When we show up in this world at birth, we are each a unique expression of life; a new opportunity for life to develop through the human model inside the greater evolutionary story of humankind.

A loving and supportive beginning enables us to show up on the natural as was meant to be line, where we are the expression of the brilliance of life, a miraculous discovery crucible. This glowing presence of life itself is what creates the irresistible attractiveness we experience with toddlers.

As I write this, I am marveling at my seven-month-young grandson. True, some of the amazement and joy I experience is evolutionarily and biologically engineered to ensure we take care of our offspring. Still, this morning as I was running backward on the beach, a toddler who is not my own progeny and carries no blood connection waved to me and brought up joyous happiness. Our eyes met, and we waved to each other with amazement and joy.

I run backward for several reasons. First, it allows me to activate a different set of muscles as I apply a movement pattern different from regular running. Second, I experience a vital innervation and rejuvenation in the brain as backward running makes me highly alert and engages non-habitual circuitries. Third, I contemplate that backward motion accurately emulates our living experience. We are forever moving into a future that is unknown and unseen. My soul enjoys the surrender and bliss of running with my back leading, which I in turn experience as an invigorating and exhilarating novelty.

Apparently, a backward running adult was a strange enough sight for the toddler playing in the sand. He stopped playing, left his parents and started following me while waving his hand. For a moment we were together entangled, soul to soul, in the unrestricted flow of life.

For the toddler this is a natural state, playfully expressing life. For me, I work to engineer moments when I cannot be in my head but must be in the body, communing with the elements and life, reconnected on the natural as was meant to be line. After running, I dive in the cold ocean waves. Today, once again, I am the only daring soul in the water. Ocean swimming revives in me the boundaryless and boundless experience of life.

While writing I recognize the ocean offers to the swimming body what the mystery of the universe offers the contemplating mind. It is a liberating joy of communion, of being together with life, as life expresses itself through the individuated human vessel that I am. You too at some point or another experienced in your own way moments of unrestricted joy, bliss, flow, immense love, harmony, and exuberant vitality. These moments and experiences reveal something special about your nature — your soul configuration.

But, I have just skipped five steps ahead, so let me retrace these moves and describe the soul as a multilayered operating system dedicated and programmed to support you. I need to spend some time on the way of the soul and what it does on the natural as was meant to be line. In the next installment I want to appreciate what happens to cause us humans to be separated from the natural line, what this separation catalyzes in the soul, and what that in turn engenders in our experience. 

To assist the contemplation of the soul we will develop a three-lines map, with a horizontal natural as was meant to be line in the middle, the conditioned line below and the evolutionary line above. I will also address the postmodern concern and criticism that arise with the idea of a natural line.

The Threefold Configuration of the Soul

We each appear in a standard human model, if we are all healthy: two arms, two legs, two eyes, two lungs, one liver, one heart, and a soul. That is the standard human model, the same for all. Within that shared design we each have a unique threefold soul configuration.

We describe the soul with a specific understanding, quite different to the general and often confusing use of the word. Okay, so what does the soul do?

The soul functions as an intelligence loom that mediates, negotiates, regulates, and navigates the planetary experience in the human model. Imagine the human is given a soul as a liaison, a companion for life, because humans are spirit beings, showing up here inside a carnal form in the Earthly ecology.

If a spirit showed up in a body without a companioning soul, the spirit and body wouldn’t know how to communicate with each other. The soul reads the cues of the spirit and is wired and programmed to offer translation to the body and back to the spirit; to orchestrate the human Earthly model and guide it through the planetary obstacle course.

The soul as an intelligence loom runs a three-layered orchestration system. The foundational orchestration layer keeps you alive. The second orchestration process guides your continual learning. The third orchestrating impulse intelligently prods you to discover and actualize your universal purpose.

Let’s reflect on these a little more.

