BOOK ONE: ON REMEMBERING WHO YOU ARE

1. More Than a Body
2. Move Right Back—You are Far Too Close
     - EXERCISE
3. How Far Down the Rabbit Hole?
4. The Power of Finding Your North
     - EXERCISE
5. Levels Within Levels Within Levels
6. The Evolving Soul
7. The Cost of Maintaining our Beliefs and the Power of Living Beyond Them
     - EXERCISE
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8. Holding Beliefs Too Tightly Retards Our Evolution
     - EXERCISE
9. The Ego/Mind and its Role in Our Evolution
     - EXERCISE
10. Regaining Power Over Our Ego/Mind
11. The Ego/Mind’s Greatest Role—Maintaining Our Fear of Death
12. The Ego/Mind Keeps Us Choosing So That It Always Wins
13. The Ego/Mind’s Attachment to Illusion
     - EXERCISE
14. More on How the Ego/Mind Subverts our Evolution While at the Same Time Assists Us
15. Living Beyond the Ego/Mind’s Control—One-By-One
16. Beyond the Pendulum of Duality
17. The Box and the Silent Observer
     - EXERCISE
18. What Keeps Us in the Box?
19. The Drama Cycle
     - EXERCISE
20. Graduating From the Drama Cycle Game
     - EXERCISE
21. Free at Last!
22. Being the Constant, Silent Observer
23. The Ego/Mind Unwittingly Helps by Creating a Contrast
24. Pain and suffering are Optional
25. Levels of Energy and Consciousness
     - EXERCISE
26. The Unconscious Mind, Part 1: Window to your Past, Doorway to your Future
27. Can Everyone Be Regressed to a Past Life?
28. Summary—You Already Know Who You Are
     - EXERCISE

BOOK TWO: ON REMEMBERING WHY YOU ARE HERE & WHERE YOU ARE GOING

29. Introduction
     - EXERCISE
30. Individual vs Mass Soul Evolution
     - EXERCISE
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31. Head Consciousness vs Heart Consciousness
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32. Moving Into and Staying in Heart Consciousness
33. The Horizontal (Outer) vs Vertical (Inner) Paths
34. The Unconscious Mind, Part 2: The Cycle of Lives
35. Karma and the Evolving Soul
     - EXERCISE
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36. Summary—To Grow and Evolve

BOOK THREE: ON REMEMBERING HOW TO GET THERE

37. Introduction
38. Owning Responsibility for Your Life
     - EXERCISE
     - EXERCISE
39. We Choose Our Response to Absolutely Everything—and this Makes All the Difference
40. Every Problem and difficulty is a Gift
     - EXERCISE
41. Reacting vs Responding
42. Look Within, Not Without
43. Create Your Own Absolute Freedom
44. Own Your destiny—Why You Would Not Wait for Everyone Else!
45. Living from Your Highest Meaning and Purpose is Owning a Powerful Compass
     - EXERCISE
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46. Our Core Meaning and Purpose
     - EXERCISE
47.How We See anything is a Reflection of Ourselves
     - EXERCISE
48. Questions that Challenge and Disempower the Ego/Mind
     - EXERCISE
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49. Everybody and Every Experience is our Teacher and Provides Only Feedback
50. Raising Consciousness Beyond the Ego/Mind’s Domain
51. Living from the Fourth Chakra Energy of Unconditional Love
     - EXERCISE
52. Live Where there is No Need for Forgiveness
53. Get Beyond Whatever Holds You Back—Once and For All
     - EXERCISE
54. The Unconscious Mind, Part 3: Shadow Work
     - EXERCISE
55. Living Beyond Pain and Suffering
56. The Power of Stillness
57. The Power of Being Fully Present
     - EXERCISE
58. Non-Attached
59. Epilogue—The Empowered Soul
Appendix I. Stages of Soul Development at a Glance: Chart
Appendix II. A Past Life Regression Paper

We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.
Abigail Adams, in a letter to her husband, John Adams, 1774

When it comes to matters of connecting with and evolving soul we can be tantalised by the most intriguing dialogue, in whatever its form, yet remain malnourished for the journey of life. Words alone can never truly fulfil our deepest longing. They can at best describe, or allude to, genuine experience but never be it.

