On The Stage Of Life, The Learning Process Is About Letting Go Of One Identity After Another

Fulfilling Our Soul Contracts

Every time we reincarnate in physical form we make new soul contracts with souls whom we have met during previous lifetimes, or still need to meet, so that together we can become aware of our God Selves and merge the higher dimensional realities of Heaven with the lower dimensional realities of Earth. Prior to each new incarnation, every soul is aware of the requirements, conditions, and circumstances that he/she needs to manifest during the coming Earth years to bring about this integration of perception or transformation of consciousness.

We can liken this to a movie. There may be 30 actors involved in a particular production. They all have consented to play a certain role, and to seal their agreement they have signed a contract. Each of them learns all about the character they have agreed to play and every scene of interaction with others, and the actors draw out different aspects of these personalities. The movie script may include a murderer, a murder victim, a detective, a judge, etc. One actor plays the villain, another one plays the victim, a third imitates the role of a detective, and so on. Although the audience watching the film sees great injustice done, there is neither a real victimizer nor a real victim. All the actors simply fulfill their contract, which entails that they act out their respective roles to make this movie possible. Once the shooting of the movie is completed, the actors detach themselves from these roles and get on with their lives, moving on to other roles in other productions. Nobody blames them or sympathizes with them for having played these characters; instead, they might even receive an award for best actor.

Lose Your Self-Identity But Gain A New Awareness

On the Stage of Life, things are not much different. Life’s learning process is about letting go of one identity after another, similar to peeling off the different layers of an onion. Eventually, there comes a point when you can no longer identify with anything anymore.

What remains is you, the ‘I AM.’ We go through the various stages of life i.e. infancy, youth, adulthood and old age, not only in this life but in lifetime after lifetime and at each stage in each lifetime we take on various roles, such as being a toddler, a playmate, a student, a doctor, a father/mother, an athlete, a friend, a thief, a patient, a retiree, etc. Playing these various roles, however, is not who I am, it only is what I identify with. My identity of being a doctor would go through a drastic change if I suddenly decided to become a lawyer or a priest. Each new identity serves a particular purpose, helping me to learn and master life’s lessons and develop more and more trust in myself. Yet none of these can serve as my ultimate, never-changing self-identity.

When we use such words as I am wealthy, I am poor, I am worthy, I don’t like myself, I am angry, I am happy, I am a failure, etc., we merely refer to the identities that our ego creates in order to know or define itself at that moment. For the ego to be comfortable and feel safe, for example, while under threat, it may refer to being wealthy, powerful, and strong as its preferable identities. If the ego receives a lot of love, praise and good intentions from others it may see itself as a worthy and generous human being. An ego deprived of love and achievement, on the other hand, is likely to see itself as unworthy and a failure. The movie of life is about creating and playing all possible roles of our complex natures.

Although none of the roles we play has anything to do with our true identity, we must play them so well that we get lost in them, just like a good actor who becomes one with the character he/she tries to imitate or personify. Once we have explored each role sufficiently we are compelled to let it go again. This causes pain because the ego is so used to or attached to its identity. It can really throw the ego to pieces when at one moment it is used to being a wife and at the next moment, it is a widow. The pain itself, however, can become the motivating force to assume another role, which furthers the growth towards completion and full self-identity even more.

It is important for human life to experience the full range of duality, all the opposites of life, and it is of lesser or no importance whether they are painted in a positive or negative light. For example, even if we are rich we may, in fact, feel and act as if we are very poor if our belief is that we are not making enough money or fear that, at any moment, we may lose everything. Conversely, many poor people feel fortunate and rich just making enough money to feed the family and have nothing left to save. Every situation in life brings out a different, mostly opposite, value in us, and step-by-step we learn everything about mastery in this physical world.

After having duly exercised our ability to live through duality and its challenges, we begin to develop a new awareness, the awareness of ‘I AM,’ without the need of being something or someone else. Torn no more between right and wrong or good and bad, we find a middle point of balance where we are neither one nor the other. There are no more roles to be played, no more identities to be assumed. We can then ascend to the throne of selfhood where the soul no longer identifies with the ego awareness of the body but with the consciousness of its Higher Self. There is now only oneness and a complete circle of the Self, which contains all: the ego, the body and the Higher Self. There is nothing else needed in order to know oneself but being. The ‘I AM’ is the final destination, the ultimate home.

At this stage of consciousness development, the reference to the dualistic aspects of life, such as love and fear, joy and pain, positive and negative, loses all relevance. It vanishes altogether. We also begin to realize that the whole journey of life has been an illusion and that we never came home because we never left home. I am today the same ‘I AM’ I have always been and will always be. There is no self-realization. Since the Self was never lost, it cannot be found. All that happens in the journey of life is the gradual letting go of trying to find our identity. A person who searches for their glasses, not knowing they are already wearing them, will eventually discover that they don’t need to look for them in order to see properly. They are already equipped with the right tools of sight. The journey of self-discovery ends when we realize that we don’t need to do or accomplish anything in order to be who we truly are.

The cycle of life may continue but having stepped into the field of oneness of duality we are free to once again assume the various roles of life, with the main difference that we are centered in the oneness of Self. Suddenly, the extreme ends of dualism, such as right and wrong, dark and light, up and down, etc., make perfect sense and can no longer affect us in any way.

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This is an excerpt from my book LIFTING THE VEIL OF DUALITY