The First Urge

The first job of the soul is to keep you alive. Imagine the best programmer in the world was assigned to code an operating system to support humans through all the experiences of life. Well, luckily, we have on the job a universal project manager, the evolutionary programmer, that coded in the program of the human soul a clear hierarchy of directives, the first being to keep you alive. Negating this first imperative would make all other objectives unattainable. To house and support the spirit, you must be alive. Life itself is pure and supreme logic.

Contemplate this first octave of the soul’s operation as the guardian of life. Keeping you alive is its business. It will do whatever it needs to do to get you out of danger. The one exception can be extreme suffering, where a super intense pain may nullify and override the soul’s first directive.

We describe the guardianship of life as an octave because it operates and orchestrates at the full gradient of levels: cellular intelligence and the immune system keeping the body intact and protected; safekeeping all other internal systems, organs, and process equilibria; and the full range of behavioral safeguarding dimensions. The guardian of life is present at all these levels.

In the case of automated human functions, such as our heartbeat and breathing, protecting life is evolutionary knowhow powered by the soul’s presence, imbuing all the cells in our body. The non-automated behavioral dimensions are guided by the guardian’s instinct, in how it nudges and directs our awareness and attentional currency.

For example, you cross the street and a car is heading in your direction; the soul will rush you to the other side of the road. You can say “my instinct drove me to accelerate and rush out of danger”. Well, yes; the instinct is the soul’s adjutant, enacting this safeguarding signal. This first command of the soul to keep you alive is also described as Life One.

The Second Urge

The second directive programmed into the soul is to help you learn, adapt, and improve conditions. Contemplate this second octave of the soul orchestration in the character of the steward of learning.  The soul is an extraordinarily intelligent and adaptive learning system, a distributed learning loom. We describe it as a distributed learning loom to indicate a holographic intelligence where each part and every cell learns on behalf of the whole and the whole integrates and imbues its knowhow in every part.

This second soul orchestration octave enables you to rapidly assimilate changing conditions in the environment to adaptively optimize your response.

Imagine the soul as omnipresent intelligence in all the many automatic and non-automatic processes that occur at all levels and dimensions of life; an ever-present urge to learn, improve, and optimize conditions, expressing itself at both unconscious and conscious dimensions.

The first directive of the soul keeps you alive. The second command programmed into your soul is a diligent urge, driving you towards continual upgrade through learning and development. It is also known as Life Two.

The life of learning and development arises in all dimensions and facets of the human system and experience, both from within and from the environment. The learning impulse is activated from within by your soul’s nature, striving to liberate your innate gifts. It is concurrently initiated by external stimuli from the environment, teaching you how you need to adapt. The soul serves as an intelligent soil, creating a fertile ecology, better described by the French word terroir, that enables you to bring to life and produce the fruits of your endeavor.

Learning is inherent and automatic in the cellular feedback loop, where every cell communicates and updates all the other cells around it about changes it experiences. The immune system itself is an adaptive learning and memory program, a novel evolutionary product that is soul powered.

You find yourself in a new environment and everything in you activates into spontaneous assimilation, discovery, and integration. That is your soul orchestration at work, insisting and guiding you to thrive in all conditions. When this vibrant and persistent will to learn, improve, and upgrade weakens, the life force filling the person begins to fade. When the life force flows in an uninterrupted way, as was meant to be, this second orchestration octave expresses itself as a fountain of renewal and updating and rejuvenating will, permeating all that a human does and is.

I observe this fountain of rejuvenation with toddlers. They exhibit zero self-pity and no psychology hindering them from trying again and again. They are naturally vivacious and move spontaneously from crying to playing, laughing, and learning.

The Third Urge

The third soul orchestrating directive prods you to discover, connect with, and serve your higher purpose. It is the soul’s way of serving the spirit it accompanies. By nudging you to connect and cohere with your purpose, it makes the spirit glow. It forever guides you to develop and evolve in all the ways necessary to actualize the higher potential of your life. Imagine this third octave of soul orchestration in the character of the champion of higher purpose.

