Episode 197 Emerging from the Shadows: Understanding the Emerging Soul

In this episode of The Real Enneagram, we continue our exploration of the three major levels of soul development as outlined in Dr. Joseph Howell's book, Know Your Soul, and we dive deeper into the concepts of the obscured soul and the emerging soul.

We begin by summarizing the obscured soul, which represents the starting point of many individuals on their spiritual journey. This stage is likened to a moon hidden by clouds, where the soul exists but is obscured by the unchecked ego. We discuss how suffering often prompts individuals to seek relief, leading them to uncover their true essence.

Next, we explore the emerging soul, which signifies a shift towards consciousness. This stage involves recognizing one's fixation and its impact on life, ultimately leading to a desire for peace and connection with the soul. We reflect on how our early experiences of love and peace shape our understanding of what it means to live authentically.

Scott shares insights on the struggle between ego and soul, emphasizing the importance of choice in our daily lives. We discuss the challenges of navigating this conflict and the significance of surrendering to the soul, especially during times of crisis. The conversation touches on the cultural context that often prioritizes ego over soul, highlighting the need for a collective shift towards deeper spiritual awareness.

Throughout the episode, we emphasize the role of relationships in soul development. We discuss how emerging souls can support those in the obscured stage by sharing their experiences and being present for others. The importance of genuine connection and the power of presence in conversations are underscored as vital practices for fostering understanding and healing.

As we wrap up, we acknowledge the ongoing journey of soul development and the hope that comes from recognizing our shared humanity. We invite listeners to reflect on their own experiences and consider how they can contribute to a more soulful world. Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to continuing this important conversation in our next episode.

To learn more about the Institute for Conscious Being, visit: theicb.info

Transcript

Scott:
You are now listening to The Real Enneagram, a podcast by the Institute for Conscious Being. To learn more about the Institute and its offerings, visit theicb.info. That's T-H-E I-C-B dot I-N-F-O.

Nanette: Well, welcome back to The Real Enneagram, a podcast brought to you by the Institute for Conscious Being. I'm Nanette Mudiam, and I'm here with Dr. Joseph Howell and Scott Smith. Hey guys, nice to see you again.

Scott: Hey Nanette, good to be back. Hi Nanette.

Nanette: Well, we're going to continue our conversation from last week on the three major levels of soul development out of Know Your Soul, the book that you released this year, Joe. And we had such a rich conversation, I felt like, and I think we all did. I felt that way. Well, and we began by talking about the very first level. And so if you didn't listen to it, you might want to cycle back one podcast episode. But we started talking about the obscured soul, which is the first level of those three stages. Joe, can you just summarize what the obscured soul is for us?

Joe: Sure. The obscured soul is where most of us begin our spiritual search because the obscured soul is like the moon covered with clouds. The soul is still there intact, but something has occluded it. And There are many different things that could hide our souls from us, but one that we spoke about in depth in the last podcast was that the unchecked ego can totally obscure our soul. Paradoxically, that ego can cause so much suffering that we look into why, because we want relief from the fixation. And that search is what uncovers, takes some of the clouds away from that moon of our soul.

Nanette: and leads us to what we hope is the emerging soul. Yes. Yes. So tell me about the emerging soul.

Joe: Well, the emerging soul is basically another mechanical word for becoming conscious. Okay. It happens when the fixation that we're in is acknowledged and we realize that our fixation is running our life. And those nine fixations I discussed last time, and we've discussed numerous times in this podcast, but that fixation is paradoxically the way to consciousness. Because when we look at our fixation and we see that it's been running the show and it's caused our suffering, and then we look for relief, we begin to search for our soul. We begin to want access to our soul. I always found it interesting that regardless of a person's fixation or how deep they are into it, Many people have always told me that they wanted peace. They just want peace, which to me is their code for, I'm tired of my fixation. It's making me very unpeaceful. It's causing suffering and pain and anxiety. But it's come to me recently, how do we know about peace? How, if we've had this tumult all of our lives with this gathering storm of an ego, what gives us the felt sense of peace or the remembrance of the felt sense of peace? And it is, I believe, the knowledge deep in our muscle memory and in our heart memory and in our body memory of our soul child. Because in those years, we did experience peace. We were in a holding environment. And every need that we had was pretty much met. Our biggest need was to give and receive love, other than our physical need. And in an adequate bonding with our caretakers, we did, were able to give and receive love.

