Perhaps spiritual awakening isn’t so much about learning something entirely new, but about remembering something the soul already knows.
I recently watched an interview on YouTube (see the link at bottom of blog) between Dr Miles Neale and Dr Robert Gilbert in which Dr Gilbert made a statement that really caught my attention.
“In the beginning was the memory.”
He went on to explain that, on a practical level, as a person begins to wake up and become spiritually aware in a particular lifetime, one of the first things that has to happen is to remember:
Who am I?
Why am I here?
What did I incarnate to do in this present lifetime?
It struck me how closely this speaks to the foundation of my own work, The Soul’s Journey – Remember Who You Are.
The idea that memory precedes awakening raises some interesting questions. But before we can begin to remember who we are, we need to ask a more fundamental one.
Where was I before I was born?
We spend a great deal of time thinking about what happens when we die, but how often do we stop to consider where we were before we arrived here? Did we simply begin to exist when we were born? Or were we already something, somewhere, before taking on this physical body and beginning this particular lifetime?
I believe and have experienced through my own journey and the sessions with my clients that we are souls having a human experience and our existence doesn’t begin with the birth of our physical bodies, nor does it end when those bodies die.
And this brings me to another question I often ask people:
Who or what is looking out through your eyes?
Who or what is reading these words?
Who or what is beating your heart, operating your mind and living through your body?
We identify ourselves by our names, our personalities, our relationships and our experiences. We become accustomed to seeing ourselves as the person we have grown into during this lifetime.
But is that all we are?
What is the conscious presence experiencing life through this physical body? And where did that presence come from?
These are not simply philosophical questions for me. They have shaped my own spiritual journey and my understanding of the soul.
I also know, from my own experience, that souls can choose their parents before conception.
I remember a time when I was thinking about having another child. During this time, I experienced something that left me in no doubt that we are a living being before we enter our physical body and a strong understanding that a soul had chosen me to be their mother before they were conceived.
“I was visited by a soul of a child who told me they wanted to come and live in my house and they would be ever so good.”
It was a very real experience, leaving me in no doubt that the relationship between a parent and child begins long before pregnancy and physical birth.
If we consider that possibility, it opens up an entirely different perspective on our arrival into this world. We don’t simply arrive here and begin our lives. There is a much greater journey already underway. We have made choices, formed relationships and established connections before we ever take our first breath.
We choose our path in. Time, place, people, gender and the experiences we want to have for our soul’s growth and enlightenment.
So could it be that when we begin to awaken spiritually, we are not discovering something entirely new? We are remembering who we already are: a soul having a human experience, who has lived before in other guises.
This is where the journey of remembering begins. Not necessarily with all the answers, or with a sudden recollection of everything that came before, but with a willingness to question what we have always assumed about ourselves and our existence.
Who am I beyond this body?
Why did I choose to come here?
What have I forgotten about myself?
Spiritual awakening is, in part, the process of bringing that forgotten knowledge back into our conscious awareness. It is something I wrote about in 2014:
“Our Soul’s Journey is to come here and forget.
To live having forgotten,
To begin to remember,
Then live through the remembering.”
© Olwynne Cade 2014
This is at the heart of The Soul’s Journey. It is an invitation to look beyond the identity we have created in this lifetime and begin exploring the greater nature of who we are.
Because before we can understand why we are here, we first need to remember that we were something before we arrived.
The journey isn’t about becoming someone else. It is about remembering who you have always been.
Remember Who You Are.
Go well, with love and gratitude.
Olwynne.
YouTube link for interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkT06rlNEO8&t=163s