A Unique Universal Lab

As described in chapter one, a loving and supportive environment enables a person to show up at birth on the natural as was meant to be line, where being a human is a special and unique expression of life seeking to learn and evolve through your unique experience.

You are a unique configuration: completely unique fingerprint like no other human; a unique, colorful intricate iris pattern of ridges and folds (the iris crypts and furrows); and a unique cosmology of competencies, qualities, and essences. All of which means you represent a unique discovery lab for life. Life gets to discover and experience a once-in-the-universe algorithmic configuration through you. That is an extraordinary fact, a sacred fact.

The unique cosmology of possibilities each human represents shows up in distinctive ways. Each person creates their unique qualia. Qualia is a word that describes what it is like to be you, the character and quality of experiencing life by being you. In that sense, your soul qualia is enriching the qualia variety of life in the universe.

We each get to experience moments of encouragement, reassurance, confidence, love, vitality, belonging, intimacy, trust, joy, playful creativity, and more. Like with your iris, the way and the combinational pattern of your qualities and qualia are a once-in-the-history-of-the-universe configuration.

To be clear, I am not describing this uniqueness insight merely to give you a special feeling about yourself, although you are surely welcome to it. Postmodernity has taken the uniqueness of self into quite an unhelpful, often distorting, and debasing place. We partly addressed this confusion in the preamble and we will come back to it again below.

For now, we are observing the sacred fact that you are a once-in-the-history-of-the-universe composition, to invite you to sense and find reverence and awe about this universal covenant. You show up in a standard human model. The first business of your soul is keeping you alive. Its second effort is to help you learn, adapt, and improve.

The third and higher project of the soul is to reveal and express a once-in-the-history-of-the-universe cosmology of qualities, capabilities, talents, and attributes. Through your actualization experience, the spirit, which is a universal witnessing cognizant entity, offers the universe an enriching testimony of novel combinations of expressions and qualia experiences.

The take-home message offers a nudge different from the endless fascination with personality tests. You matter not because your personality is so special — you matter supremely because your essence configuration represents a unique opportunity for the universe, which gets activated when you play your part in letting your soul guide you to this higher significance. In a later installment, we will develop this realization further, when we describe the evolution of the five selves.

This in a nutshell is the covenant of life. Here is the sobering part. How many people truly get to express more than five percent of their potential? How many truly liberate their latent cosmology of qualities and capabilities and bring to life their essence?

It is an exceedingly rare occasion. Still, life has not given up. It is offering this generous covenant and possibility time and again.

A Universe Waiting to be Born

Here is a wild scenario to consider and imagine. Astrophysicists tell us we only know the universe by five percent. The other 95% is made of, well, we do not really know what it is made of, so we call it dark energy (68%) and dark matter (27%). Since we ourselves are part of the universe, if we only know the universe by five percent, the inference is that we truly only know ourselves by five percent.

Okay, so, what is the shocking part of this scenario?

Well, could it be that 95% of the unknown universe is waiting for us to get on with our own development and evolution through the universal laboratory we each are? Could it be that as we begin to express and experience the six and seven and eight and nine percent of our potential, the universe itself may begin to more fully reveal and birth itself through us?

Oh, yes, while we are here, let us make this one more move. Consider the dozen wicked problems that together make the meta-crisis:

• Energy
• The environment and global warming
• Nuclear threat
• Depleting oceanic and other natural habitats
• Unmanaged AI running amok
• Unsustainable economic distortions
• Extreme polarizations in culture and politics
• Ongoing wars
• Loneliness and depression
• Leadership void
• Broken trust in all institutions
• Nihilistic cynicism and the emptying of meaning

Could it be that solving these problems cannot be done by rearranging and reallocating the five percent we already know?

Could it be that the solutions and salvation humanity needs are nearby, available in the six and seven percent of our and the universe’s own potential, waiting to be unlocked?

Let us please hold the imagination of our six and seven percent potential as we embark on the journey ahead.

