What if we had no mind, ego or wounds, who would we be? Much of our ‘mortal’ identity, the identity that pertains only to this lifetime, can act as blocks to understanding who we are at a ‘soul level’.

This ‘soul level’, or ‘multi-lifetime level’, awareness holds truths and wisdom earned throughout all of your lifetimes, so it is incredibly wise and compassionate. But, crucially, it also holds the blueprint for the ‘soul contract’ that you forged for yourself before you were born in this lifetime. This ‘soul contract’ is the intention and compass that guides you to the highest purpose and meaning for you in your life here and now. If we access this soul contract and fulfil it, we are rewarded with a sense of deepest satisfaction and joy; we move in ‘flow’ co-creating with the universe. If we steer away from it, we feel that ‘something is missing’, or that we’re in the ‘wrong place’, or ‘running out of time’. Our urges, ‘gut reads’ and ‘inner knowing’ keep us on track. But, instead of just bodily (somatic) guidance, what if we had conscious awareness of what that soul contract was, and who we were at a soul level? What difference could that make to our lives?

What if the channel between our conscious mind and our soul was so open that we could have back and forth conversations between these different aspects of ourselves? What would we want to know about who we truly are? What issues that we’re facing would we want guidance on? What parts of our lives have been forged by this contract so far that we would like more information about, on why we chose that? What clarity do we need? What direction do we need assurance about? What are the next big steps for us in our lives? What are the missing pieces in our awareness that we have yet to gain? What is holding us back? What intentions had we made for this lifetime and what among them have been fulfilled and what is yet not done?

And what is being asked of us at this time in the world? What is our role at this crucial time? How can we be of service?

To open that clear channel of communication, we need to clear out that which doesn’t serve us or is not true to who we are. The three main blocks to who we truly are, are ‘the mind’, ‘ego’ and ‘wounds’. Let’s take them in turn.

The Mind

The mind is composed of a mix of everything we’ve consumed. As humans, we tend not to be in ‘right relationship’ with the mind. Unless we have actively sought to discipline the mind, and have it be silent unless required otherwise, it tends to dominate our experience of life. We tend to observe and adhere to the workings of the mind. In worst case scenarios, we identify with the mind and believe that it is who we are and that our thoughts are speaking from our true selves. The reason for this is that the mind has been exalted in importance in the west, in alignment with the left hemisphere of the brain, to be the guide for our lives, the ‘captain of the ship’. In truth, the mind is the least intelligent aspect of the self; the body is infinitely more intelligent and the highest self, or soul, is incredibly wise. The mind can be a tool for learning, but it can only give us back what we already have learned, and together with lateral thinking, back story and comparison, it can assess that information and deduce conclusions. None of this is inspired. Inspiration itself is the essence of creativity, ingenuity, inventiveness and originality.

Historically, throughout the last epoch of masculine, left-brain thinking, logic, reason and deduction (which are the premise of engineering, mathematics, science and law) were revered. Logic and reason predominated philosophy and thought and, with it, an association with the mind as an identity. The 17th-century French philosopher, René Descartes, (wrongly) once said, “I think, therefore I am” and this became the cornerstone of western philosophy. Long before thinking, there is being. And not only is thinking not ‘us’, rarely is it even our ‘friend’.

Transcending thought is the goal. Most animals generally live in a state of ‘pre-thought’, not thinking but instead doing. Humans in the west, particularly, have evolved to live in a state of ‘mostly-thinking’ and associating their identities with the resulting thoughts. The ideal is to transcend thoughts and reach a state of ‘post-thought’. The process for doing this involves any practice that brings awareness to the thinking that is happening, to observe it and then to withdraw your attention from the thoughts and to reside in awareness.

Withdrawing our attention from thoughts as they occur shows us that the awareness that is able to disconnect from the thoughts is not responsible for the thoughts. And not only are we not the thoughts, neither are we the person experiencing them. The Jesuit priest, spiritual teacher and mystic, Anthony de Mello, once said that there were ‘things, thoughts and the thinker’ and that we were none of these. He said that we were not the things, the thoughts we were having about those things, or the person experiencing the thoughts. Instead, he said we are the “awareness in which thoughts arise.”

We are the awareness that observes, arising from a sleeping state into an awakened one. We are the growing consciousness of the universe experiencing itself.

The more that we release our identification from the processes of the mind, the easier it will be to see more clearly who we truly are and to live that in practical ways.

Ego Consciousness

The extraneous ego, that is, the ego beyond its basic functions, can influence our understanding of who we ‘think’ we are. Consciousness that is merged with ego tends to believe that its identity is wrapped up in whatever can be associated with that person, whether it’s a label, a name, a career or even whatever that person owns. Our true identity is none of these things. These labels belong to a ‘this-lifetime’ consciousness and not a transcended ‘multi-lifetime’ awareness.

