Who Are You?

When monks and nuns adopt the religious life they change their name. I believe this is primarily to detach them from their old worldly persona and reorient them to their new higher life in which they are no longer supposed to be centred on themselves. They are making a complete break with the past. Of course, there is no reason why they should not then become attached to their new name and identity which simply replaces the old outwardly while the same psychological structures remain in place within, but the purpose is to provide them with a platform or focus for a new mode of being.

However there is another reason why everyone should try to dissociate themselves from complete identification with themselves as they appear to be in this particular time and place. From you as who you now are with the particular experiences and genetic inheritance that you currently have.  Quite simply this is not who you really are. That is just who you seem to be in this earthly life. Your real self is a spiritual being that extends way beyond the earthly manifestation of it.

For example the person known as William Wildblood, born in 1955 in London of mixed English, Irish and Scottish ancestry, is just the tip of an iceberg. One part of him identifies strongly with this person but there is also a part that feels he is the present face of something more. Not in the sense of a sub-conscious lurking below the surface but the exact opposite. Something that transcends his current personality and is altogether a bigger thing which is using the outer persona to express itself through for a particular purpose, presumably a learning purpose.  This William Wildblood person is him, of course. It is not a question of a split personality or any kind of psychological problem or difficulty of integration. It is who and what he is in the everyday sense. But it is not the whole of him. It is an aspect, presently operating in the physical world, very much to the forefront most of the time but not the totality of what he is. And it's the same for everyone though possibly there are degrees of this, meaning that if we call these two things the personality and the soul there are degrees to which an individual has developed the latter.

What I call here the personality is the physical, emotional and mental structure (with input from higher levels or else it could not be sustained) which is formed from the earthly parents though it also has its own quality, derived from its spiritual progenitor which is the soul. The soul is the spiritual being we truly are. It is the source of our individuality and contains within it our connection to God. It is rarely known during our incarnation on this earth but may speak to us through the voice of intuition or conscience and possibly in other ways too. Whether it is fully conscious on higher planes during our lifetime or in a  kind of spiritual sleep while its 'projection' down here lives out its earthly life I don't know. But one thing I do know which is that it is more aware of the true nature of things than we are. I know this because a Master told me on one occasion that 'the greater part of you remains with us and I can assure you that you wish this training to take place however difficult it may sometimes seem'.

Do you not feel that you too have a 'greater part of you'? That the being you are in this world has something more behind it? I would imagine all human beings have a soul at different stages of development though there are some teachings that say some people already do have this spiritual component while others have the task of constructing it during this life. God may work in different ways and that might explain the very different attitudes people have towards the idea of a pre-existing soul but this does not alter the fact that our task is the same, to develop  a deeper awareness of God and walk in his light rather than our own. 

This is what awakening entails, spiritually speaking. It is awakening to the reality of the soul which is the point at which we can know God.