Skeleton and soul

in conversation with esoteric philosopher William Meader

on awakening the self and the limitlessness of love

In the vision there is a bath. The surface of the water trembles beneath the caress of a breeze that has fallen through a window you cannot see. Alone, you stand in stillness, your back to a vanity mirror and facing an ivory-tiled wall. The bath is quiet; it smells like lavender and secrets. You wait as if for permission, listening for instructions on how to ease into its depths without tormenting yourself or the water. You can’t bathe wrongly, but no one does it the same.

Once submerged, you cease to be as you have been before. Both inexplicably aware of and completely oblivious to your body. There, you transcend the worldliness of the thoughts that have anchored you to arbitrary and un- important places. In the mirror, your reflection fades; your physicality has perished. Time evaporates and nothing is known for certain, not even you.

Your soul does not awaken within like your body bathes without. In truth, nothing else compares to awakening at all. Swiss physician Paracelsus once said to be not another if you can be yourself. What is less apparent is how one charts the depths of the soul that has been, will be, and is.

Someone else who appreciates the ambiguity of knowing thyself is esoteric philosopher William Meader. Devoted to nurturing a deeper understanding of the spiritual path, the influential teacher helps seekers to make sense of the at times enigmatic relationship between body, soul, and spirit. To align with their soul’s truest creative intention in the manifestation of higher consciousness.

Kathryn Carter: Self-actualisation appears to be the flavour of the moment, and yet there still seems to be confusion surrounding some very basic underlying principles in relation to the enigmatic true self. As an esoteric philosopher, how would you define the concept of the true self?

William Meader: Well, self-actualisation is a term that I think was introduced by Abraham Maslow back in the ’40s.

Yes, it was.

And I think you’re right; when it’s used today, it’s kind of used in a lower than intended way.

I agree.

What a lot of people would call self-actualisation today is really a manifestation of an integrated personality: the ego. And that’s actually not what Abraham Maslow was saying; that’s the step before self-actualisation. Self-actualisation is ultimately the notion that you as an ego, as an individual self, have reached that point where you’re starting to transcend and let go of your preoccupation with identity, and with an understanding that you are a living cell within a larger living system. So real self-actualisation is actually a function of decentralisation, where lower self-actualisation is a function of centralisation, if you know what I mean?

That makes perfect sense to me.

Yeah, so in the esoteric philosophy, the word “self” is interesting in its own right. This is because there is self as personality and self as soul. And then beyond that, there is self as monad, which is beyond the soul. Each of them is a place of identity, but each is understood differently in terms of how they are inwardly experienced. So the lower self, the personality, defines itself by its uniqueness. On the other hand, the soul is the part of us that recognises itself as part of the underlying unity of things. That self is filled with a quality of selfless love and is increasingly interested in making a contribution beyond itself. Finally, the monad is experienced as universality—a state of self-awareness experienced by a liberated master.

That’s a very good way of putting it, thank you. Because I think there is confusion surrounding the different notions of self.

That’s right. Behind it all, though, is a very sacred principle: the principle of identity. The principle of identity is as sacred as the principle of love. You have value because you exist as a living being within creation. But how you define it is what makes it “lower” or “higher” in the sense we’re talking about.

Just to that point, in his book Theosophy, the late Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner claimed that anyone trying to understand the essential nature of the human being is first required to come to a clear under- standing of the difference between body, soul, and spirit. How would you describe the difference between these three aspects of self?

Well, that ties in nicely to the question you just asked. The terms “body,” “soul,” and “spirit” are also used in different ways by people, particularly in the new-age community. But from an esoteric point of view, body represents the consciousness pertaining to your lower self, so it’s not just the physical body but also includes your emotional body and your mental body. And the sum total of that consciousness is personality, which is, as I say, governed by the principle of separateness. Whereas the soul transcends the three bodies of the personality. It is one’s higher consciousness, and represents that wider and more inclusive kind of love, as well as the sum total of one’s acquired wisdom. The soul is governed by the principle of unity, while the spirit is something that, in this philosophy, we call the monad, which is governed by what is called the principle of universality. So the lower self, which would be equivalent to body consciousness—mental, emotional, and physical—is governed by separative awareness. The soul in you is governed by unitive awareness, and the spirit in you is governed by universal awareness.

Yes, that’s a good way of summarising it. There are so many different tangents when it comes to those three terms, I’ve found.

Yes, very true.

Just to that, though. Do you yourself feel that the majority of people, in the West at least, still consider the physical body to be the actual self?

Well, that would be the lowest manifestation of the realised self. Normally, when a person believes that their physical body is the basis of their sensed identity, that’s a person that has not yet awakened to the soul and the spiritual path. When you wake up to your soul, you’re waking up to your own duality, and you’re realising that you are something transcendent to your physical body; you even start to realise that a part of you is transcendent to your emotional life and your mental life too. But prior to that, there is complete identification with that lower self, and particularly [with] the physical body.