Joe: Now, if we experienced that,

Joe: we knew what true peace is, because true peace is based in giving and receiving love. So in our memory, we have the experience of having lived in beautiful peace. So that's why we know to say, all I want is peace. We're trying to say, all I want is to go back to my essence because I know I had it once.

Nanette: We innately know that there is some place that we lived in peace before.

Scott: Yeah, I mean, like Joe said, none of us come into this world with a fully formed ego. When we're infants, we mostly soul. We had this guest speaker, Doug Lynham, wrote Monk to Money Manager. Fascinating guy. He had this idea that we start off in a state of unconscious unity and then as the ego develops and we forget the soul, we move into a state of conscious separation. But then we can eventually move into conscious unity, but we do start in that sense of unconscious unity where we feel ourselves as a part of the present, as a part of reality, as a part of the divine. as infants, we don't have a conceptual sense of those things, but we have, I think we have a felt sense, right, Joe? Absolutely. And we remember that, you know, maybe not consciously, but subconsciously, super consciously, like we have a bodily sense of what peace is from those early years that is there and available to us. We engage in practices like self-remembering.

Nanette: So when that happens, we've been living in this obscured soul. And as we alluded to last week, if we're honest, obviously, we've all been there. On some days, I'm still there. But we know so much of the world. And our suffering is really because of people living in this unawakened state where The moon is obscured. They're walking around with their ego fixations, whether that's on achievement, or doing things right, or having this perfect love, or this perfect job, or whatever it is that they're fixated on. And then they run out, they start to suffer, and they remember. They start to remember that there's a moon up there. There is a soul, that there might be purpose, that there might be real peace, that there might be real love available. And then you start to search for that. And for those of us in the ICB world, our search led us to the truce of the Enneagram and the spirituality of the Enneagram. And to recognize that there was a map to soul, that we could start to get an idea about what it looked like. And so our souls have emerged. I would say that I know lots of emerging souls in my life. And I've had that privilege to study alongside other emerging souls at ICB and in other places in my life as well. And so we start to recognize that the soul might have a better way for us to live. But there is this kind of conflict, isn't there Joe, you know, between ego and soul. And I think that's kind of maybe where I find myself in my daily life, you know, which am I going to yield to? Am I going to start my day, you know, with meditation and you know, or with the news, you know, and, and that's just the reality of kind of my ego versus soul first thing in the morning decision, you know, like, how's my day gonna go, you know, and I get these series of opportunities during the day, some kind of quite naturally, and then some kind of forced, you know, which is, am I going to choose my ego today? Or am I going to choose my soul? How do I get better at maybe manifesting soul where it's more natural, where it's not this mixture that I find myself living in, Joe?

Joe: Well, the wonderful thing about what you've just said, Annette, to me, is that at least you know you have a choice. In the first stage, We're so asleep, as Gurjeet said, and also he's the one who coined the words self-remembering that Scott brought up. In stage two, or this emerging soul stage, we are convinced the soul is there because we've given it a chance to take over. And the ego didn't like that. I know we're speaking in binary terms here, and there are lots of shades of grey. But for simplicity's sake, the ego and the soul do struggle with each other during this stage, because we want the ego to get its act straight so that we don't have to change, but that it gives us what we want. So we really aren't going to give up that ego lock, stock, and barrel at all, even though we've seen the moon. Like you say, sometimes we choose the news instead of to meditate. So you have this mixture. with an ebb and flow. Sometimes a day can be totally soul and living in your sonality. But other days because of stress or because of the fixation rearing its head, the ego tends to dominate. And this can happen for years. But at least the soul is beginning to peek out of the clouds.

