Guy Spiro: Gary it has been a little over two years since we last talked. What’s new?

Gary Zukav: Quite a bit. We have expanded our three year Authentic Power Program, which is sponsored by the Seat of the Soul Institute and it has grown. Quite a few people desired to stay in the program after the three years. So we created the Expanded Support Program, and now those people are learning how to create authentic power and to support other people in creating authentic power.

     We have a new website, www.seatofthesoul.com. We make it as supportive as we can and it has a free online course. It has spiritual partnership guidelines you can print out as well as articles and interviews. Within a few months, it will have a blog and some other supportive activities. Oh, and I published a book called Soul to Soul that came out in October. The paperback will be coming out soon.

     Linda Francis, my spiritual partner, and I are starting to go out again. We took a break from giving workshops and events, but now we’re doing it again. Our coming to Chicago is a part of that and we have events all over the country on Spiritual Partnership, Living Courageously, Scientist of the Soul. I invite all of your readers, Guy, to visit the website and if they are drawn, to come and meet us at an event.

GS: You have several books out now.

GZ: Every book that I write is an experiment. The Dancing Wu Li Masters was on quantum physics. The Seat of the Soul is the fundamental book for all of the things that I do now. Then came The Mind of the Soul about emotional awareness. It’s a how-to book and really goes into how to create emotional awareness that is described in The Seat of the Soul. The Mind of the Soul: Responsible Choice goes into depth on how to choose responsibly, which is also described in The Seat of the Soul. And then I wrote Soul Stories, which is again about authentic power.

     Soul to Soul, I think, is easy to read and was wonderful to write. It has short “chapterettes,” maybe two or three pages long. At the end, I answer around a hundred of the most frequent questions from over the years. It is divided into two subjects. The first part is called Soul Subjects and the second part is called Soul Questions.

GS: Please talk a little about Authentic Power

GZ: Everything is about authentic power, which is the alignment of the personality with the soul. We are in the midst of an unprecedented and immense transformation of the human soul. It has no antecedent other than the genesis of humanity, and this transformation is happening very fast from an evolutionary point of view. Within a few generations, it is going to affect everyone. This transformation is one of awareness. We are expanding beyond the limitations of the five senses—what can be heard, tasted, smelled, touched and seen. Those five senses together form a single system that is designed to detect physical reality. Now we’re acquiring another sensory system. We are becoming multi-sensory. This sensory system provides us data that the five senses don’t detect. It detects compassion, wisdom, intelligence, that is real. As we become multi-sensory, we become aware of ourselves as more than we previously thought. We become aware of ourselves as souls as well bodies. We become aware, each in our own way, that we have an immortal component, a part of ourselves that existed before we were born and will continue to exist after we die.

GS: I have often said that we are at a phase in human evolution where we are morphing into another level of humanity, no longer homo sapiens, but homo luminoso.

GZ: That’s a good way of putting it. Our new level of awareness is allowing us to see ourselves and experience ourselves as part of larger tapestry of life. I’ve gone into much detail about the transformation in consciousness because I would like to make clear that, although it is immense, this transformation of consciousness will not make a single individual kinder, or more gentle or more wise or more patient or caring or loving.

GS: That’s still up to the individual.

GZ: Precisely, precisely. That is the point. This transformation of consciousness makes us more aware and it brings a new potential, the potential of a life of meaning and fulfillment and richness and joy. A life that is free of fear. A life that is full of love. But we have to create it. We don’t have to make ourselves multi-sensory. We do not have to create multi-sensory perception. That is being given to us. But no one can align your personality with your soul except you. No one can create a life of meaning and a richness and fullness and love except you. That is now the spiritual path.

     Our old understanding of power, as five-sensory beings, has been the ability to manipulate and control. That is how we evolved for millennia. Now we are in new territory. The pursuit of external power has now become counter productive. It produces only violence and destruction. What used to be good medicine is now poison. Our new evolutionary path is the creation of authentic power. In other words, five-sensory humanity evolved by surviving. Multi-sensory humanity evolves by growing spiritually.

GS: Would you use the terms “soul” and “higher self” interchangeably?

