Episode Transcript
We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships, we may wish for better. Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare, and this is The Spiritual American. Hello everyone and welcome to the Spiritual American. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare and I'm your host. And today we will be talking about the journey of the soul, the soul's journey home, actually. So it's going to be a very nice, topic may be a little different than you expected. But before we get started, if you're watching on YouTube, please consider like sharing and subscribing. As you know that this gets the YouTube algorithm to get us out to more people. And please consider sharing with your friends and family as well. So today we are going to talk about the soul's journey and of course I can talk about it from a didactic standpoint or from a spiritual teacher standpoint, which is the thought I had at first. But then I thought, no, you know what, let me go in a different direction. So one direction that I could have gone in is to say that we're all souls. We all come onto earth. We all, play a part. We all bodies, we all are human beings and so forth. And that's true. But I think that there's so many different feelings and opinions and experiences about the journey of the soul I think it would be beneficial to speak about it in the sense of experience. And from the perspective of meditation. So what is it that the soul experiences in meditation and can that be called home or heaven? And one thing I was thinking of was that we have all our experiences in our mind. So if I were to. forget about my body for a minute or maybe not forget about it, but let's acknowledge that the body has its own timetable. The body has its own experience, in terms of when it's born, what happens to it and when it dies. I don't have any input as to, oh, I don't want to get this illness. I don't want to die. I don't know when, not I die, but I don't know when the body's going to die or. I have very little input. I have input into how I treat the body and how I live my life, my lifestyle and so forth. We have a lot of science about what's healthy and how to keep the body well, but we don't have a lot of input in terms of the body's lifespan or anything like that. So if we can take the body and just put it aside for a minute and say, okay, body, you're going to be alive for a certain amount of time and then you are going to. Die at a certain time. Even that much, let's just take a minute to experience that. So I acknowledge that I have this body, I'm using this body, and at some point the earth is going to take the body back. So it's kind of like a body is on loan. I'm using it, I'm calling it mine, it's nobody else's, right, but it's mine, and then I have to give it back, or it takes it back. The earth takes the body back. So then what happens with the soul? What happens to me? So I'm going to say there's a lot of opinions about going to heaven, seeing loved ones, going to the land of peace, going beyond birth and death, going, there's all different opinions depending on your religious beliefs and your feelings and your experiences. So I'm not going to talk about any of that. I'm going to say, let's talk about what can be done while I'm here. What can be done with meditation and with a little bit of direction to have experiences while I'm still in the body. So for instance, let's say I am one of those people who think that when the body dies, I go to the land of peace. I go to a peaceful place and I stay there and I never come back into a body and I just stay out of the whole birth and death cycle. I know some of the Eastern religions believe that and they call that mukti. Mukti means liberation, so the soul is liberated from matter, from time and from the pain and everything. It goes along with living as a human being. The happiness too, by the way, but they call that the land of peace or the land of liberation. So can I experience that now? And the answer is yes, I can. So what I can do, and we'll practice this now, it's just an example. So let's say I want, let's say that's my belief. That when you leave, you go to the land of peace. So can I experience myself in the land of peace? Well, yes, we actually call that bodiless stage. So bodiless stage means that I experience myself as pure energy, the living soul, the living being, you can call it a point of light. I have the point of light behind me there, right? So I am the point of light and right now I'm in the forehead, but in meditation, I can imagine that little point. flying up past the earth, past the sun, moon and stars into this beautiful realm of light. And I can experience that peace and stillness and beauty of just being. As I'm saying it, I'm trying to allow the experience to come. So the peace and the stillness and the quiet and the silence of just being. You could argue that that is liberation because in that moment I'm liberated from the other experiences I'm having with the thoughts and feelings and everything else that I'm experiencing. So that's one example. Another example is maybe in the Christian background where I came from, we have this idea about going to heaven and that you meet your loved ones and you, that you will see them again and, and things like that. So. We can experience that too in meditation. So we don't have to wait for the body to die in order to have these experiences. I guess is my point today that the soul's journey home is not the same as the body's journey home. That I can actually experience this now. So let's practice the one that I just mentioned about going to heaven. So I can experience heaven. What do I think heaven is like? What do I wish it would be like? And I can create in our practice, we call that the subtle region or the angelic stage or the subtle stage, which means that I am using my mind to have pure thoughts. soul conscious, pure thoughts and experiences in my mind. So loved ones can come. I can meet Jesus. I can meet Krishna. I can have those experiences in my mind and generate the happiness or the comfort or whatever it is that I wish for. As I'm saying this, I hope that You can understand what this actually means. A lot of times people have pain and sorrow because they feel like the only way that they're going to get relief is when they die. Maybe they won't see their loved ones again until they die or they won't feel free until they die. I know there's a lot of people that are really depressed and going through things