Choice

The center of the evolutionary process is choice. It is the engine of our evolution. Each choice that you make is a choice of intention. You may choose to remain silent in a particular situation, for example, and that action may serve the intention of penalizing, sharing compassion, extracting vengeance, showing patience, or loving. You may choose to speak forcefully, and that action may serve any of the same intentions. What you choose, with each action and each thought, is an intention, a quality of consciousness that you bring to your action or your thought.
The splintered personality has several, or many, aspects. One aspect may be loving and patient, another may be vindictive, another charitable and another selfish. Each of these aspects has its own values and goals. If you are not conscious of all of the different parts of yourself, the part of yourself that is the strongest will win out over the other parts. Its intention will be the one that the personality uses to create its reality. The charitable part of you, for example, may want to see the burglar that was caught in your house given another chance, but if the vindictive part of you is stronger, you will, perhaps with mixed feelings, press for his or her arrest.
You cannot choose your intentions consciously until you become conscious of each of the different aspects of yourself. If you are not conscious of each part of yourself, you will have the experience of wanting to say, or to intend, one thing, and finding yourself saying or intending something else. You will want your life to move in one direction, and find that it is moving in another. You will desire to release a painful pattern from your experience, and see it reappear yet again.
It is not easy for a splintered personality to become whole because only some parts of a splintered personality seek wholeness. The other parts, because they are not as responsible, or caring, or compassionate as the parts that seek wholeness, pull the other way. They seek to create what satisfies them, what they have become accustomed to. These parts of the personality are often strong and well established. The splintered personality must always choose between opposing parts of itself. This is the backbone situation of our evolution. This is the foundational situation-the point of choice.
The choice of intention is also the choice of karmic path. If you speak or act from anger, for example, you create the karma of anger. If you speak or act with compassion, you create the karma of compassion, and a different path opens before you. This happens whether you are aware of the different parts of yourself or not, whether even you are aware of the choices that you make at each moment. Unconscious evolution through the density of physical matter, through the experiences that are created unconsciously by unconscious intentions, has been the way of our species to now. This is the unconscious road to authentic empowerment.
Conscious evolution through responsible choice is the accelerated way of evolution of the multisensory personality, and the five-sensory personality that is becoming multisensory. Responsible choice is the conscious road to authentic empowerment.
What is responsible choice?
As you follow your feelings, you become aware of the different parts of yourself, and the different things that they want. You cannot have all of them at once because many of them conflict. The part of you that wants more money and a bigger house conflicts with the part of you that suffers with the poor and hungry. The part of you that reaches out with compassion toward the beauty in others conflicts with the part of you that wants to use others for your own benefit or gratification. When you satisfy one part of yourself, the needs of another go unsatisfied. The fulfillment of one part of you creates anguish in another, or others, and you are torn.
Just as the experimenter in quantum physics cannot produce the experience of waves from physical light and the experience of particles from physical light at the same time, and must choose which experience he or she will create, so you, also, as you shape nonphysical Light must choose which experience you will create.
As you become conscious of the different parts of your personality, you become able to experience consciously the forces within you that compete for expression, that lay claim to the single intention that will be yours at each moment, that will shape your reality. When you enter these dynamics consciously, you create for yourself the ability to choose consciously among the forces within you, to choose where and how you will focus your energy.
The choice not to choose is the choice to remain unconscious and, therefore, to wield power irresponsibly. Awareness of the splintered personality and of its need for integration brings with it the need for conscious choice. Each decision requires that you choose which parts of yourself you want to cultivate, and which parts you want to release.
A responsible choice is a choice that takes into account the consequences of each of your choices. In order to make a responsible choice you must ask yourself, for each choice that you are considering, "What will this produce? Do I really want to create that? Am I ready to accept all of the consequences of this choice?" Project yourself into the probable future that will unfold with each choice that you are considering. Do this not with the energy of intention, but simply to test the water, to get the feel for what you are considering creating. See how you feel. Ask yourself, "Is this what I really want?" and then decide. When you take the consequences of your choice into your decision, and when you choose to remain conscious, that is a responsible choice.
Only through responsible choice can you choose consciously to cultivate and nourish the needs of your soul, and to challenge and release the wants of your personality. This is the choice of clarity and wisdom, the choice of conscious transformation. It is the choice of the higher frequency energy currents of love, forgiveness and compassion. It is the choice to follow the voice of your higher self, your soul. It is the decision to open yourself to the guidance and assistance of your guides and Teachers. It is the path that leads consciously to authentic power.
How does this happen?
You may be aware that deceiving another person is not in alignment with your soul, but decide to do that anyway in order to gain a profit, or save a relationship that you are not yet ready to lose. You may know that the path of compassion is to share your thoughts and actions, and yet decide not to share them because you think that would cost you money, or security. When you choose the energy of your soul-when you choose to create with the intentions of love, forgiveness, humbleness and clarity-you gain power. When you choose to learn through wisdom, you gain power. When you choose to create with the energy of your personality, with anger, jealousy or fear when you choose to learn through fear and doubt-you lose power. You gain or lose power, therefore, according to the choices that you make.
