The Three Levels of Self: Ego, Soul, and Oneness (EP47, 1/2)

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In this foundational teaching, we explore a radically different way of understanding who we really are—one that extends far beyond the limited identity our culture has conditioned us into. Through a map of three levels of self, we journey from the egoic self (the small "I") through soul consciousness and unity awareness, all the way to pure oneness—the great "I AM."

This isn't abstract philosophy. Understanding these levels of consciousness directly shifts how we experience healing, awakening, and our purpose in this world. We're not separate, isolated beings struggling alone. We're waves in an ocean, molecules in a great unified field, forever held and held together by something infinitely greater than ourselves.

When we shift our awareness from the limiting belief of separation to the liberating truth of our shared belonging, everything changes. We begin to understand what it means to live as soul, to operate from unity consciousness, and to remember love as our deepest truth and highest calling.

This is the foundation. This is who you really are.

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This podcast show is for people dedicated to spiritual awakening, spiritual practice, psychology, healing work, collective healing and awakening, and global positive social change. 

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This podcast show explores meditation, mindfulness, consciousness, spiritual awakening, and spiritual growth, with a strong focus on personal healing, trauma healing, emotional healing, and somatic healing. We dive into nonduality, embodied spirituality, the true self, life purpose, and spiritual practice, while also addressing shadow and integration themes like spiritual bypass, ego-death, root causes, and holistic healing. 