Separation Events

Chapter one described the soul’s journey on the natural as was meant to be line. It then hinted that many — perhaps we ought to say all — of us at some point experienced a painful separation from the vital flow and harmony of the natural line. Indeed, parting ways with blissful connectedness of the flow and verve of life is part of the initiatory path of being human in a modern, postmodern world.

What can trigger and bring about separation from the fullness of trust, connectedness, and bliss; the playful and joyous sense of being joined to the fountain of life, belonging, love, and peace? What can cause such a break?

Before answering these questions there are two criticisms that may arise at this point which we will address a little later in this chapter. The first is about how we mean “natural” and “meant to be.” The second goes something like this: but hold on a minute, Aviv, what about those who never get to experience a blissful and trusting beginning? We will address both concerns shortly. For now, let us imagine a newborn showing up for life on what we describe as a natural line of trust and possibility. What occurs to bring about a severing separation?

Well, separation and its triggering event can appear in many faces. Disconnection can be instigated by much that is found on the conditioned line, which consumes large or even most of the space of the media and the news, and occupies and devours the lives of many.

Separation from the fullness of the flow of life where the soul is naturally connected and bound to its higher potential can be triggered and induced by a painful shock, insult, disappointment, disregard, a critical derisive comment, erupting conflict, bad accident, abandonment, abuse, cruel interruption, deliberate malice, frightening attack, death of a loved one, the ravages of war, and by the full range of small and large traumas.

A separation event, small or large, is an occasion where the soul orchestration gets untethered from its connected attunement to the spirit and is forced to freeze or sever the inner soul–spirit conversation as it contracts to operate solely at the level of survival.

Separation occurs when the soul is reduced to its first directive only and is confined by being forced to protect and defend against danger. A separation event can be instigated because the occasion introduces actual present danger or because it is perceived and experienced to be dangerously threatening. The effect in both can be dissociation from the higher dimensions of the soul and contraction to the first directive, where the soul’s consciousness and orchestration are reduced to survival.

The separation takes place when the infringing or threatening constellation imprints and freezes the soul’s response to this narrowed mode of operation, curtailing its natural capacity to expand again to its higher orchestration dimensions.

On the natural line the soul enjoys the flexibility and agility to contract and expand, much like breathing is made possible by inhaling and exhaling. The natural resilience of the soul facilitates the transition from sympathetic to parasympathetic response with ease. Sympathetic activation occurs when the soul contracts to operate in its foundational ‘keeping you alive’ mode.

In its resilience range, the soul can shift into a sympathetic mode and then relax into retracing a parasympathetic posture and demeanor. Sympathetic response narrows the sensing focus. Parasympathetic settlement expands the sensing horizons and can bring to life other latent sense organs; for example, the sense organs that calibrate connectedness, belonging, and flow.

The separation imprint occurs when the experience is a) too potent to metabolize, thereby freezing the contraction, such that the soul orchestration loses its parasympathetic elasticity, and/or b) recurring and engenders a lingering environment of threat such that the natural resilience and elasticity of the soul get suppressed. The first instigation is acute. The latter may be chronic. In both cases, the soul’s natural ease and flexibility are curtailed.

An important awareness about separation events is that even when the soul contracts and is reduced to a narrow orchestration range, it is fundamentally whole, and not damaged. This is of course evident in the testimony of life, where people who suffer horrendous experiences not only recover from those traumas, but proceed to live full and rich lives, turning their experiences into a well of wisdom. They proceed to contribute and lead others to realize their greater potential and soul expression.

A Resilient Beginning

We promised above to briefly address the challenging circumstances many are born into. Indeed, too many all over the world begin their earthly journey in an ill-equipped environment, arriving in a house with people who do not know how or are not available to support a young life.
There is much that has been observed about early development in the field of child psychology, including cognitive, emotional, and behavioral developments, social learning, and the impact of healthy attachment or the lack of it. Our focus here is on the soul’s experience rather than a comprehensive review of child psychology.