The first soul directive is a standard issuance working to keep you alive. The second directive compels you to learn, adapt, and improve by using your unique capabilities and can-do talent. The third directive seeks to unlock your unique configuration as it guides and even haunts you to discover your greater potential in life.

It nudges you to make connections and meaning, create contributions you are called to offer, and serve the purpose you are summoned to fulfill. These are all ways to serve the universal spirit you carry. This purpose-guided and connection-inspired pursuit is also known as Life Three.

What shapes this third orchestration octave? It is shaped by a primary quality or a set of qualities that together fashion the unique invisible cosmology each person is configured to lead in their soul orchestration.

We use the word orchestration in Portals into the Soul to convey the bringing together of many parts into a coordinated actuation of the whole. Consider that soul orchestration is an ongoing emergent conversation of all parts of you with all parts, as the human system seeks to respond to a need arising from within and in the environment.

A sublime musical representation for this kind of conversation can be experienced in the Andante, the second movement of the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra. Try an experiment. Listen to it, but not outside of you. Let it play and as you listen, let the violin and viola conversation emerge inside you. Imagine this quality of conversational attunement of part-to-part-harmonizing intelligence arising inside your soul.

To help cultivate a greater somatic awareness, attunement, and harmony, we are now beginning to serialize a set of practices we call Internal Human Orchestra Work (IHOW). The focus of these practices is to activate and engage the whole person system — body, mind, energy field, and soul orchestration permeating these entire spaces to facilitate enhanced flow, vitality, well-being, and brightness. The spaces we are opening and the awareness we are cultivating about the soul need more than our heads and words. We need the whole person system prodding, experimenting, conversing, and discovering.

The Cosmology of Qualities

We each show up here with a primary essence and nature, which is expressed as a unique set of qualities. Some people experience this essence as the full trust of life; others feel immense vitality, a sense of strength or connectedness. For some it may be flow or the unreserved generosity of life, or the primary quality of love in its multiple expressions and dimensions.

Others show up with heightened capacity to see, perceive, understand, and make meaning. For someone else it is the state of blissful harmony, or warmth, or fortitude of integrity, or sense of intimacy and belonging. Some will describe a feeling of confidence or an ever-present care or grace or peace.

These are qualities that describe the unique essence and nature of the soul’s configuration. Championing life and the spirit that you are gets uniquely expressed by each configuration. This third soul urge will nudge and facilitate us towards our highest purpose by promoting a fuller bloom of our unique essence configuration which illuminates the spirit.

When we draw closer to our soul’s nature, we discover how we are meant to serve the situations we encounter, and connect to our calling, the spirit glistens and glows through the unique soul cosmology of qualities and natures.

It may appear with a whimsical sense of humor; with others the soul glows with immense courage and the capacity to respond at the point of need and do what must be done. With another it is an inventive and innovative genius, or the intelligence of deep listening, care and healing support.

Some are instinctively drawn to develop professionally in ways that are aligned and attuned to their natural soul configuration, to discover and reveal in the process their soul nature and potential. Others are nudged to discover their soul’s nature later in life and in other ways. As chapter two will describe, many are haunted by a painful separation experience and spend their entire life searching for the nature that arises when the soul is able to stay attuned to the spirit, so it glistens and glows. The journey therefore towards discovering your true essence and nature becomes essential.

Imagine that the soul functions as a fiduciary on behalf of life. First, it is a guardian that ensures you stay alive. Second, it is a steward conducting you to learn, improve, and update and upgrade conditions and opportunities. This second command serves you in three ways. Circumstances may predominantly focus the learning urge on supporting the first impulse by seeking to discover better ways to secure yourself and making you and your loved ones safe, in which case the second soul impulse becomes somewhat subservient to the first. 

The second dedication that may arise with the steward of learning is towards getting ahead, excelling, and improving opportunities. The third possible learning dedication is helping you discover your unique nature and capacity to contribute to life by liberating and expressing your gift and your unique essence configuration. In this later case the second urge to learn and adapt serves the third urge to help you discover your higher calling.