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Transcript

Portal of Unity: Three Levels of Self Meditation

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Now we're sitting in meditation and now we're opening into the soul level. I am the one I have always been. We are. We are here. We are one shared vessel. We are all bodies, one body And we get to feel that belonging and the truth of our togetherness, that we don't do anything alone, even if it looks like it. We incarnate together. We walk together. Those who don't incarnate with us, who are holding us, protecting us, regenerating us, they're with us. This is part of the great we that I'm talking about. Our angels, our guides and helpers, our ancestors, our great masters and gurus and saints, our archangels. our deities. Welcome to the Ground of Love. I'm your host, Olivia Frazao. This is a podcast for people who are deeply dedicated to the spiritual journey. You are here for self-growth care, for others, and being of service to the world. This podcast is in service to you to help you remember who you are and why you are here, you will receive inspiration, clarity, and no BS Love. We are walking each other home. Let's begin. In this episode and the one after it, I'm gonna be giving an overview on how I see things in terms of who are we, why are we here, what is this spiritual path, and what are we doing together? What is our true work here? What is our purpose? How are we of service to the world? And that includes also what is my work in the world And how I see all of our work in the world together. I'm gonna talk about this by offering a different vantage point of seeing ourselves beyond our limited time-space incarnation, and I'm gonna give a little map of three levels of how we can define the concept of self I would like to offer a view that differs from the view that our culture gives us in two main ways. First, it is a multidimensional view This means that both time and space are much vaster and inclusive than what we're usually given through our cultural definitions of time, space, the mental mind, and the concept of viewing only within the lifetime the second difference in the view that I would like to offer here is the concept of self as it pertains to the we rather than the I And how we can experience ourselves beyond the limited identity and part of the great web of being and ultimately the great I am, the one I, great I And as I share both of those things, those changes in view in comparison to how our culture usually conditions us to view, from that, I feel like being able to share how I see our work together, that'll naturally reveal itself I think I'll be able to go into both of these points through one main explanation rather than doing one at a time. The first is about expanded time-space, and the second is about expanded self, just as a review. So ultimately, it-- we can't talk about one without talking about the other We're gonna look at three levels of self right now. Which I basically already mentioned, but I'm gonna go deeper here and map it out. In those three levels of self, the first one is gonna have two subcategories, and the second one is also gonna have subcategories. But stay with me. It'll be easy, don't worry The first one, the first of the three, okay, which is gonna have a singular and a plural within it, hence the two subcategories. The first one is the egoic self, okay? The small I, the egoic self that says me, mine, the solid separate self as the Buddhist would say the personality self. This is the self that our culture tells us is us That self tries to find, quote-unquote, my purpose. It's looking through a lens of limitation and isolation, often a lens of fear and desire, and, purpose usually pertains to only this lifetime and, comes from only this local self. What our culture tends to confine us inside of. Which is the cultural conditioned version. Now, the second part of this first definition of self, the plural version of it, is what you could call collective consciousness. Now, this is basically the amalgamation of all the egoic selves as one, let's say, mind cloud This is where you basically have the mind of culture or the collective mind. Now, this is simply The average of everybody's thought forms and that particular cloud of human collective consciousness around the world, so often collective consciousness would describe kind of the cultural average, the, amalgamation or merge of all of our individual consciousnesses from that egoic level, that this would just be basically all of those people put together. So both of these things, the individual egoic self and the plural version, which I'm calling collective consciousness, are all the individual and an amalgamation of individuals All of that is what I'm calling the first layer of self, which is limited to the lifetime and limited to what we call this time-space reality The second of the three buckets that I'm calling self, this second category is what you could call the soul level On the soul level, you have the singular and the plural also, just as we did in the, the first category where we had the singular and the plural of the egoic self. So of course, the singular is the soul, my soul, your soul, which right now I'm gonna call... 'cause not every tradition has the concept of soul within it, okay? So right now, what am I calling soul? I'm calling it what one of my teacher's teachers, Daskalos Stylianos Atteshlis, would call the permanent personality This is also the case for those who like the Seth material, channeled by Jane Roberts, in her book, The Eternal Validity of the Soul. There would be, a lot of information about this also So we're talking about the self that is not born and does not die Or better said, the self that has so many births and so many deaths, the self that moves through all of the different egoic selves, all of the particular names that we call ourselves. This is who we are that incarnates and then disincarnates, and then incarnates again, and then disincarnates again. This is the self that moves through all the different time-space realities and the realities beyond time-space. This is the self that moves through and exists as a simultaneity of lives, right? Because now we're outside of linear time. A simultaneity of lives across dimensions, across worlds, realities, domains So this self still has a uniqueness that we could call me or myself Even though myself in this case is understood to be spanning countless lifetimes simultaneously existing, whether or not we're aware of it Now, the plural version of this would be what some people might call soul group Or what I could call to differentiate it from collective consciousness, which is in the first category, which is an amalgamation of individual egoic selves. Now I'm gonna call the amalgamation of soul level self as not collective consciousness, but unity consciousness This is an awareness of us, of the we. This is where all of us who incarnate together in worlds upon worlds are aware of not actually being separate individuals, but being a shared self or a shared mind in some way that also experiences itself as individual souls on one level and those individual souls experiencing themselves as unique incarnations On this level of what I could call soul group knowing unity consciousness, there is a remembrance of who we are together and that we walk together across worlds and lifetimes unique and at the same time as a unit. So ultimately, we are all one And on this level that I'm naming, there's an understanding of a sense of togetherness of individual souls walking and moving together as, let's say, individual molecules of a great wave So through this view, through this understanding of reality at this level We are all molecules in a great wave moving together. And so we could see ourselves as one of the molecules in the wave, or we could see ourselves as the wave And when we see ourselves as the wave, we see ourselves as the we We feel ourselves as an indivisible part of something much greater than ourselves. And in this case, at this level of being, I'm talking about what you could call Soul group. So what is soul group? Because I've been talking about this. Soul group is your wave that you are inside of, of your own molecule, your own little being that incarnates, and the other molecules that incarnate beside you Sometimes in physical form and sometimes not. Together, somehow always together in sha- in what I'm going to risk calling shared mission or shared intent. So a wave is a group of molecules all going in the same direction So we walk together. That's what I mean by saying we walk together. We are all carried forth through that same great hand moving us forward together as one organism Another way you could see our togetherness is as a web of light. Some people may call this Indra's net. And so of course there, technically I could say in this category there are actually three levels in category number two that we're still inside of, right? The first would be the soul level. The second would be the amalgamation of