Let us abide with this focus for a moment. Imagine the first presence enveloping the newborn is trust. In its fully prepared prenatal stage, the soon to be newborn is highly intelligent and intuitively reading the ecology that awaits. They intuitively know the parents are somewhat ill-prepared, they still come out trusting that life will take care of them.

Unlike the baby deer, the fawn, literally hitting the ground running almost instantly, human newborns are completely dependent for all they need on the adults around them.

Still, there is something awesomely resilient about toddlers.
Life itself is highly resilient; we see the evidence for it all around us, in nature and in our own experience. Earlier, and further below, we will describe what curtails resilience. Nevertheless, in the context of appearing in suboptimal household and upbringing conditions, let us offer a few encouraging notations.

There is something utterly profound that accompanies the newborn. Imagine the whole universe and the creative powers that cherish human possibility, all embracing the new life almost despite the conditions and location of birth. That throbbing flow of life is meant to accompany the child through to age seven and nine, and even to the point of puberty at 12 or 13. The impact of suboptimal conditions, however, can significantly accelerate the retreat of this universal embrace, introducing stress into the child’s life.

Indeed, there is growing evidence in recent decades of precocious puberty, or puberty showing up at an earlier age, perhaps partly a byproduct of chemical, digital, electronic, and social stress imposed on the young.

As the universal embrace gracing the child withdraws, the young life becomes more susceptible to separation constellations, which prematurely accelerates development in the body. Here, though, is the encouraging point. Painful separation events can happen early in life, but please consider that up to the age of two or three years and often into four and even six, the intensity and resilience of the natural as was meant to be line and its embrace is exuberantly strong, almost irresistibly.

A loving and intelligent parenting and child rearing can profoundly elongate and fortify the gracing embrace of the young. As the presence of trust is sustained and not curtailed or withdrawn, it permeates and expresses itself through and from trustful parents and caregivers to the child. The child then learns to trust themselves, trust their body and experience, trust others, and trust life, the world, and the universe at large.

Connectedness, belonging, natural intuition, love, intimacy, intrinsic sense of significance and meaning, vitality and strength, spontaneous creativity, playfulness, humor, agility, flow, and more are all available according to the unique configuration of each person, awaiting discovery and orchestration.

We have each had a moment where for the first-time trust was broken. If we were able to metabolize the experience, we likely were able to recover quickly and restore the sense of trust, connectedness, intimacy, and belonging. When these occasions leave a freezing disconnection imprint, they produce secondary and tertiary separation aftereffects.

The Double Anguish

The separation cascade tends to produce a double anguish that then creates a third resultant, which we will describe shortly in the idea of the ghost.

First is the painful event itself and what it causes in the person physically, mentally, emotionally, energetically, and soul-ly. The injurious experience itself can create lingering adverse effects. This is the first anguish.

The second agony is the separation from the line of wellbeing, vitality, joy, confidence, and the full flow of life. First you are impacted by the injury. Second, if the soul orchestration loses its resilient elasticity for reasons described above, you are left needing to metabolize the injury without the resilience bounce and healing more fully available on the natural as was meant to be line. On the natural line, the soul orchestration of regenerative and redemptive recovery are omnipresent.

There also are immediate practical applications that most are not fully aware of and therefore don’t fully apply.

When you strike something hard with your arm or foot, you naturally rush to message the area without even thinking; a built-in soul-orchestrated reflex. It helps ease the local trauma and the inflammatory response.

You also may have consciously trained yourself to do so not just instinctively, but with added intention and awareness that you are immediately working to reduce and ease the inflammatory reaction. Even though it is yet to be fully scientifically validated, you may have discovered that in such moments you can integrate light finger tapping on the sternum to engender and revive immune response.

We are obviously not offering here medical advice. The bigger application, though, goes beyond cellular biochemistry and neural rerouting from sympathetic to parasympathetic conditioning. Because along with the immune response, tapping very gently and lightly the sternum, or other rituals you can develop, can serve as a reset/restart signal to the soul to not freeze up in a compressed mode.

