PART 1: WHO I AM

ARCHITECTURE OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

From a practical perspective human consciousness has four core, basic, mortal layers, forming a quadrant of stability. Once this quadrant is stable, comes a fifth layer, an immortal, largely silent layer that is an observer, distinct from these four. The first four pieces I’ve named the Core Four, the building blocks that, combined, create a mortal Sense of Self. We might think of the Core Four as the home within which, when safe to do so, the immortal ‘soul’ makes itself known and happily lives and grows.

The Core Four layers of the human self, considered ethereal bodies in some traditions, are mind, body, spirit and emotions. The soul is substantially different from the Core Four in many ways and yet it is the most true to our nature and the most essential of all of the aspects of the self, not least because it is immortal. It is also the most evolved of all of our aspects and the piece that will never lie to us.

Knowing who we are means being able to access and nurture all of these aspects of ourselves.

CHILDHOOD AND THE DEVELOPING A SENSE OF SELF

The sacred process of ‘becoming’ a person in your own right begins in childhood in stages and in layers. As the toddler grows, the early physical, emotional, mental and verbal pieces become intact and the next stages of organic consciousness development begin to be seen. If a child is introduced to kind but firm boundaries growing up, for both themselves and others around them, that child is afforded a relative calm sense of ownership of those boundaries as theirs by right. These boundaries are the crucial building blocks of safety that allow a safe Sense of Self to emerge in the child; without the boundaries, the child cannot know who they are.

Children with violated boundaries, for instance, can expect to believe that they are whomever or whatever their abuser tells them that they are, and that belief can continue into adulthood or until therapy or healing work is done. It does not make that identity true, of course, but it is what is believed; the knowing of the deeper, truer soul-self has not yet emerged enough for that child to disbelieve what their abuser has taught them about themselves.

For children growing up in environments with good boundaries, those good boundaries are used as a guide in developing a ‘buffer’, a protective layer, for the soul that is yet to emerge. As the child grows, they are soon ‘directing’ boundaries, with a keen sense of ‘what’s mine’ and what’s not. This is not ego, as we understand it in an adult sense, but rather a tentative foraging for and forging of precious, crucial boundaries of self, where that child is learning how ‘to be one person’ in a safe way.

As this sense of self matures into a self that is calmer, easier with itself, and more understanding of good boundaries that are tested and proven to be safely intact, beneath that another awareness is emerging, one that is the very essence of that person. While the Sense of Self is taught, through good boundaries, the next, inner layer of emerging awareness is simply ‘known’.

Soul: The Divine Essence of Knowing

After the Sense of Self is intact and safe, comes a beautiful unfolding of a more true and eternal Self, one that is not limited to this lifetime. This more-true Self does not die with death; it is immortal. This emerging immortal identity is the ‘soul’; the “knowing” that comes from experience, and the collected experiences over many lifetimes, forged and honed.

The soul emerges into the safe environment of an established Sense of Self, forged through good boundaries, at the core of the divine human form. To know ourselves at this level is to know not just who we are, but also our path and our purpose over many lifetimes. When we have access to this awareness, it isn’t experienced with the mind, that is, with thinking, but rather it is experienced by us using our “knowing”.

As a divine consciousness, this ‘soul essence’ is infinitely more wise than any thinking or emotional faculty that we possess. The soul itself is ultimately a barometer and a compass, the inner guide that helps us to navigate life.

In Part Two of this 3-part blog we will look at what happens when a healthy Sense of Self doesn’t occur, for instance when there is trauma, and crucially, what happens in this instance to our relationship with the soul. The soul is a compass that guides us, and when our relationship with that compass is impacted, our lives can go awry. Part Two of this blog looks at what happens to the soul when this occurs. In Part Three of this blog, we will look at how the ‘Core Four’ aspects of the mortal self and the soul interplay and how life as a human can impact nature’s course of consciousness-development, when trauma thwarts that growth.

But also how, when this crucial relationship between the ‘Core Four’ and the soul is in a state of optimal “flow”, our consciousness expands and we become vastly more aware of reality than before, in a good way, and what that means for us and our lives.