GZ: No, your soul is your essence. It is what you are. Your soul chose to calibrate a portion of itself to the experience of physicalness, to experiences in the domain of time and space and matter and duality for the purpose of healing parts of itself. Your higher self is not the fullness of your soul. Your higher self is the personality to soul communication. It is the most evolved, developed, expansive, aware, enlightened state that you can create while you are in earth school, while you have a personality. In the East, the experience of being your higher self would be called enlightenment. When you die, which means when you return home to non-physical reality, you return to the fullness of your soul.

GS: I think it is important what you said earlier, what is happening is not going to make people better. That it is still going to be an individual effort.

GZ: Yes, if you are angry now and anger erupts through your relationships, in your interactions, so will your life unfold as you become multi-sensory. If you are callous and brutal and you care not for others, as you become multi-sensory, you will continue to be callous and brutal. Multi-sensory perception gives you new awareness. It provides new potential, but you must still transform yourself. That is what authentic power is about. It requires that you step into your life with the awareness that you develop, and transform yourself with the power of your own will.

GS: Talk a little bit about what you are offering in your new book on meditation.

GZ: The new book is Soul to Soul Meditations: Daily Reflections on Spiritual Growth. It is taken from the larger book, Soul to Soul: Communications from the Heart that was published in October, 2007.

GS: Well then, talk about both books.

GZ: As you begin to understand authentic power, the alignment of your personality with your soul, your entire life becomes a meditation. As we become multi-sensory, we are becoming able to distinguish different currents of energy within us, and as we develop the ability to experience them, we see that following or acting on some of them creates destructive and painful consequences. We also begin to see that following or acting on others of them creates constructive and blissful, joyful consequences. As we begin to make this distinction, we can then begin to choose which currents of energy we will follow and which we will not.

     Generically, we can say that some of these currents of energy belong in the category of fear and the other currents of energy belong in the category of love. As we act on those currents of energy that belong in the category of fear, we create painful consequences for ourselves. We give them names on the emotional or psychological level, such as anger, jealousy, vengefulness, feelings of superiority, feelings of inferiority, and when you act on anger and superiority and jealousy and all of the other experiences of fear, you create painful consequences for yourself. The currents of energy that are in the generic category of love we experience as gratitude, contentment, appreciation, care, patience. As we act and follow those currents of energy, we create constructive, beautiful consequences.

     The creation of authentic power requires you to challenge and heal the frightened parts of your personality, the parts that are angry and jealous and vengeful and so on and to change them. You do that by experiencing them fully, experiencing them in terms of physical sensations in your body. For example, when you are angry, if you stop in the moment and put your attention in your chest area, you will find physical sensations in your chest area that could be very painful. If you put your attention into your solar plexus area, you will find the same thing. You put it into your throat area, the same thing.

     Our vernacular expresses this quite clearly. We say we have a heart ache. A heart ache is real. It is very painful. It is excruciating. We say we have butterflies in our stomach when we think we can’t do something that we know we need to do. If we have difficulty expressing ourselves, we say, “I get choked up.” This energy center in the throat area has to do with expression. The energy center in the chest area has to do with heart, with relationship, with relations. The energy center in the solar plexus area has to do with our ability to accomplish what we intend to accomplish and need to accomplish in the world.

     In the East, these energy centers are called chakras. Anyone who has studied the chakra system would recognize this immediately. I’m using the term energy centers because Sanskrit is not a language that I speak and it is more accurate from our point of view. As you process energy in each of these energy centers, which is a continuum, ongoing dynamic, you process that energy in either fear and doubt or love and trust. Whenever you process it in fear and doubt, you create painful physical sensations in the vicinity of that energy center. That’s another way of saying what I have just said in a different context. The frightened parts of your personality are painful when they become active, so you can know when they become active by paying attention to the physical sensations in your body. That’s the emotional awareness. A book that I coauthored with Linda Francis, The Heart of the Soul: Emotional Awareness, is specifically about developing this awareness. Your body will not lie. You may think that you are not jealous for example or angry, but once you develop your emotional awareness, you will find out that a little part of your personality is active.

GS: Whether you think you want it to be or not.

GZ: Correct, and when it is, you can challenge it by feeling it fully and then deciding to choose differently from what you have habitually chosen. In other words, you can make a constructive choice. It is a choice of intention that is love rather than a choice of an intention that comes from fear. As you do this again and again and again, the frightened parts of your personality lose their power over you and eventually their power disintegrates. As that happens, the loving parts of your personality become freer and freer to express themselves in your words and your actions and your perceptions and your thoughts and creations. That is authentic power.