There is increasing evidence that in certain traumatic events that can lead to post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an immediate or near-immediate assistance can help reengage the soul with fuller flexibility, which then spontaneously unlocks healing and regenerative properties. Inside our framework, PTSD is understood to represent a temporary inability of the soul to reboot and regain its full resilience and elasticity.

One way this has been attempted is in getting a person who experienced a frightening traumatic event to immediately, or as near as possible to the incident, describe the event — what they saw and experienced. Instead of freezing inside the traumatic imprint, the intent is to instantly metabolize it. This is behaviorally and psycho-spiritually akin to the instinct of massaging with your hand the sore point in your foot after you bumped into a hard object.

Mid-flight Assistance with TikTok Truism

Before proceeding to describe the soul psychology that arises because of a separation event, and why it could induce what we will describe as the ghost, let me address a concern and an anticipated criticism. Some may ask, why do you say natural as was meant to be? What do you mean by “natural” and by “meant to be”? Are you suggesting that getting hurt and experiencing pain is not natural? Are you implying I am meant to be anything other than what I want to be? 😊

Well, let me offer the following clarifications. First, we use the term natural and as was meant to be to introduce the idea of design parameters. For example, clearly the human system is not designed to survive in 2000 degrees of heat, not Celsius and not Fahrenheit. The design threshold for the human system will not allow it to naturally survive in temperatures warmer than 113°F/45°C degrees. So, the postmodern mood of “I can choose anything I want the case to be for me” is going to meet a wall above that body temperature threshold.

In a similar way there is a pain threshold beyond which the human system cannot cope. Pain tolerances vary from person to person, but each person will have their own 0 to 10 pain scale. The implication is that each person will find an edge condition in the worst pain possible, which on their scale is defined by the number 10. Beyond that threshold, a system shutdown ensues, first into unconsciousness, and then, if the pain trigger continues to build, death.

These two examples establish that contrary to the TikTok truism claimed by some, not everything about human experience is subjectively and/or socially constructed. There are real design parameters that define boundary conditions.

For our purposes, the natural as was meant to be line describes circumstances within which the soul can retain sufficient resilience and elasticity to operate - contract to orchestrate survival needs and then expand again to reengage with its higher calling as described in the third orchestration brief. When contraction pressures and pain persist and intensify to leave the soul impaired, temporarily or semi-permanently, we describe the experience as a severing separation event that reduces the soul to the conditioned line.

Conscience and The Compensatory Act

The double anguish appears in the combination of the injurious event and its byproducts, coupled with the separation from the source of vitality, well-being and flow. This leaves the soul operationally diminished, constricted, and distanced from its higher capacity and mission.

These two are then joined by a third element, a little subtler and harder to observe, and yet as critical to appreciate. We described in chapter one how the soul is programmed in its third urge to facilitate your possibility by orchestrating and nudging you to realize your higher universal purpose.

Imagine the soul has an open feedback loop with the spirit, which offers its validation by growing brighter when you draw closer to your calling, or fainter and blurrier when you veer away. It is a bit like the hot and cold game you played as a child, just less obvious, for reasons we will explore later when we describe in greater detail the spiritual journey called life.

Every person has a spiritual journey, whether they believe in the actuality of the spirit or not. You cannot be a human and not have a spiritual journey. A human is a spirit being entering a planetary experience in the human model. It is accompanied by a soul whose job is to be a companioning liaison that helps navigate and orchestrate the human to realize the spirit’s purpose through development and evolution.

Becoming aware and conscious and bringing purposeful intention to your human journey does represent an important spiritual maturation along your path. Still, you do not need to believe in anything I am describing to have a spiritual journey.

For the last 20 years before he died, I used to banter with my late father-in-law and always concluded the exchange by saying, Moshe, when you die, you will get the shock of your life, because you will see and realize that it is not the end. You will then see that I was right. So, if you can, drop me a sign. I believe he did.