Nanette: What does it look like for an ego to submit to soul?

Joe: It is the final act of desperation.

Nanette: Does suffering play a role in that?

Joe: Yes. The suffering is so great. It could take anything. But it gives everyone the form that they need. in order to make that final surrender, which Scott brought up a few minutes ago. It is not an easy surrender. I liken it to the people who jump out of burning buildings. They don't want to get burned anymore. So they trust air and falling. instead of the room which is on fire three stories up or eight stories or a hundred stories. And they surrender to thin air.

Joe: That final act is pivotal, profound, because

Joe: That is when we really never go back to the mixture again. The mixture between ego and soul and in stage two, they're fighting with each other. We never go back to that exact scenario, because we don't believe in the ego anymore. It doesn't mean the ego won't sit on our shoulder and whisper in our ear. And it doesn't mean that our fixation won't come again and give us an ego day. It doesn't mean that we won't have fantasies that are not what are best for us. But it just means that we know it when it happens. We're conscious of what this is, and then we make a conscious decision to leap out of the burning room once again.

Nanette: It makes me think of Father Roar's book, Falling Upward, where he really talks about this Well, we have to call it what it most often is, which is a midlife crisis, right? That says, I've lived in this ego all my life with its fixations and with its patterns, and it's not working for me anymore. And at this stage in my life, I can either double down on it, And I can, and very often we know these people, right? Unfortunately, they're bitter. Unfortunately, they're angry. Unfortunately, they're resentful. There's that doubling down on this is the way it is. And this- And I've been there.

Scott: I've been those people. I think our culture encourages it. We are uniquely handicapped by Western culture generally, it's been like this since before Plato's time. We don't appreciate the soul. It's my feeling there are indigenous peoples, people that are uncontacted by Western civilization in the present day, as well as in history, that they have a felt sense of soul. And it's not that they don't have an ego, that it doesn't develop, but like they have a cultural awareness of the power of the soul. You know, there's often like initiation rites. Joseph Campbell's hero's journey touches on this. You know, you grow up in the culture and all of its assumptions, and then you venture out of it, you know, and they're revealed as assumptions. And then you come back not to smash it, but to supplement it, you know, with a new perspective on reality. that in my opinion is more soulful. And we lack that.

Nanette: Well, I think you make reference to cultures who valued spirituality and the wisdom of age in a way that Western culture does not. It made me think of Joe's example of the lady he was drawn to. HeHo? Yeah. HeHo from last week. And obviously, there was something in, she fell upward, as Richard Rohr said, at some point in her life, she made that decision to say, I'm going to keep growing, I'm going to keep progressing, I'm going to keep developing. And she became such a spiritual inspiration that Joe took notice of that and valued that.

Joe: falling upward myself.

Nanette: Yeah, well, you hadn't had the opportunity yet. You're still, I mean, we can't blame people in their 20s, 30s, midlife, whatever, for using the ego. It was working until it stopped, you know. But when it stops working, when you're in crisis, you do, I mean, a wise man does say like, maybe we should try something different, you know? You would hope.

Scott: So you're being a doctor. It hurts when I do this. Well, don't do that.

Nanette: Well, I mean, it's when you obviously we're not learning that because when you see the amount of collective suffering in the world made by our own decisions, whether that would be, you know, in our environment, or, you know, politics, or health, or healthcare, you know, there's not a lot of, unfortunately, examples of people who are really emerging souls, which is why we do this work, right? We're hoping not only to find progress and development in our own lives, but hopefully to come alongside others to say there is a choice, there is another way.

Scott: I think our world desperately needs that. Our world desperately needs a shift from ego to soul. And it has to be a bottom up thing. It can't be something imposed from the top down, because that's just more ego, right?