Because the modern and postmodern world produced a socio-economic paradigm that emphasized economic success and money above all other values, the second soul orchestration is increasingly directed to drive learning and development in the context of professional and financial success. Moreover, the inverted focus often means the third orchestration nudge to discover and manifest your unique configuration gets recruited elsewhere. Instead of facilitating the intrinsic glistening glow of the spirit, its orientation is to extrinsic economic and commercial success.

Do these have to be experienced as a polarity? No, absolutely not. Can a person achieve economic success and serve a higher purpose that makes their spirit glow? Yes, absolutely.  Do many feel that the economic paradigm does not support the yearning of their spirit and soul? It seems so. The data on lack of meaning, purpose, and connectedness; loneliness, depression, anxiety, and people escaping real life into virtual life — escaping their body into their heads — all indicate an extreme imbalance and disconnection from the natural as was meant to be third orchestration response.   

Discovering Your Soul’s Primary Nature – A Practice

We highlighted above some primary natures and qualities that may show up in the soul’s configuration and described the third orchestration urge as the yearning to express this essence configuration. There is a simple inquiry journey you can start on your own, with a friend, or with a soul inquiry pod of three to six friends to begin discovering your natural essence configuration.

The approach is somewhat opposite to the orientation taken by certain therapy modalities. Still, this inquiry journey can unlock a profound sense of healing and renewal.

Several therapy approaches tend to explore traumatic experiences that produced difficult contraction and scar tissue with the intent to desensitize and disarm a triggering charge that is still semi-active. We will get to difficult experiences inside a different context in the next chapter. For now, to facilitate the discovery of your soul’s primary nature and its configuration, we are exploring what may be viewed as the inverse approach.

Instead of focusing on a painful experience as the object of investigation, we are seeking to bring to the surface what joyously and blissfully happened. The invitation is to cultivate the awareness of the essence and the nature of the soul, with the intention to acknowledge it, celebrate it, and fortify it.

I demonstrated this inquiry in a global Zoom call with 150 friends as part of the Epoch Journey work. The facilitative inquiry can be adapted and customized in a variety of different ways.

Here is the question I asked a volunteer:

Can you travel through your early childhood, and share with me an experience that was the happiest, most idyllic, blissful, or joyous, or whatever word you would use to characterize the experience and the significance it carried for you?

Given that each person’s soul configuration is uniquely fashioned, I did not want to direct the inquiry towards one specific nature as I asked the volunteer to describe the occasion. As they remembered the first moment that came alive for them in response to the inquiry, I followed up by asking for further details about the occasion, and then about the quality of their experience and what made that moment special and significant.

The inquiry invited the tracing and mapping of moments on a person’s journey when their natural configuration was able to expand into its greater glow and luminosity. As we conversed, I applied deep listening with presence (level 5 listening) and noted the soul qualities and intelligence that were emerging.

The volunteer answered: “Well, I can remember being with my parents and my grandparents in a place where we were part of a larger group. We were all singing in a choir, and I was there as a little girl, maybe three or four years of age, and for the first time I experienced something bigger that opened up.”

To encourage further discovery we can, for example, additionally ask:

• Can you describe the place and the people around you? What did you see?
• What did they do? How did they conduct themselves?
• What did that moment make you feel?
• What about this experience made it special?
• What was the nature and quality of the feeling that lingered with you after that occasion?
• What other insight are you unearthing about this experience?

In this demonstrated exploration two qualities emerged as primary. The volunteer described this experience as waking up to a greater sense of harmony, inside of which there was a special feeling of belonging.

We will retrace these qualities in our next chapter and ask, what happens when we abruptly or forcefully get separated from the qualities we are naturally wired to express and abide with?

A conversational exploration with a friend or a soul inquiry pod can by itself become a potent revelatory and healing process as you further unfold this line of experiences. You can also access a similar self-insight discovery on your own by journaling your response to the inquiry above.