souls in a particular soul group, which is a group of souls with shared intent or shared mission who walk together, who work together. And then the third level would be forget about soul group, now we're doing all beings everywhere. We're doing even beyond soul group. There's-- It's just everyone. And that is, as I said, what, what we would call Indra's net. That's what we would call interbeing from the Thich Nhat Hanh definition, at least my extent of understanding of it Interbeing is this third category within what I'm still calling the second level of self, which is the s- the soul level. So now we're doing, as I said, soul on the individual soul, group soul or soul group and Everybody, everybody, everybody interbeing. The w- the web of creation Okay, so now we're gonna go to the third, uh, level of self. So we've done basically one A, one B, two A, two B, two C, and now we're at three. Three doesn't have any subcategories. Three is oneness Now there's no differentiation whatsoever of anyone or anything. There's no capacity for number With interbeing, you could say there's countless, countless, countless beings here. There-- It's just one. So the metaphor, to continue the metaphor of the wave in this case, now we're talking about the entire ocean We are the ocean of being and we show up as waves and we show up as molecules and then we fly out into the air as a little droplet thinking ourselves to be a little egoic self And then we fall back into the wave and know ourselves as the great we, the great us, the great togetherness And then we know ourselves as the entire ocean, as all beingness without form or formless differentiation irrelevant, without any type of binary, without any type of polarity, without any type of boundary at all or definition at all. And here it's just oneness looking at itself through multiple eyes. So when what we call I look at what we call you It's oneness looking at itself through two pairs of eyes and oneness is looking at itself through a protrusion whose surface looks like what I call me, and through another protrusion whose surface of itself looks like what you call you that identifies so much with the surface of itself because the surface of itself over here where I am and over there where you are has so much self-consciousness to it where we become very attached to our sense of self on the personality level and to the view that our personality level creates for us. And yet we can see and know and experience self from this oneness while at the same time noticing that this oneness has textures on its surface that call themselves individual people. And I can feel my own texture of the individual person that I'm acting as, and I can feel yours. And at the same time, I can know self as oneness. I can't even say me and you anymore. I can't even say us anymore. It's just self. It's the I am So we did three categories of self. I'm gonna review them. The first one had the limited ego self as well as the collective consciousness of basically the plural of the limited ego self, all the people, and the amalgamation of all those thinking minds. The second category is the soul level, the individual soul that incarnates as those egoic selves, as well as the group soul, or the soul group, which is souls that walk together in shared intent and shared mission Souls that support each other and that act in unity and that experience unity consciousness together, that know themselves as one, that operate as one, as one great being And then the third subcategory here is all beings, interbeing. Not just soul group, but all souls together acknowledged and felt as the great family of being And then the third level, which I said has no subcategories, is oneness. So that's what people would call I Am, the great I Am, right? Not the little egoic I am from the first category but the great I am. So if we go through the three categories quickly, we have I am in lowercase, the egoic self talking about itself. Then in the next category we have we are knowing ourselves as the we. And then in the third category we have I AM in capital letters, God knowing itself as itself through all of those other things, through all those other identities, but not losing itself in them So obviously, uh, if we're looking at anything besides the first category, if we're looking at the second or third, which is the soul level or the soul group level or the interbeing level or the oneness level, then we're looking way beyond time and space in the way that our culture has usually inc-enculturated ourselves into it We get to experience ourselves as existing spaciously, leaning into the sense of home and belonging Way beyond the current limited lifetime, way beyond whatever we have been told that we are, and way beyond whatever expectations for our actions and outcomes of this lifetime we may have been given by our culture and, uh, and have internalized also in our own self-expectation. So what does this mean? How does this pertain to our work? And what is our work? When we talk about healing and awakening, what are we talking about? When we talk about being of service to the world, what are we talking about? When we talk about what some people call global ascension or collective awakening, what are we talking about? We're talking about shifting our locus of awareness, of perception from the limited egoic identity, the solid separate self of the first category of self, and even the plural version of it, the collective consciousness field that creates and recreates our cultural mindset and expectations and norms for behavior And we're shifting now permanently into knowing ourselves as part of the we knowing ourselves as never being alone. And when I say we, now I'm talking about that second level, right? I'm not only talking about those of us who are incarnated. This sense of we spans those who are incarnated and those who exist in other planes, either because they're finished with their incarnation or because they don't ever incarnate here, but they support us here So when we talk about a sense of togetherness, when we talk about a we feeling or a unity feeling, or a sense of group, or dare I say a sense of team who we are and how we operate shifts. We are no longer doing anything alone, and we are no longer doing anything just for ourselves And thus we are not being driven by the little machine inside of ourselves that tells us to go, like a car engine being like, "Okay, now we're, now we're going from stopped to a certain velocity." That momentum is not coming from our inner efforting. We are not moving ourselves We are the wave. We are a molecule in the wave inevitably beside each other and moving together. And the wave does not move because all of the little molecules move. The little molecules move because the wave moves. The wave has its own force, its own momentum, and it's propelling the form bodies of itself to shift locations. And so we move forward, we shift, we take action, we take movement because there is a greater hand within us, a force of vitality propelling us forward together And we move together in unison, in unity This doesn't mean that on the surface level we are literally doing the same things. One person can be a doctor in France, the other person can be a teacher in California, et cetera. It doesn't mean that we're all sitting together meditating at the same time And we can. We can sit together and meditate at the same time. And when we do, we're all tapping into our togetherness at the same time with our conscious awareness The truth is that we are always this wave. And it doesn't matter if the teacher in California is teaching and the doctor in France is doing their doctor stuff and nobody's thinking about each other. We are still in unison There is a pulse inside of us, whether we're conscious of it or not, that carries us forward together. And when we sit together in meditation, we know ourselves consciously as what we have been this whole time without having been focusing on it What I love about meditation and what meditation is to me, which is opening together in shared group field is that whoever has been locked into a view from the egoic level of self can now open into the reality of experiencing ourselves as unity consciousness, as togetherness, as this shared beingness through each of our bodies as one, all bodies, one body And this is where sometimes when I lead a meditation, I say for each of us to remember within ourselves, I am the one I have always been. This is self-knowing itself on the soul level or even on the oneness level. So now we have opened beyond the limited solid separate self viewpoint that maybe we were holding before when we were doing the dishes or caring for the kids or at the supermarket. Now we're sitting in meditation and now we're opening into the soul level. I am the one I have always been. We are. We are here. We are one unit together. We are one team. We are one shared vessel. We are all bodies, one body And we get to feel that belonging and the truth of our togetherness, that we don't do anything alone, even if it looks