and maybe wanting to commit suicide and things like that because feel like they want to be liberated from the body. But in meditation, we realize that the soul is actually experiencing everything through the mind. And these experiences of heaven, meeting loved ones, meeting the religious people, the elevated souls that I love and care about, That I can meet them in my own mind. Now you could say, Oh, that's your imagination and so forth. Well, okay. So it's my imagination, but I'm still having the experience. Think about it like a child, like a young child that has an imaginary friend or imagining, having a tea party or whatever kids imagine. Now, I'm a, I'm a. I'm a park ranger. I'm Superman or I'm whatever. And they're imagining, I'm a princess. I'm, they're using their imagination, but they're generating that experience. And this is actually, it seems like a simple topic, but it's quite deep because we're really making a distinction between the body and the soul and the mind. The soul can use the mind to have experiences. I just remembered, the founder of the Brahma Kumaris was a, was a man, but we also had a female that was very, instrumental in the beginning of the organization and they called her mama and, uh, she came very young and she was very powerful and she ended up being, in charge of the women and everything in the, organization at the time in India. And she passed away in her fifties, uh, from breast cancer, metastatic breast cancer. And there's a picture of her. online that was taken like the day before or two days before she passed. And the look on her face, she was completely beyond. She was so happy. She was very content. I mean, knowing at that time in the 1950s or 60s, whenever it was that she must've been in a lot of pain and been very uncomfortable physically, but in her mind. She was totally free and you could see it on her face. She had a smile, her eyes were sparkling. And my understanding is that picture was taken like the day before she left the body or she passed. So what is the point with this? We're talking about the soul's journey home, but we can make effort to have these experiences on a daily basis with meditation. I'm giving a lot of different examples because there could be a lot of things in life that make us feel like we're going to lose something. Could be a cancer diagnosis, somebody passes away, a situation at work or a situation within the family or maybe even just getting older or something like that, like all related to the body or family or something that happened here. But inside my mind, I can create something. And we had a lot of different episodes about changing my past, rewriting my past, going back into painful memories and rewriting them. Why can't I write my future? Think about it. We don't often think like this because we've kind of accepted what religion has told us and that's what it's going to be. But some of us maybe don't. I don't believe in that or maybe we haven't really experienced it or explored it. So I guess what I'm suggesting today is that each of us should take a moment and maybe take a look at what do I want to happen when this body goes? What do I want or do I want to experience it now? Maybe I want to see my loved ones. Maybe I want to spend time with them. Maybe I want to talk to them. Maybe I want to feel what it feels like to be totally free. Maybe I want to feel what it feels like to live in heaven where everyone is happy and there's absolutely no sorrow. I can do that in my mind and just like the child that sits there and does it and experiences, we can do that too. The last point I have is I wrote here from ego to authenticity. When we practice things like that, we're fulfilling the desires of our heart. When we practice meditation in this way, I'm fulfilling the desire of my heart. When I fulfill that desire, I become more real, more authentic, more me. I think that's what people want from each other. We just want to be ourselves and we want others to be themselves and we want it to be okay, right? So ego would be like a false self or a false, like a, because I'm afraid or because I feel like I have to play this role or whatever, but if I can, work on fulfilling my desires, like healing my hurts, fulfilling my desires. I don't know what anybody's desire out there. I'm talking to a camera. I don't know what any of you feel, but I'm saying that in our mind, we can have experiences. And that they're not limited to the body. They're not limited to my age of the body. They're not limited to relationships or circumstances or illnesses or anything. It's not limited to that. And so the soul's journey home, you could say definitely when the body dies, the soul is freed up physically, but why not practice freeing up in the mind? There's nothing stopping me from doing that. This is a deep topic I'm talking about because we're really underlining, like I said before, the difference between the body, the mind, and the soul. And the potential to use the mind for elevated experiences. One other thing, and then I'll end it here. So one of the other things that we can use the mind for is service, meaning sharing my feelings with the world. So my love or my care or my understanding or my good wishes can be shared with the world. Can I share with physically? Maybe online or something, but the vibrations. So even though I'm talking to a camera and maybe people are listening, I'm hoping that the vibration that I'm sending is also reaching everyone. So serving through the mind means that if I feel peaceful or if I feel loving or if I feel gratitude or if I feel content, that I want everyone to feel that way. And if I'm opening myself up to share those feelings, I increase my capacity. I'm also increasing my experience of those feelings. So we have the potential to have elevated spiritual experiences in the mind and has nothing to do with what's going on with the body. So I'll leave it there. It's something to think about. We're very focused on the body, but I'm hopeful that now that the times are changing in a sense that people are going to be more and more interested in the mind and more and more interested in what's possible. We're very familiar with the limitations of the body and we're very familiar with the pain of the ego, right? So maybe it's time to look beyond both of them and see what's possible. So I'll leave it there for today. Remember our slogan is heal, empower, and serve. And until next time, take care. Transcripts provided by Transcription Outsourcing, LLC.
