The Self in the Modern World

The Self in the Modern World

Chances are that when you were very young, you lived in the fullness of spirit most of the time...If you are an adult, chances are that nowadays these experiences are rare enough to be memorable. What happened to you? Somehow your heart was broken, or you became insecure, or your self-esteem was shattered, or you were smitten by fear or anger. These terrible events, whatever they were, wounded your spirit.

Eliot Cowan

We are hybrid beings, made up of body, mind, and soul. The body and mind are limited to this lifetime while the soul is eternal. The soul has an agenda and is using the body and mind as a way to interface with the physical world to set its agenda.

When we are born, we are pure soul in the body of new born baby. Over the next 21 years we are programmed to be able to function in the world and in our society. We download programs from our family, school, religious groups, peers and endless media sources; all that programming stands between the soul we really are and the world we live in. By the time we are adults, we are convinced that we are our programming.

From birth to age three and a half we begin to make the transition from a purely spirit-being to a physical spirit/human hybrid. We learn what is real according to this plane of existence. We learn what to believe in, especially from our parents. We develop beliefs surrounding who we are and what is expected of us. We learn how we should treat others and how we deserve to be treated. These beliefs lay the foundation for everything else that follows and for the rest of our lives.

From ages three and a half to seven, we learn all about our emotions. Emotions are things that compel us to act. Love and courage as well as things like avarice, avoidance, desire, anger, jealousy, over-indulgence, pride/entitlement are things that are developed within us during this period. We also write many of the emotional programs that are designed to defend the beliefs we established between birth to age three and a half. This is the period where we hold much of the pain and hurt from the circumstances of our youth, along with our joy and wonder.

From ages seven to fourteen, we learn about feelings. Feelings are different from emotions in that feelings are sensations of the mind, while emotions move us to actions. Feelings are intuited observations. Emotions are enormous behavioural programs that dictate what we do. Feelings are smaller programs that dictate what we sense and feel in certain situations.

During this phase, we feel “vibes”, along with things like friendliness, warmth, fondness and apprehension. We learn the programs for what we like and don’t like. What we feel is creepy or what we feel is enjoyable. What we learn in this period supports the emotional programming we went through in the previous period (ages three and a half to seven). It defends and reflects the beliefs we hold to be true.

The final stage of development occurs from ages fourteen to twenty-one. This period is designed to deal with logic. Practicality, priority, sequencing and reason – all get loaded in during this period. It is the topmost level of consciousness and enables us to interface with the world. It is our day to day mind that gets us up in the morning, moves us through our day, and gets us back home at night.

All of these programs get loaded into us along with the earlier ones we wrote about ourselves based on our beliefs, emotions, and feelings. They are all the rules of our life until they are recognized and changed. After 21 years of loading all of these programs into our thinking, we come to believe that the programming is who we are. But who we really are is a soul having an organic human experience.

The key to uncovering the soul’s agenda, its purpose in life, is to get underneath all of the programming and indoctrination that we have been inundated with since birth. We have become both a victim of our own conditioning and the machine of the culture we live in. The programming becomes the mask we wear in the world and we come to believe we are the mask.


Seeing in the Dark
Colleen Deatsman and Paul Bowersox