Nanette: Mm hmm. But yeah, I feel like, you know, if we if we talk about the news of the day, you know, we keep hoping that, you know, solutions, say in America, would come from the top down, you know, like we're keep looking, we keep looking for, for somebody to stand up and say, gosh, the things that's going on here are really not right. And, and I think people of soul, of depth, maybe, I mean, we really have the answers. If we believe this, then the emergence is going to come from those who are in touch with their souls.

Scott: Yeah. More so than answers, there's a willingness to ask questions, to sit with questions, and to sit in the gray areas. like a receptivity, which goes hand in hand with the idea of surrender to what is versus control. Surrender to what is isn't just whatever happens, happens. It's meeting reality on its own terms. That's a true sense of neutrality. We're such a doing obsessed culture. We're such an ego culture that when people hit this midlife crisis, this suffering, this critical mass of suffering, as Job calls it in his first book, he can hardly be surprised that so many people, their response is to double down on their ego strategies, because it is all we know, and it's generally all that we are offered by our culture. Our culture wordlessly teaches us that we are an ego and that's all we are. That the soul, if it exists at all, is something frivolous or, you know, maybe something you can indulge in if you get all your work done, rather than the most essential part of us that our work, our doing, our whatever it is, springs from and is empowered through it. Because Surrender's not a doing, it's an allowing, it's a letting go, it's a matter of being. Yeah, I digress.

Joe: Thank you. I think the beautiful thing about this stage is when we do, through love, experience the peace, we know that our soul is the one emanating it. Because the ego cannot emanate true peace. It can emanate addictive peace. It can emanate false peace. It can emanate an imitation of peace. But it is not the origin of real peace. The origin of real peace is the soul. And so when we experience these glimpses of the moon in our life, amidst chaos and suffering, it's like a breath of fresh air. I remember after the death of our son, then the tremendous amount of egoic fear that was grasping to take me over, the grief, which was threatening to take me and my family down, It was the love, unselfish love, of the community that gave me a sense that the soul was still there. Because I saw it in other people first. And when they reached out to me, and I'm not speaking for the other members of my family, but when they reached out to me, It reminded me that I have one of those too. That I have the ability to reach out and love as well. And it made me remember what that comes from. It comes from the soul, which my fear had occluded. But seeing the soul in others, helped mine emerge out of a horrific period of suffering.

Nanette: Do you think people who are at this stage can help people who are in the obscured stage?

Joe: Happens every day.

Nanette: Yeah?

Joe: When the soul is shining, even if we're in stage two, we feel like we can share it. And who do we share it with? People who don't see theirs. And offices and organizations, churches, everything is filled with people in both stages. And you know, you can come in and out of these stages, but when the soul is in charge, which is stage two, albeit in charge intermittently. It cannot not express itself. And who does it best express itself to? Not people who are in their same stage necessarily, but the people who are more desperate. which happens to be the people in the first stage where the soul, they cannot see them. They cannot see the moon because the clouds are too thick. How about letting them see what the moon actually looks like from them letting them see you when the soul was in charge? like the people did with me when the grief was so profound. There were people who wanted to be with me, wanted to show me their souls, for me to experience it, for them to be present, and it worked.

Nanette: Do you think that is part of the soul's development at this point, is also to share it with other people? Do you think that's a practice for us?

Scott: I think so, very much so. Because the reality is we are in relationship. Bill Shepard talks about how reality is based on exchange. Exchange is the basis of relationship. We are in exchange with the air around us, people around us. We are in exchange with everything else. And the soul feels that on a felt level. The ego lives in a world of abstraction and separation, of independence. Me outside the world. Me in a vacuum. Me in a silo. I'm managing myself. I'm organizing myself. I'm trying to assert control over my environment. We talked about control and surrender in the last episode. I have to say, the more in touch we get in our soul, the more we are sensationally, experientially confronted with the reality of relationship.