The personality is interested in itself. It likes thrills, so to speak. It is not necessarily responsible nor caring nor loving. The soul is the energy of Universal love, wisdom and compassion. It creates with these energies. The personality understands power as external; it perceives in terms of competition, threats, and gains and losses that are measured against those of others. When you align yourself with your personality, you give power to the realm of the five senses, to external circumstances and objects. You disempower yourself. As you grow aware of your spiritual self and origin, your immortal-ness, and you choose and live according to that first, and the physical second, you close the gap that exists between the personality and the soul. You begin to experience authentic power.
When you interact in terms of the perceptions of your personality, in terms of your five senses, there is an illusion that you do not see. A disagreement between two friends, for example, is not so much a disagreement as aspects of each surfacing in order to be healed. If they were not souls in agreement, they would not be together at all. If a father longs to be at the birth of his son, for example, but circumstances take him elsewhere, the perception that he is elsewhere is an illusion. He is with his son. As the personality becomes whole and empowered, it becomes content to let the illusion play.
This is the creation of the dynamic of the soul whereby, no matter what situation it is in, it creates the best of all worlds from the power that it draws to the situation. From the perception of the personality, it is not possible to see clearly those human beings who, from the outside, appear to be making foolish decisions, or to be unaware of their environment, when in truth they are simply drinking from the finest nectar of their environment and are totally content to let the illusion play.
The splintered personality is not content. The contentment that it feels in one moment is replaced by anger or fear or envy in the next moment as conflicting aspects of itself struggle with each other. Your responses to the struggles between the conflicting aspects of yourself determine the way that you will evolve, consciously or unconsciously, through the experience of negative karma or positive, through fear and doubt or through wisdom. Your struggles themselves do not create karma or determine the way that you will evolve, only your responses to them.
If your struggle with the conflicting parts of yourself is conscious, you are able to choose consciously the response that will create the karma that you desire. You will be able to bring to bear upon your decision an awareness of what lies behind each choice, and the consequences of each choice, and choose accordingly. When you enter into your decision-making dynamic consciously, you insert your will consciously into the creative cycle through which your soul evolves, and you enter consciously into your own evolution.
This requires effort, but is it really more difficult than living through the consequences that follow a decision to act in anger, or selfishness, or fear when you know that with each decision to act without compassion you yourself will experience the discord, or fear, or anguish that you create in another? Is it not worth the effort to project yourself ahead into the probable consequences of each of your actions, at each point of choice, and see how you will feel in each instance, how comfortable you will be with each of the consequences, if doing that will allow you to harvest love, compassion and authentic power?
The effort that you apply to each decision to align yourself with your soul is rewarded many times. The part of yourself that reaches toward Light may not be the strongest part of you at the moment that you choose to journey toward authentic power consciously, at the moment that you choose the vertical path, but it is the part that the Universe backs.
When it becomes necessary, for example, for the physical, emotional body of a person to heal, a dramatic shift in nutrition is often required wherein a person must release every one of his or her eating habits and take on the habits of eating certain foods that are much higher in vibration. Ninety percent of the person's personality may not want to do that, but the ten percent that is choosing that path for the sake of health and wholeness has more power ultimately than the ninety percent that is fighting to remain where it is and have its own way, because the Universe backs that ten percent and not the ninety percent.
Think in terms of what it means to make decisions and try to cause the rest of you to fall into alignment with them, of responsible choice, and as you move into the healing of who you are and the conscious journey toward what it is you want, recognize that the Universe backs the part of you that is of clearest intention.
You are constantly receiving guidance and assistance from your guides and Teachers, and from the Universe itself. When you choose consciously to move toward the energy of your soul, you invite that guidance. When you ask the Universe to bless you in your effort to align yourself with your soul, you open a passageway between yourself and your guides and Teachers. You assist their efforts to assist you. You invoke the power of the nonphysical world. That is what a blessing is: the opening of a passageway between you and nonphysical guidance.
A personality that is conscious of its splintered-ness, and struggles consciously to become whole, does not need to create negative karma in order to evolve, in order to learn to create responsibility, in order to acquire authentic power. When you struggle consciously with a choice between the wants of your personality and the needs of your soul, you enter a dynamic through which you are enabled to evolve without creating negative karma. That is the dynamic of temptation.
What is temptation?
Temptation is the Universe's compassionate way of allowing you to run through what would be a harmful negative karmic dynamic if you were to allow it to become physically manifest. It is the energy through which your soul is given the gracious opportunity to have a dry run at a life lesson, at a situation that, if you can see clearly, can be removed and healed within the confines of your private world of energy and not spill into a larger energy field of other souls. Temptation is a dress rehearsal for a karmic experience of negativity.