Books are valuable for all sorts of helpful reasons. However, when it comes to satisfying a yearning for profound authenticity, for meaning that deeply resonates, words, like superficial experience merely skim the surface of genuine knowing, never having the power to truly feed a life, let alone transform it. They can only point the way and open doors to growth that must then be profoundly experienced for one’s core to be altered irrevocably—something that reading even the most eloquent of texts, hearing the greatest oracle, or discussing the deepest philosophies of life, can only suggest to us.

At their best words merely prepare the ground for unfeigned experience. When the essence of our evolved, wise self is planted in the soil of an open heart, and if the conditions exist for it to germinate in the experience of soul, it may then bring forth such fruit that just one taste totally changes us forever. Then we end up not arguing for, or preaching about, a particular way, but living from a place that rises deeply within us like an ancient remembering. We no longer merely talk or intellectualise about how to live, but become the way from a knowing that cannot be adequately spoken, because it transcends all forms of language. Maybe this is the process to which the Chinese Taoist scholar and philosopher Wang Pi (226-249 AD) alluded when he penned:

Ideas are expressed in pictures,
Pictures are expressed in words;
Clinging to the words
we fail to understand the pictures;
Clinging to the pictures
we fail to understand the ideas.

Having understood the pictures
we can forget the words;
Having understood the ideas
we can forget the pictures.

Empowering the Soul contains words and ideas from which you will no doubt create your own pictures. Should anything expressed in these pages resonate within you at the deepest of levels, maybe you will understand the ideas, lose those pictures and forget the words, for they are all designed merely to bring you to the point where you end up not pointing or preaching the way, but being the way—realising the empowered soul you already are deep within.

Exerts from 'Empowering the Soul'

What if we new how stand back from all of life’s dramas and learn to value each and every experience as being our teacher? If we began to see every event and person crossing our path as having something of great value to teach us, how then would we then engage with those who currently give us the hardest time in life, especially those with whom we have the most difficulty?

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Most of us choose the more victim-styled option of blaming events, and other people, for interrupting our best-laid plans. We habitually get caught up in creating or being absorbed by drama, or we prefer the more sensory-pleasing life, saturated with play, distractions, and avoidance of what truly brings the most fulfilment. But at what price?

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Can you imagine how different your life would be the moment you became:

 - fully detached from unhelpful inner turmoil, emotional dramas, and suffering;
 - wholly in control of how you respond to whatever happens to, and around, you;
 - profoundly, peacefully centred, even in the most turbulent of times;
 - so calm that nothing can disturb, worry, or make you anxious or fearful;
 - completely comfortable about how your life is unfolding regardless of outer circumstances; and
 - so wholly aligned to your life’s core purpose that at the conclusion of your life you will have achieved absolutely all that you could, that you decide has the most intrinsic value?

What would it be like having lived this kind of highly successful and fulfilling life, by the above definition, having transcended every last fragment of the clutter and baggage that holds you back from becoming who you were born to be? Is there any higher determination for living a successful life, really?

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What other success, achievement, or recognition the world can bestow even comes close to equalling what it is like to live quietly resonating at a level of light and energy that places us out of reach of unhelpful effects of the dramas of life? Here nothing that happens to us, or around us, can disturb the deep inner peace in which we can permanently reside. It is a peace that transcends all understanding and enlightens lives at the deepest level. It is the transformation our inner-selves yearn for, the transcendence from common black coal into the shimmering diamond.

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When you can identify the lesson from all that happens to you — that everything is just feedback for you to see how much you are dragged into the drama around you or about to stand in your power — you will find yourself disconnecting from old, unhelpful, thinking and behaviour. This will happen without significant effort on your part because you will find yourself standing back and observing your life and seeing how it fits together in a much larger picture than you could ever have previously imagined.

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A valuable exercise to develop a higher level of consciousness in life is to awaken out of the dream-state we live in for most of our lives, believing that the way we see the world is the ‘right’, or best one, and instead of getting annoyed with the behaviour of others, or seeing them as something less than lovingly in our minds as they make, to us, what is not very bright choice, just remember that we all just do the best we can. We can do no more, or less. When we understand this deeply enough we also recognise that there is no need to forgive anyone because there is nothing to forgive. Everyone is just doing the best they can, equal to the level of their own development.

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Be aware that any belief system ultimately limits our capacity to transcend the world because anything we cling to retards our soul’s growth. We ultimately do not need to find anything ‘out there’, but learn to eliminate both the internal and the external clutter, merely bringing our evolved, Wise Self, to the fore from within; experiencing the truth that lies beyond all belief—where the ‘kingdom of God’ lies within each one of us.

