What is the Soul?

Within a lifetime, it’s common at some point for a human being to ask:

“Who am I?”

and

“What am I?”

If we’re lucky, our core needs are met, and we have the luxury of asking such existential questions.  If we’re extremely lucky, we also have the maps & means to answer those questions.

Self-discovery is a progression of shifts in identity. Along the journey, our self-identity moves through several discrete stages of state awakenings that build upon one another.  At first, our self-identity is “trapped” in an ego, bound to a mind and body, but we don’t know it.  The ego sees through a filter of mind and body but cannot look at the filter.  If we’re lucky, years of ordinary meditative practice has given us a brief release of our subjective self-identity from exclusive identification from the ego.

During “subject release,” your awareness discovers a gap between awareness and the objects of awareness, including objects such as your own body and your own thought. The gap between your awareness and objects is how you know your “self” from the objects within your awareness.  But if there is a gap between your awareness and your observable thoughts, then you can’t be your thoughts, any more than you are the words on this screen, of which you’re also aware.  So, who are you?

Human growth and development move (1) horizontally through states of self-identity and (2) vertically through evolving life altitudes.

More questions

We can inquire further into the experience of the soul. The Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ) was developed as an online survey of mystical-type experiences. According to research [9], the MEQ is an efficient measure of individual mystical experiences. Below is a small subset of questions from the MEQ that address self-identity:

THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE QUESTIONNAIRE (subset)

Rate the degree to which at any time during that session you experienced the following phenomena.

1. Loss of usual identity
2. Freedom from the limitations of your personal self
3. Feeling a unity with something greater than your personal self.
4. Experience of the fusion of your personal self into a larger whole.

When we asked students in PraxisAletheia: The Metamodern Mystery School to rate their mystical experiences and their experience of their own inner organic technology, i.e. SalutoGenic responses in the body, we discovered a strong correlation between those two experiences.

In other words, it’s no longer a matter of luck whether someone has access to mystical experience and the discovery of their soul.

What about the brain?

The brains of Tibetan Buddhist monks and Celestine nuns have been studied. Both groups demonstrated the ability to produce gamma waves during meditation. Gamma-band activity in the brain falls within the frequency range of 30Hz to 42Hz. Gamma-band activity creates “a global and exclusive availability for a given stimulus, which is then subjectively experienced as conscious[ness]” [6]

In a preliminary study, Alison Ooms, the Director of Research at The New Human University, measured the brain-wave patterns of students up to 40hz, a frequency which is associated with cognitive functioning, learning, memory, and information processing.  After Source Code Meditation, gamma-band activity shifts from the right hemisphere of the brain to the left hemisphere.  According to other significant research [1], activity in the left hemisphere of the brain is associated with

• transformational leadership and leadership maturity [3,4]
• higher learning rates [5]
• assimilation of information into a comprehensible whole [6]
• creative combination processes [7]
• attention span [8]

It is significant to note that our students are neither Buddhist monks nor Celestine nuns.

Shift in gamma activity to the left hemisphere of the brain after practicing an early form of “Soul Awakening” Meditation from “The 9 Summits of Transformation”

Just the beginning…

Soul Awakening is just the beginning of the journey. The 9 Summits of Transformation is also designed produce Transcendent Awakening, Unitary Awakening, and Unitary Evolutionary Enlightenment. And in PraxisAletheia: The Metamodern Mystery School, we use the most advanced techniques — esoteric techniques — to provide those experiences to our students.

Watch this webinar and find out if you’re a good fit for the Hero’s Journey offered at PraxisAletheia.

We’ve been in the first stage of early enrollment into the class beginning January 2022.  Early enrollment comes with a significant reduction in tuition, but we’re about to move into the next phase of enrollment and end the current discounts. If you know PraxisAletheia would be life changing for you, then don’t wait!

REFERENCES

[1] Fischer, K. W. (2008). Dynamic cycles of cognitive and brain development: Measuring growth in mind, brain, and education. In A. M. Battro, K. W. Fischer & P. Léna (Eds.). The educated brain (pp. 127-150). Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press

[3] Balthazard, P. A., Waldman, D. A., Thatcher, R. W., & Hannah, S. T. (2012). Differentiating transformational and non-transformational leaders on the basis of neurological imaging. Leadership Quarterly, 23(2), pp.244-258. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/usarmyresearch/265

[4] Rook, D., & Torbert, B. (1998). Organizational Transformation as a Function of CEOs’ Developmental Stage. Organization Development Journal, 16(1), pp.11-28. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254304296_Organizational_Transformation_as_a_Function_of_CEOs%27_Developmental_Stage1

[5] Goldberg, E. (2009). The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

[6] Dehaene, S., Sergent, C., & Changeux, J. P. (2003). A neuronal network model linking subjective reports and objective physiological data during conscious perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(14), pp.8520-8525; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1332574100

[7] Gonen-Yaacovi, G., de Souza, L. C., Levy, R., Urbanski, M., Josse, G., & Volle, E. (2013). Rostral and caudal prefrontal contribution to creativity: a meta-analysis of functional imaging data. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 7, 465. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00465

[8] Mably, A. J., & Colgin, L. L. (2018). Gamma oscillations in cognitive disorders. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 52, pp.182-187. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2018.07.009