Absolutely. Which I feel is quite easy to do in a materialistic culture.

Well, that’s true, you make a very good point. Western consciousness, which is so materialistic, is going to be even more prone to that tendency.

In the writings of the Bahá'í Faith, an analogy frequently used is the image of the soul being like a plant and the body being like the earth or soil in which it grows. In this analogy, the soul is thus nurtured by the world of the spirit, variously symbolised by the rays of the sun, the rain from clouds, and “springtime.” Do you feel like the stress caused by current global conditions—cultural, environmental, political, social— somehow litter negative emotional debris in the world of spirit?

I wouldn’t say that it’s adversely affecting the spirit, [but] I would say it’s adversely affecting the mental, emotional, and physical planes of consciousness which spirit is struggling to evolve within. So it’s not the spirit itself, it’s the distorted outer garments that are causing more and more stress to the system.

In your essay ‘The Path of Purification’ (2013), you speak of the first time we encounter the soul deep within, a moment ‘when the spiritual dimension of one’s inner beingness is consciously awakened, and from that moment forward, life is never the same.’ Seeing as the soul was al- ways there, why do you think awakening to this part of ourselves shifts our reality in such extreme ways?

Well, the first part of the answer needs to be directed to the question of why is there this delay? And the reason is that the causal body, the soul, waits for many incarnations for the lower self to become more integrated; it needs an integrated outer garment that it can work through. And so, much of evolution is about developing the outer garment, which is what we call the integrated personality or the ego. So once the ego is developed, that is when the soul says, ‘Hey, here I am, and let me take over the reins.’ The great irony is that the personality has been slowly developing for countless incarnations, and it finally gets its act together, and now the soul speaks up and says, ‘I’d like to take over.’ And the personality says, ‘Are you kidding me? After this work I’ve done to get to where I’m at, you think I’m going to let go of the reins now? Forget it.’ So the reason for the delay is simply [that] the lower self has to get its act together before the soul can be consciously utilising it. The personality then resists yielding to the soul’s directional prompts, at least for a period of time. So that’s part one. The awakening is an awaken- ing to your own duality for the first time. You awaken to the realisation that you have both a higher and lower quality to your consciousness.

Then, over time you start to realise that your higher impulse—that higher sense of values, that higher kind of love that you more steadily sense—is the thing that you are trying to evolve towards and become. So once you wake up to your duality, life is never the same, because from that point forward, the soul is going to slowly, and more consciously, impress a whole different value system upon your mind and your brain. By so doing, your values shift, and you find that you tend to see things in a different light. Often you find yourself seeing the world going in one direction while you have a growing sense that we are going the wrong way. When you wake up to your soul, you’re recognising that you’re going to have to start swim- ming against the current of society.

That’s definitely how it feels.

Yeah, so you know about that. Welcome to the path. I always tell my students that if you don’t feel like you are swimming upstream, then there is something wrong.

Well, that’s comforting to know. I must be doing something right.

Yes, okay. Good, good, good.

In ‘The Path of Purification,’ you describe individuals who are awakening as souls who have become conscious participants in their own evolution. How would you describe people, I guess, who are “unawakened”? Do you feel as though people who haven’t quite woken up to that part of themselves are somehow less empowered when it comes to steering the course of their own journey?

Well, gosh, that’s a really good question, Kathryn. It depends upon what you mean when you say “their own evolution.” I always think that we have to ask which one of us are we talking about: soul self or the personality self? If we’re talking about just the [kind of] person who is not awake yet to their own soul consciousness, pre-the awakening, they are going to be driven by the incentives that society has conditioned them to believe are the things to strive toward. So on their own level, as personality consciousness only, they believe that they are pursuing their own destiny, you might say, but it’s actually the destiny of their lower self. And yet, in all fairness, that too is a necessary step before the awakening.

Very true.

I must say, when people are like that, it is easy to feel a measure of negative judgement toward them. I certainly have been guilty of this at times. But again, in the bigger picture, it is a predictable step on the journey of evolution.

Absolutely, yes. The path of purification itself involves what you refer to as ‘spiritual cleansing and refinement. It is a phase when an individual deeply recognises that spiritual development can only occur when the distortions of the personality (lower self) have been transformed.’ Can you tell us more about these distortions that you speak of? Another big question, that’s good. What do I mean by distortions? Well, first remember your personality has three parts to it: mental, emotional, and physical. And on all three levels, there are different types of distortions. On the physical level, we all have impurities within our physical nature or an unwholesome relationship to our physical appetites [sometimes]. And then we have thoughts in our day-to-day consciousness that are separative, and those thoughts are actually distorting. Once you awaken, you become much more aware of those distortions, and you start to work on transforming them more consciously. You realise that the transformation of the impurities of the lower self is as important on the path as is striving inwardly to touch and hold that higher part of you, the soul.

Continue reading at The Haiku Times

Originally published in JANE magazine issue six.