The Ground of Love

29:48

like it. We incarnate together. We walk together. Those who don't incarnate with us, who are holding us, protecting us, regenerating us, they're with us. This is part of the great we that I'm talking about. It's not only horizontal, it's vertical too. When I'm talking about horizontal and vertical, imagine everyone sitting in a circle meditating together. Even if it's online, just imagine a circle, people sitting together. But it's not just a circle, it's a great pillar of light. It goes all the way up and all the way down. All the way up into the heavens, all the way down into Mother Earth And in every layer there's beings and beings and beings. Our angels, our guides and helpers, our ancestors, our great masters and gurus and saints, our archangels. our deities. That's what I'm calling all the verticality. Horizontal is those of us who are incarnated together who can see each other and talk to each other, and the vertical is connecting across dimensions. This is all one family of light. This is all one team all of us who work together, this is one wave. Now, this one wave can be made of countless, countless, countless, countless, countless beings, all with shared intent and shared mission who support each other Who have the shared work to do, which is the work of self-healing and awakening, and the work of helping others in their healing and their awakening. That is shared intent Shared mission. Remembrance. Remembrance If you have resonated with this, You can take a look at my work. at thegroundoflove.com. we have a group That I lead in this shared remembrance and togetherness and offering of ourselves to be beacons of light,

OUTRO

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of unconditional love To be people who can show up in maturity and generosity and service in our lives, and to do our best to bring forth a healthy, loving world This is an online group with in-person retreats you can join for only online or for both. So no matter where you are in the world, it can work for you To take a look, you can go to thegroundoflove.com/team And you can get in touch with me if you wanna talk about it. In the show notes, if you go to the way bottom, there's a place that you can click where you can send me a message, and I'll read it i'm gonna take a pause here and end this episode as part one of the two-episode series where we're talking about who we are and what we're here for In the next episode, I'll talk about our work together and the power of meditation, what it's like to be a living portal, and how we are truly of service Blessings. thank you for being with me in The Ground of Love. You can follow this podcast to receive the next episodes, and who is it that comes to mind to share this episode with? Please go ahead and pass this along to them and go ahead and leave a review or a rating if you wish. I thank you for that. For one-on-one healing sessions and a group membership. you can go to www.thegroundoflove.com Blessings to you. May you be protected, held, regenerated centered. And taken forward with all light, love, truth and highest and best health and wellbeing on all levels and taken forward to make the greatest, most beautiful impact doing exactly what you're here to do. God bless you. Protection, grace, protection, grace. So it is.