GS: Can you describe the meditative practice that you are presenting in the work?

GZ: This book, Soul to Soul, is not on meditation; it’s a communication from the heart. The meditation book is 365 thoughts that you can look at if you want, one a day, to help you reflect on your own spiritual development. But the meditation that I am talking about is what I have just described. First of all comes the commitment to grow spiritually. That means putting an end to being controlled by your anger or your need to shop or gamble or have sex or smoke or use drugs. It means to free yourself from your workaholism or perfectionism or obsessive thoughts or fault finding or judgment and criticism or thinking that someone else is going to be the answer to your problems. It’s the decision, the commitment, to free to you from the pain of your anger and jealousy and despair and mania and all the experiences of fear. It is the creation of emotional awareness, the ability to scan your energy centers and experience the physical sensations that are present at any moment. It is the ability to choose responsibly. A responsible choice is a choice that creates consequences for which you are willing to assume responsibility. The choice of intention is the fundamental creating choice.

GS: Is there a process that you recommend when someone sits down to meditate?

GZ: First of all, you don’t need to sit down to meditate.

GS: I agree with that completely.

GZ: I do meditate sitting in the mornings and often in the evening for a period of time because I like it, but I don’t stop meditating when I get up. I don’t stop meditating at any time as long as I remember. It is the process that I am developing within myself continually. I am looking at my interactions. Every interaction that you have with someone else creates emotions in you and those emotions are informative. They inform you of whether a frightened part of your personality is present or a loving part. If a frightened part is present, then creating authentic power requires you to experience it and to choose differently. Each choice is a practice of creating responsibly. You can also consult your intuition and do that continually if you choose. All of this, the creation of authentic power, the alignment of your personality with your soul, the development through your own effort of a life that is full, rich, meaningful, fulfilling and joyful is the creation of authentic power. It is something that you can do only for yourself. If you try to do it for someone else, then you are pursuing external power. You try to change someone else so that you will feel better. Nothing that you experience is not part of the meditation.

GS: What will you be do at the conference here in Chicago?

GZ: I’ll be giving two talks, one on each of the weekend days. Then Linda and I will be giving an event on Monday. That event, we call Living Courageously because that is exactly what I have been talking about; to become aware in your life requires courage. I used to be in the army. I was a Green Beret. I thought that it took a lot of courage to parachute, to go on night patrols, to rappel out of helicopters, but it takes more courage to experience your own fears. I didn’t realize at the time that I was so macho because I was terrified of not living up to my own expectations. I was terrified of not living up to the expectations of others and I was frightened of being ridiculed. I was that fear that I didn’t recognize, that drove me into the army, into the Special Forces and took me all the way to Viet Nam. I wanted, I needed, to feel worthy and admirable. I didn’t think of it in these terms, but I needed to be loved and I didn’t see myself as lovable.

     This is not unique to me. This is the pain of powerlessness that lies at the core of human experience. It is the feeling of being inadequate or flawed. It is the feeling of being ugly or intrinsically defective. It is wanting to belong and not belonging. It is wanting to be loved and feeling unlovable and it is one of wanting to love and feeling that you are not capable of loving. These are the feelings of powerlessness and they are excruciating. In the past, to escape or to avoid the experience of these pains, we have reached outward to change things around us. This the pursuit of external power. Now that we are in this new terrain of multi-sensory perception, the pain of powerlessness is still there, but the big difference is how we respond to it. Instead of trying to change others to make us feel better or safer, we now turn our attention around 180 degrees. Instead of looking out at what causes pain or anger or jealousy, we look inward to find the internal sources and pull those sources by the root. That is the creation of authentic power and that is what transforms your life into an ongoing meditation, every bit of it.

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Living Courageously: Using Your Experiences to Grow Spiritually is presented by Gary Zukav and Linda Francis in connection with Mishka Productions’ Celebrate Your Life conference. Two 90-minute presentations by Gary on May 31st and June 1st, and a one day event with Gary and Linda on June 2nd at The Westin Lombard Yorktown Center. For more information and registration, call Mishka at 877-300-7352 or click on www.CelebrateYourLife.org.

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