Book Summaries

Book Summary: The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav.

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“When the personality comes fully to serve the energy of its soul, that is authentic empowerment.”

American Media personality Oprah Winfrey considers “The Seat of the Soul” as one of the most impactful books she has ever read. Oprah’s Favourite Insight from reading the book:

“When the personality comes fully to serve the energy of its soul, that is authentic empowerment.”

Oprah’s Living Creed from the book:

“Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect. If we participate in the cause, it is not possible for us not to participate in the effect. In this most profound way we are held responsible for our every action, thought, and feeling, which is to say, for our every intention.”

Cause and Effect

“If your intention is to do what other people want, they will keep asking you to do exactly that. That was an aha moment! When I changed my intention to be about doing what I wanted, what I felt was worthy of my time, the effect automatically changed.”

My Favourite Take-aways from Reading, the seat of the soul:

Dr. Maya Angelou on Courage

Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage one cannot practice any virtue consistently. We can be kind, generous, just, courteous, and merciful sporadically, but to display those virtues, consistently, calls for an enormous display of courage. From childhood on we have been taught that the heart, the mind, and the personality, the spirit and the soul have come to life together occupying the same space and then they will go together into death.

“All creative people—which is everyone—require commitment and time and courage to grow into their insights. Inspiration is one thing. Applying it to your life is another.”

The Power of the Soul

The decisions that you make and the actions that you take upon the Earth are the means by which you evolve. At each moment you choose the intentions that will shape your experiences and those things upon which you will focus your attention. These choices affect your evolutionary process. This is so for each person. If you choose unconsciously, you evolve unconsciously. If you choose consciously, you evolve consciously.

The fearful and violent emotions that have come to characterize human existence can be experienced only by the personality. Only the personality can feel anger, fear, hatred, vengeance, sorrow, shame, regret, indifference, frustration, cynicism, and loneliness. Only the personality can judge, manipulate and exploit. Only the personality can pursue external power. The personality can also be loving, compassionate, and wise in its relations with others, but love, compassion, and wisdom do not come from the personality. They are experiences of the soul.

Your soul is that part of you that is immortal. Every person has a soul, but a personality that is limited in its perception to the five senses is not aware of its soul, and, therefore, cannot recognize the influences of its soul. As a personality becomes multisensory, its intuitions—its hunches and subtle feelings—become important to it.

It senses things about itself, other people, and the situations in which it finds itself that it cannot justify on the basis of the information that its five senses can provide. It comes to recognize intentions, and to respond to them rather than to the actions and the words that it encounters. It can recognize, for example, a warm heart beneath a harsh and angry manner, and a cold heart beneath polished and pleasing words.

When the energy of the soul is recognized, acknowledged, and valued, it begins to infuse the life of the personality. When the personality comes fully to serve the energy of its soul, that is authentic empowerment. This is the goal of the evolutionary process in which we are involved and the reason for our being. Every experience that you have and will have upon the Earth encourages the alignment of your personality with your soul. Every circumstance and situation gives you the opportunity to choose this path, to allow your soul to shine through you, to bring into the physical world through you its unending and unfathomable reverence for and love of Life.

Your soul is not a passive or a theoretical entity that occupies a space in the vicinity of your chest cavity. It is a positive, purposeful force at the core of your being. It is that part of you that understands the impersonal nature of the energy dynamics in which you are involved, that loves without restriction and accepts without judgment.

The Power of Intentions

Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect. If we participate in the cause, it is not possible for us not to participate in the effect. In this most profound way, we are held responsible for our every action, thought, and feeling, which is to say, for our every intention. We, ourselves, shall partake of the fruit of our every intention. It is, therefore, wise for us to become aware of the many intentions that inform our experience, to sort out which intentions produce which effects, and to choose our intentions according to the effects that we desire to produce.

On Karma

Every cause that has not yet produced its effect is an event that has not yet come to completion. It is an imbalance of energy that is in the process of becoming balanced. That balancing of energy does not always occur within the span of a single lifetime. The karma of your soul is created and balanced by the activities of its many personalities, including you. Often a personality experiences effects that were created by other of its soul’s personalities, and, conversely, creates energy imbalances that are not able to right themselves within its own lifetime. Therefore, without knowledge of its soul, reincarnation, and karma, it is not always possible for a personality to understand the significance or the meaning of the events of its life, or to understand the effects of its responses to them.

Of one thing we can be certain: A person that is engaging in violence is hurting deeply, because a healthy and balanced soul is incapable of harming another.

Emotional Intelligence

If we are not intimate with our emotions, we cannot perceive the dynamics that lie behind emotions, the way that these dynamics work, and the ends that they serve. Emotions are currents of energy that pass through us. Awareness of these currents is the first step in learning how our experiences come into being and why. Emotions reflect intentions. Therefore, awareness of emotions leads to awareness of intentions. Every discrepancy between a conscious intention and the emotions that accompany it points directly to a splintered aspect of the self that requires healing.

All the best in your quest to get better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.

Lifelong Learner | Entrepreneur | Digital Strategist at Reputiva LLC | Marathoner | Bibliophile -info@lanredahunsi.com | lanre.dahunsi@gmail.com

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