About the hot and cold game. Consider that it is less obvious because at times what is experienced as struggle, challenge, resistance, and even pain are enablers that draw you closer to turning the light on with your latent capacities, qualities and essences. The spirit hot and cold game of hide and seek is much more multidimensional than hiding an object in the room. In the soul’s journey, the “search and find” effort is itself already an important part of the “develop and evolve” work.

When a separation experience occurs, the soul is still whole and undamaged, but it has been restricted to its survival mode where it cannot hear and feel the spirits cues in quite the same way. The natural communication flow has been interrupted. The soul then recognizes it was caused to contract and retreat from the pursuit of its higher calling. It feels constrained to be operating in a diminished range.

The soul now begins to develop a psychology. It registers the sub-optimal operating capacity and becomes sensitized to the psychology of a) I am letting the spirit down, and b) I have lost some of my conductive power, functional stature, and charm.

It may also be receiving the impressions of a psycho-emotional hurt building in the person. We are differentiating between the soul’s psychology and the psychology arising in the person, even as the first will be hearing and receiving the impression of the latter.

The Ghost

Why are we describing the compensatory act as a ghost behavior?

The soul’s natural conduct in its higher orchestration is to work from inside presence. The tree grows from its roots. The soul liberates and is nourished from within the presence of the spirit and all that is ready to bless it. When it has been distanced from this presence, it initially seeks to regain this connective flow.
In its absence it tends to develop a compensatory act, which plays an idealized script that seeks to trace and imitate the quality it has lost. The act becomes a performative cover for what is missing rather than the true restoration of the original quality and presence that were lost. Instead of a presence-filled embodied muster of the soul, the compensatory act appears as a haunting semblance or shadow of the true quality.

For example, if on the natural as was meant to be line, the soul facilitated the flow of vitality and strength, and a separation event left the person feeling vulnerable and weak, in the absence of regaining the original vitality, the soul may develop a fixation, an idealized version of the very natures it now misses. This could produce a compensatory act that advertises bravado strength, a kind of swagger confidence that is rather weak inside and lacks the interior vitality and robustness the soul yearns to regain.

In the example of chapter one, where harmony and belonging were two qualities that emerged as we demonstrated the inquiry exploration to help reveal the primary natures of the soul’s orchestrated alignment, a similar struggle may ensue.

A ghost compensatory act that can arise when the soul has been distanced from the sense of belonging and harmony may, for instance, be expressed as a defensive and protective conduct, seeking to control and thereby alleviate whatever presents a threat to harmony and the sense of belonging.

Where the natural conduct of the soul was attuned to expressing ease and joy in the presence of trust and connection, the ghost may take a critical, defensive, and controlling conduct. The ghost forever arises in the gap between what the soul is naturally configured to do and be to its current curtailed condition.

This gap or outage becomes the blind spot and shadow of the ghost, preventing the person from engaging with the situation for what it is. Instead, the ghost is a displaced act, desiring to rebalance the offset that resulted from the separation, which often exacerbates it.

In a later installment we will describe a process that can help liberate the ghost conduct by making the subject of the experience an object of inquiry to facilitate discovery. 

An Encounter with the Heart Specialist

A little before my eighth birthday I visited the family doctor in the kibbutz. He listened to my breathing and my heart and told my father he wanted me to see a specialist to get a second opinion. I did not think much of it.

The kibbutz environment was filled with natural beauty and what I enjoyed most was roaming freely outdoors. I loved running and I loved swimming in the pool. I loved swimming so much that in the warm seasons we would do all our afternoons in the pool. I would run on the grass near the pool, play soccer, and then dive in the pool swimming, competing, and being in the never-ending bliss of action.

I imagine I experienced most vividly the sense of flow while running and swimming. Running and swimming meant to be fully alive, to be fully with life, to be fully filled by life. I was fast, I was excelling, and I was discovering and experiencing the can-do confidence of exerting my body and reaching the point of being breathless. Even at that age I discovered the joy of testing my limits and then expanding those limits.

