The pre-born, living within Mother, but increasingly alive, knows only the dual world of She-and-me. The new-born, finding itself in an undefinable aloneness yet reassured by a Mother now separated, clings to her now-externalised warmth and nourishment. But a dramatic change has taken place. There is an imprinting within consciousness of separation and the key to the rest of life will be the question “Who am I?”

The pre-born starts off not knowing there is such a thing as separation. Souls entering the physical life have no choice but to experience it. Mystics seek to return to the source and transform it and them at the same time…

The birth is a combination of organic life given by Mother as part of her life, plus the character of the infant, genetic and egoic, as that sense of self is slowly realised, consolidated and acted upon. We have come to expect that the word ‘ego’ will be used negatively, yet it is the most essential of things in the formative stages of life. Without the experience of the growing self, there would be no growth of capability in that life, since we would not be able to harvest and keep the fruits of experience.

Spiritually, there comes a time when we question the validity of that (till then) lifelong separation – ‘in-here and out-there’. Working backwards through what is sensed as the ‘false self’ we come to the base survival conditioning that is associated with the issues of fear and trust. If there is enough force in our search we can see something shining in those waters…

From the time we emerge as infants, our discovery of our world is a matter of relationship.

Pleasure, pain and fear are low-level, survival-based drivers and essential to our physical existence. Consciousness, such as we use the word in self-development, is seen as an ‘upward’ extension of awareness, but can also be seen as a growing-back movement from the edge of the circle of raw experience towards the centre of a circle. That centre is our spiritual goal, the core of our real self.

Continue reading here