Nanette: And I'm mindful about how much people are living in isolation, you know, and thinking about the obscured soul, it makes so much sense that you would be isolated. We have an epidemic of loneliness in this country such that it has been highlighted in magazines and newspapers and in the news, New York Times had talked about you know, how loneliness is an epidemic in this country. And, you know, we have so much tension in conversations and around politics and around points of disagreement. You know, sadly, the Internet that was supposed to unite us with one brain has given us every reason to be fractured and divided. And I'm just thinking about how, as our souls emerge, how we can help our friends and neighbors by having better conversations, by letting them glimpse the moon, as Joe has used this analogy, and us. And what in some practical ways does that look like? I mean, obviously, reaching out to someone in grief. Well, you know, if we're honest, we're not very good at that. In America, we say the dumbest things ever to people who've lost someone. I mean, Every friend I know who has had a significant loss, and by that I mean death, we don't even know how to talk about it. We don't know what to say to people. We are so inept at the real conversations of spiritual life, which is life and death. So I'm just wondering how an emerging soul can respond to these very practical needs of response to human needs, to relationship, to interaction, to meals. Does this make sense to you guys?

Joe: A hurting soul knows that there's no difference between me and you, me and you. There's no difference between you and me, even though you've lost your sister. The soul can still show itself to you because the soul understands grief. And you're not in your own silo because you've lost your sister. Though I might have not lost my sister, I know what loss is. And knowing that loss is loss gives me a way to bridge the gap between two people. And that gap is a soul bridge.

Joe: Yeah. I find it helps me to be more present to others.

Scott: Something, another thing Philip says is the greatest gift you can give someone is your presence. We tend to rob each other. of our presence. When we're in our ego, we are self-conscious. We are organizing the cell. It's more about how am I doing? What are you thinking about me?

Scott: How can I, I mean, Philip calls it presentation mode. How can I present myself such that you see me the way I need to be seen by you and so that I can elicit the proper responses that I want from you from whatever I'm saying.

Scott: So all my awareness is focused on me and there's not very much left for you. And I think in a way we, some way or another, we've all felt that difference between someone that is present to you in conversation and someone who is not. People feel that even if it's not on a conscious level, using conscious in terms of awareness rather than conscious conscious. And another thing about it in my personal experience is it does help you be more aware of patterns, egoic patterns that you were unaware of before so that you regain choice in the matter. So perhaps I'm having a conversation with a close family member and they say something that triggers one of my patterns and reactivity flares up if If I'm unaware of that pattern, I just run off. And before you know it, we're having a fight or we're not having a fight, but I'm having resentment. But if I'm aware of that pattern, I can observe it without assisting or resisting it and let it pass through and not let it ruin this lunch with my mom or whatever it is, ruin this road trip with the family. That's hopeful. That is helpful. And it helps people. To me, it's more about modeling consciousness, talking about it.

Joe: Okay.

Scott: People can feel that, you know, you could you could say a lot of words about consciousness, and it may not connect, but people can feel if you're present or not too.

Nanette: Yeah, that's such a practical and insightful way to bridge a gap between those living in obscurity and those with emerging souls is just simply to be present to them. I think that's so helpful. Thank you, Scott. I appreciate that.

Joe: Thank you.

Nanette: Well, I think we'll wrap up there today, guys, and we'll pick up this conversation next week. It's been deep and good as we continue to explore these levels of development of our souls. Thanks.

Scott: Thank you, Nanette.

Scott: Thank you for listening to The Real Enneagram, a podcast by the Institute for Conscious Being. To learn more about the Institute and its offerings, visit theicb.info. That's T-H-E I-C-B dot I-N-F-O. The music for today's podcast was composed and performed by ICB faculty member Drexel Rayford.

Nanette: Thanks for listening today. We hope you liked what you heard. If you did, please subscribe, leave a review, and share this with your friends and family.