The entire dynamic of temptation is the compassionate way of allowing you to see your potential pitfalls, and cleanse yourself before you can affect the lives of others. It is a form of decoy in which the negativity is compassionately drawn from you, if you can see that before you create karma. As you respond to the decoy, you cleanse yourself by becoming aware and not having to actually live through the experience. You cleanse yourself without creating karma and interaction with other souls. How exquisite is temptation. It is the magnet which draws your awareness to that which would create negative karma if it were allowed to remain unconscious.
In other words, temptation is a thought form that is designed to draw possible negativity from the human energy system without harming others. The soul understands that. Left to its own device it would operate completely within the human energy system, without spilling over and contaminating the collective conscious.
Temptations are not traps. Each temptation is an opportunity through which the soul is able to learn without creating karma, to evolve directly through conscious choice. The dynamic of temptation is the energy of what might be thought of as the challenging dynamic of the human experience, as the Luciferic principle. It serves the purpose of assisting the evolution of power.
Lucifer means "Light bringer." Temptation, the Luciferic principle, is that dynamic through which each soul is graciously offered the opportunity to challenge those parts of itself that resists Light. The Luciferic energy is represented in the Garden of Eden story by a snake, by the idea of a presence other than human that could tempt, but, literally, could not have dominion over the human being. The Luciferic energy tempts you, tempts the level of human being that is mortal, that is five-sensory, but the snake cannot destroy the soul. It can merely threaten that part of you that becomes too linked to the physical. The snake is of the Earth. When you are too close to the Earth, when you find yourself honoring the gods of the Earth, and make Earth your god and master, then so, too, you shall be bitten.
The Light-bringing energy, the Luciferic energy, that tempted the person Jesus of Nazareth who became the Christ, and that tempted the person Siddhartha Gautama who became the Buddha, is the same energy that tempts you. It tempts the accountant to steal, the student to cheat, the spouse to adultery, the human being to external power. It opposes the Light of your immortal soul to the physical light of your personality. It sets before you the vertical path and the horizontal path. What is the nature of transformation? It is the compassionate way of temptation.
Temptation is the gracious way of introducing each soul to his or her power. When you are seduced or threatened by external circumstances, you lose power. They gain power over you. With each choice that you make to align yourself with the energy of your soul, you empower yourself. This is how authentic power is acquired. It is built up step by step, choice by choice. It cannot be meditated or prayed into being. It must be earned.
When you choose to release anger, for example, you create an energy template around which your experiences will form. This energy pattern will draw to the surface the anger within you in order that you can release it. When you choose to challenge and to release a negative aspect of yourself, that aspect comes to the foreground. Everything starts to serve that purpose. Your dreams show you the archetypical dynamics of your anger. You find yourself continually in situations that generate anger within you. Your life appears to be distorted around anger, because that is the aspect of yourself that you have chosen to challenge, and the Universe has responded to your choice with compassion.
When you consciously invoke growing, consciously invoke wisdom, you consciously invoke the parts of yourself that are not whole to come into the foreground of your life. With each recurrence of anger, or jealousy, or fear, you are given the choice to challenge it, or to give into it. Each time you challenge it, it loses power and you gain power. Each time you are tempted to become angry, or jealous, or fearful, and you challenge that feeling, you empower yourself. There would be no accumulation of strength inside if the choices that you make did not require discipline and intention.
If you decide that you cannot beat a temptation, what you are really doing is giving yourself permission to be irresponsible. The desires and impulses that you feel that you cannot resist, that you lack the power to overcome, are your addictions. Addictions are the wants of the parts of your personality that are very strong and resistant to the energy of your soul. They are those aspects of your personality, of your soul incarnate, that are most in need of healing. They are your greatest inadequacies.
Your addiction may be to food, or drugs, or anger, or sex. You may have more than one addiction. In each instance, you cannot release the addiction until you understand the dynamic that underlies it. Beneath every addiction is the perception of power as external, as the ability to control and use the environment or others. Beneath every addiction is an issue of power.
The journey to the soul begins with understanding that we are drawn automatically as a species to come to terms with power. Each human being is experiencing the causes and effects of his or her choices, his or her desires to fill in the empty, powerless places within him or her. This dynamic can be described in terms of an insecure humanity, but that is just the obvious. The mechanism at work is the journey toward genuine, authentic empowerment.
This is why each human being struggles so deeply with power: the lack of it, the acquisition of it, what it is really, how one should have it. Underlying every crisis, emotional, spiritual, physical and psychological, is the issue of power. Depending upon the lens that you wear to interpret your crisis, you will either step closer to your soul or closer to the Earth.
The journey to wholeness requires that you look honestly, openly and with courage into yourself, into the dynamics that lie behind what you feel, what you perceive, what you value, and how you act. It is a journey through your defenses and beyond so that you can experience consciously the nature of your personality, face what it has produced in your life, and choose to change that.