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We need to become embroiled in the myriad of possible choices so that we are able to eventually realise the futility of being enmeshed in them. Yet this is also the very process that enables us to ultimately grow. As an extension to our previous discussion about beliefs taking sides and defending an opinion that creates all conflict in the world, know also that holding tightly onto these beliefs and believing them to be true enslaves us in a world of lower consciousness because any belief can only ever be an incomplete part of the whole picture. By definition it cannot be entirely true, so why defend any belief as being so?

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At the heart of this entire process are our ego, and through it, our mind, that attempt to subvert our growth by keeping us embroiled in the drama created by taking sides in any and every issue. However, at the same time we are gradually accruing sufficient life awareness to eventually awaken to the delusion we subsequently live in. This accumulation of experience ultimately translates to such an overwhelm in cognisance that we see through the delusion of the ego and mind that has kept us immersed in the full force of the various dualities of life and transcend their power over us. In short, we take it back!

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Collectively we grow at a snail’s pace because we give so little consideration to the quality of our inner life when compared to the energy we invest in outer-trappings and emotional drama. The reality is that the majority of us on the planet are young souls repeatedly thinking of others, who are different, as wrong in some way and attempting to subjugate anyone who disagrees with us. We are constantly absorbed in widening our sphere of control and extending our possessions without, it seems, the capacity to stop, or even slow down, when the planet already groans under the weight of humanity’s excesses.

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How many people walk the planet firmly grounded in a clearly defined, inner sense of why they are here rooted, not in their moods, circumstance or surroundings, but in a deep, heart-conscious knowing that brings internal peace amid the tempests and storms of life? Perhaps not many? Most earth travellers prefer instead to chase after whatever is most fashionable, or whatever brings the most power, recognition, or pleasure, all of which are fickle and fleeting.

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All fundamentalism is a culturally shared conviction of being custodian of ‘Truth and Right’ and labels whoever does not agree, as being wrong, or worse. Insistence on any perspective or belief as being the one true, and only right, perspective over others casts off dissenters and non-believers of that position as evil. But is this really the most helpful way to experience life?

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Taking the quest for our inner growth too seriously, or wanting it so badly that we frustrate ourselves when we do not ‘get it right’ can be another form of getting sucked into the drama. All life is a play of illusion that seems real until we step through the final curtain of dissolution of the Ego/Mind. So it helps to smile on the inside when we mess up or when events impinge upon us and we observe old reactive habits threatening to sneak back in.

In other words, be kind to yourself when you stumble, which may be often. Consider life merely as a matrix of cleverly constructed, staged lessons that seem incredibly real when we are totally absorbed in the story, and so it must be, otherwise we would not take the lessons seriously enough and we wouldn’t learn what we need to learn from them. Nonetheless, they are just part of the matrix of illusion.

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Remember, it is only the Ego/Mind that deludes us into creating problems that are weighed down by emotion, and it is the Ego/Mind that needs us to believe that ‘this-is-painful’, otherwise it is out of a job! It is never the experience that hurts us emotionally but the identification with the emotion we attach to events, past or future, that keeps us embroiled to past memories and living in future anticipation, preventing us from becoming all we can be. It is the unhelpful feelings and meaning we attach to events, both real and imagined, that keep us in a self-defeating loop or spiral. When we take the emotion away, by being fully in the present moment, the meaning changes, and so too can our responses. Then, we can step back and see that we create anguish, pain, anger, fear, and so on, ourselves. What a realisation!

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It does not really matter whether a soul enters a particular lifetime as a young or old soul. It is more about raising one’s level of soul consciousness beyond Ego/Mind to enlightenment. Time is irrelevant. Only attention, presence, awareness, intent, and so on, are relevant. In short, it is about learning to simply Be.

  The real does not die, the unreal never lived.
  Once you know that death happens to the body and not to
  you, you just watch your body falling off like a discarded
  garment.

  The real you is timeless and beyond birth and death. The
  body will survive as long as it is needed. It is not important
  that it should live long.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That.

May you overcome the body-conscious dominion of the Ego/Mind’s realm, skilful in viewing the larger perspective of your highest purpose so that you realise the full power of your own sovereignty. May we all become increasingly still, ever calm, more and more peaceful, and eternally fully present, residing in the centre of the labyrinth of the soul, knowing that at our last breath we will have become all we could ever Be. And that will be enough.