanding that we are not limited to it. We are both the players in the drama and the witness to the entire play of life and death. In this awareness, there is the possibility for find true freedom.