Around 2,500 years ago, the Buddha taught the ‘Three Marks of Existence’, which are: “All conditioned things are impermanent (anicca). All conditioned things are unsatisfactory (dukkha). All phenomena are not-self (anattā).” — Dhammapada, verse 277–279

It is the last of these three that speaks to the illusion of the ego. There is no permanent, separate “self” behind experience; everything is constantly changing, the only constant is change, including the body, our feelings, our perceptions, our thoughts and our consciousness. This universal truth teaches that we suffer because we try to protect and preserve this imagined self and that real freedom arises when we no longer cling to this illusion. That person who hurt you, didn’t hurt “you”; that “you” doesn’t really exist. Instead, they injured themselves at a soul level and projected the shame and sufferance of that pain onto you. You can choose to accept that sufferance or not. It isn’t yours to accept, but you can if you wish. The difference you are experiencing is the change in the person that you thought that they were. Now you see them more clearly, with all of their flaws and hurts. Yes, you’re hurting at a ‘human level’, but what do you gain at a soul level? What if you could see both perspectives at once? Would it lessen the pain? What if you could see all of it from a soul perspective? Would you have welcomed the experience because of the changes it made in you?

The Three Marks of Existence were taught not as dogma to adopt, but rather as doorways to move through, to observe directly through awareness and meditation, to facilitate seeing clearly. And it is in that seeing clearly that we suffer less. The higher in awareness that we climb, to identify our truest identity, the less relevant the concept of self (ego) becomes. Before merging with Source at our highest identity level, we can examine our multi-lifetime awareness that has had a multi-lifetime plan in place that we have been carrying out. At this time of enormous change on the planet, having access to that multi-lifetime awareness and plan can help us to facilitate a remembering of the work that we set out for ourselves to achieve here and now. Carrying out this work creates a significant sense of purpose and joy.

Wounds

Early trauma can change who we ‘think’ we are, in ways that can diminish our sense of self-worth, distance us from loved ones and keep us stuck in trauma-loops that replay old dynamics in our day-to-day life, making those patterns normalised. It can impact who we believe ourselves to be that we have come to ‘deserve’ this trauma. These wounds typically reside in the unconscious, directing our lives in ways that seem like ‘destiny’. The Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, once said that, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Wounds can make us believe that we are someone we are not because it can put us into a ‘victim’ identity, making us feel that what has happened to us has radically changed who we are. Someone at the start of their healing journey usually identifies as a ‘victim’ and someone who has finished their healing work often identifies as a ‘survivor’. The difference between the two is that the “victim” says “this happened to me and now I am this thing”; the “survivor” says “the perpetrator did this, this has nothing to do with me, I refuse to identify with what that person did”.

Energetically, the difference between a victim and a survivor is that the victim is a hollowed out person, their previous identity gone, and in its place they are now filled with trauma response triggers, hyper-vigilance, fight, flight, freeze and fawn. The healing journey is an excavation of that trauma response energy out of the body of the person to whom it does not belong and a reclamation of who they truly are.

Healing can trigger an awakening in consciousness because of the conscious awareness required in the healing process. The simple steps taken to notice your feelings, observe them and be in ‘right relationship’ with them causes us to be more ‘awake’ to what is truly there. Therefore, for many, the psychological journey is a preliminary layer of the spiritual journey.

Clearing Blocks Means Knowing Who We Are

Being free of the restraints of mind, ego and wounds means that we clear the mind and psychological blocks, to enable a spiritual journey to occur. When we move out of mind, ego and wounds, we are enabled to move out of our ‘story’ and into a higher understanding of who we are, but not just in this lifetime, but over many lifetimes.

Mind, ego and wounds are human influences, or ‘identifiers’. We are not human in our origin; we are spirit. Clearing these human tendencies means that we can step into our ‘supernatural’ origin and own that identity in our core and have it be the ‘captain of our ship’, the life compass directing us the way that our soul pre-designed.

Most of healing is not adding anything, but instead removing that which does not serve us or belong. The spiritual journey is about moving into alignment with who we truly are, and it starts with clearing out that which is not ours. Therefore, the healing journey and the spiritual journey are two ends of the same spectrum. You cannot ‘leapfrog’ over the work. If you have healing work to do, you must do it before you can know your true self.

Empowerment

Knowing how the mind, ego and wounds can impact us in negative, misinformed ways, and knowing that we need to remove those influences first before knowing who we are, gives us a roadmap for clearing out the transitory (this lifetime) ‘human’ blocks that prevent us from standing in our power.

But what is empowerment and how do we come to own that? To ‘stand in your power’ means to know and to own our true (multi-lifetime) identity. Choosing to own that identity enables that energy to reside in our core. Our core then emanates that energy, which causes us to move into ‘authentic empowerment’ as that identity.

‘Power-over’ and leaning on anything external to the ‘self’ for identity is to be inauthentically powerful. That inauthenticity cannot last. For example, a person who believes that they are powerful because their identity in the community has ‘status’ or that they have wealth and that makes other people look up to him, is ‘inauthentically powerful’. The power only lasts as long as the external support, and sometimes not even that long. In contrast, the person who owns their identity, and is full of ‘knowing’ about that identity, and who emanates that from their core is authentically powerful. This is because the identity is true, it is owned, and it radiates from within.

Knowing who we are is the most essential process of uncovering that we can do as humans. If we know in our core who we are (from a ‘multi-lifetime’ perspective), we can emanate that truth and live it. We are no longer burdened by what was done to us, who we are in certain contexts, the illusions of the mind, or lies that the ego has told us. We get to stand in our strength and knowing, living out our lives with purpose and joy.

And from this place, we get to enact the greatest objectives of our multi-life perspective and to help forge a world where innate power, true identity and equality and liberation for all is a more possible reality. What is your role in all of that?