It was a rainy day when we traveled to the hospital in the nearby city. We arrived and found the long corridor where we sat waiting to see the heart specialist. I remember looking at the walls that were painted foggy green. They looked cold, depressing, and somewhat foreboding. Years later, when I wondered why they would paint the hospital walls foggy green, I realized it was an economic choice. Foggy green requires little maintenance and touch-up work. Whoever was the genius that thought foggy green paint was a way to communicate clean sterility obviously didn’t realize it produced a foreboding effect.

We walked into the doctor’s office, and I was told to take off my shirt so the doctor could place the electrode sensors of the EKG on my chest. The doctor never explained what he was doing and for an eight-year-old mind this first exposure to the EKG machine looked and felt scary. It was the 60s, and apparently building trust and rapport with children was not part of practicing medicine, at least not for that heart specialist. In retrospect, it may have also been part of the Israeli cultural ethos, which was that young boys were expected to grow to be tough and strong men.

I was cold, I was frightened, and I started shaking. I then became worried even more that my shaking was going to produce worse results on the EKG test, so I tried to suppress my shivering. At that point I did not know if I was shivering from the cold or because I became frightened and anxious that something was horribly wrong with me.

After another long and foreboding wait, we got back in to see the doctor. He never looked into my eyes; he simply delivered a brief message to my father. “Your son has a mild murmur. It is not life threatening, but he should not overexert himself and I’d like to see him again so I can monitor how he is doing.” But I did not hear the “not” before the threatening. What I heard was ominous and frightening. What I internalized was that something in my body was not alright. The very thing I trusted most, which was taking my body to the edge in running and swimming, I was now told needed to be watched over and could not be trusted. A separation event enters.

A classic separation event because it enters, to interfere exactly with the most essential nature this soul was configured to enjoy and love. There was no physical blow to prevent me from anything. There was a psychological fear-inducing blow that threatened to curtail and freeze me from what as an eight-year-old was life and all I cared for.

My father was kind and loving. As we waited for the bus, he pulled out and offered me the sandwiches he prepared which carried the assurance he was nearby and was going to support me. On the bus ride home to the kibbutz, my fear and anxiety were not alleviated, and a storm was raging inside. I looked through the bus window at the rain coming down on the fields and I felt it was not just raining outside, it was raining inside me.

Then something extraordinary happened. The inner tears of fear and insult I have internalized from the heart specialist that filled my throat were taken into the diaphragm and re-emerged in the solar plexus as a storm of defiance. I turned to my father, and I said, you know this is not going to be, I am going to run, I am going to run free. Although I had no grasp of this at all at that time, my soul was fighting back to regain its fuller resilience and elasticity, and it produced internally the property of defiance, a quality I will come to know time and again later in life, on occasions when the odds conspired against me to hold me back from what I needed to do.

By my 9th birthday I was already practicing regularly. Then a couple of years later I started winning cross country running races. Still, there was a lingering anxiety that I carried; will my body be alright. Later, winning the Israeli championship and the coveted Tabor race were the culmination of this battle.

What no one of my competitors knew was that I was not merely competing with them, I was competing with my body. Although I did not understand it, intuitively, I was running to heal my heart, seeking and desiring to regain trust and confidence. In my example, what started as a compensatory act of defiance was transformed to become a path of self-healing.

There are of course 1000-times more horrific experiences children at the age of 8 go through all over the world every day. The point in this is not the comparison. The point is decoding the process by which the soul retreats to a lesser range and then its compensative response as it yearns to regain its fuller range and rejoin its original enhancement and bliss.

There are horrendous experiences inflicting people, families, groups, villages, and large populations, and many children, especially in war zones. Many carry their physical injuries and soul’s compression and separation for the rest of their life. Some foster a compensatory act and live out of a ghost script.

There are also many who proceed to recover completely and grow to become vibrantly strong and fully in touch with their inner lives and creative and connective capabilities, revealing that the soul unto itself is undamaged, and given the supportive ecology it needs can always discover a redemptive release.