Soul Questions & Answers by Jonathan Parker

1. What do you see people do that prevents them from leading meaningful lives?

If people don’t think they are having a meaningful life it is because they are disconnected from their spiritual nature and operating through ego perceptions and defenses. This often happens seamlessly as situations arise and a person meets them with their defensive nature rather than the soul. I have found that people experience satisfaction, completion, meaning, fulfillment, happiness, enjoyment, and lightness of being when they integrate their soul into their mind, body, and feelings.

2. What “advice” or ideas would you have to share that can be helpful for someone to deepen their participation in meaningful ways?

Deepening the participation in one’s spiritual awakening process starts when a person desires to connect with the truth and presence that lives within. Desire is what carries people along the pathways life lays before them. Like learning most things the more one engages in the discovery practice, the more deeply they will initiate the realizations. In the beginning it can seem as formidable as starting to climb a high mountain, but the journey gets progressively easier the higher in consciousness one rises.

To help with this I suggest the following technique. Put one hand over the center of your chest and acknowledge the comfort that naturally emerges. This helps connect you with the soul presence. Next, spend some time allowing yourself to explore your inner space while calling to your spiritual soul presence to emerge and integrate through all your thoughts and feelings. Through this process over time the spiritual presence replaces all else and becomes the predominant experience.

3.  You encourage meditation to create transformation in life. For those that are new to meditation, what changes can a person expect to see with a daily meditation practice?

The type of meditations in the book The Soul Solution are of a proactive nature as opposed to passive forms of meditation. Each meditation contains a sequence of prayerful intentions to help form deeper integrations with one’s spiritual nature. The natural outcome is the progressive diminishing of disturbances physically and emotionally with a concomitant emergence of enriching qualities such as deep peace, unconditional love, sustained happiness, and beautiful spiritual awakenings. Where it eventually leads a person is to the qualities often admired in saints as they begin to emerge automatically for they are the nature of the soul within us all.

4. You dedicate a large part of the book to eradicating the ego. Why is this so important to create a conscious shift? What are signs that the ego is controlling our actions or beliefs?

The ego is a term that applies to a vast collection of disturbances to one’s peace and harmony. Anytime you find yourself reacting negatively you are operating from the control of the ego. This includes the mental and emotional components of all negative emotions as well as all judgments, fixed opinions, criticism, and blame. The ego tends to engage a person in fear-based outlooks which result in such conditions as futility, struggle, depression, hopelessness, guilt, doubt, victimization, anger, resentment, neediness, and the like. As long as the ego is exerting itself in a person’s life their contentment, happiness, peace, fulfillment, love, and fun will be fleeting. When the ego is replaced by bringing the soul to the surface all of those qualities and more become sustained.

5. What impact does fear have on one’s ability to connect with their inner voice? How can a person overcome fear to create change in their life?

The core of nearly all blocks and feelings of being stuck as well as most mental and emotional disturbances is fear. Fear can manifest in many ways that a person may not regard as fear-based but which are. For instance, most people know fear is present when they have anxiety, panic feelings, or they are terrified, but there are other forms of fear as well such as worry, jealousy, insecurity, uncertainty, self-doubt, feeling the world is unsafe, and experiencing life as a struggle. Fear in all its forms functions like a filter that affects a person’s outlook and decisions. When it is present it can distort inner guidance and generate negative self-talk. The best solution to fear is to replace it as the operating system within by meeting it with the inner light of the soul. This is a process that requires addressing each form it presents, releasing and letting go of the way it engages a person’s attention, and inviting the soul to merge into every place it is found. This diminishes the lifeforce energy that fear engages and replaces it with the peaceful and empowered soul presence.

 6. Jonathan, What is your personal story leading up to the writing of your book, The Soul Solution?

The Soul Solution is far more than a book about the spiritual soul. It is a resource of tools for the reader to experience the soul. The reason this is important is because you don’t understand the soul only on an intellectual level. The fullness of what the soul is and what it offers must come about through an experiential process, and the source of how this book came to be is rooted in my extensive experiences with the soul in working with many clients.

In the process of doing more than 40,000 meditative-counseling sessions with people over the phone I found that I am able to tune into the deep essence of people to what has been called the “True Self” or the soul. I found that the soul is the real source of transformation that quite literally releases a person from the grip of negative thinking and feelings and enables people to automatically live in the now in continuous happiness. For years I wasn’t sure if it would be possible to convey the experience of the soul through a book, but several years ago I created a 5-day meditation retreat based on the soul-solution process and the success of that retreat is what I used as the basis for the book.

7. Is quantum theory related to the content of your book and if so, how?

We exist in an intelligent quantum field that sustains all creation and we and the soul are integral parts of the creation as well as participants in creation. All thoughts and impulses arise from the field of awareness and express through our individuality. The spiritual soul is our container of that expression. When we are integrated in the soul’s awareness we experience the reality that we are one with the Creator playing out our lives in the field. We write the scripts, bring in the props and people to populate our stage, and then we interact in the play of life expressing through us according to the will of the Creator.

8. There is a fascinating chapter in your book titled, The Secret of the Mirror Universe. How is life a mirror of our beliefs and a mirror of our consciousness?

That chapter is a fundamental insight into how the universe works. It is another way of saying, “you reap what you sow,” which is a universally recognized principle. We have reflected back to us what we project from us through our actions, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. In his classic book, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill wrote about a secret that many successful people have discovered: People attract what they think about. This is similar to something Buddha said, “All we are is a result of what we have thought.” This is an acknowledgment that we are creators of our own reality because we attract, create, and become what we hold in our mind both consciously and subconsciously.

On the surface, this seems to offer a simple solution to all the challenges we experience since it would seem by these statements that all we have to do is start thinking about success and we will have success. However, there are two obstacles. One of the problems is that most people clearly know what they don’t want much more than what they do want. I have often asked people what they want out of life, and I generally find that most people haven’t thought much about that, but they are quick to say what they don’t want. What this does is cause a person’s lifeforce to energize what isn’t wanted. The second problem is everyone has “blind spots” or patterns that are unconscious and therefore which they are unaware of that undermines getting what they want.

While pondering the idea that we attract or create what we don’t want may seem like a negative scenario, it is actually quite an empowering realization. Joseph Campbell put it this way on his DVD A Hero’s Journey, “When you follow your bliss…doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors…and the world moves in and helps.”

The question then becomes what is bliss? He does not mean “blissed out” in some trance state of euphoria. The bliss he refers to is the happiness, contentment, and joyfulness that are the natural characteristics of the soul. Leonardo da Vinci said, “Do you know that harmony is the basis [nature] of our soul?” When you have integrated the bliss, happiness, and goodness of your soul, you more naturally attract and manifest the wonderful results you want in your life, and that is the most profound of gifts from The Mirror Universe.

9. Jonathan, what is the difference between the soul and the spirit?

What I call the spiritual soul some others call the higher self, authentic self, true self, or divine self. The soul is the intelligent non-physical core essence of who you truly are and it is the individualized expression of the intelligent spirit essence that pervades all existence. It is characterized by all goodness in the form of unconditional love, acceptance, happiness, fulfillment, joyfulness, lightness of being, profound beauty, and spiritual awareness of oneness. Anytime a person is not experiencing these qualities they are operating from ego and that is a call to return to the soul.

10. How can people break free from repeating patterns in life?

For the most part, repeating patterns are caused by unconscious beliefs. It may seem strange to suggest that a belief can be unconscious, but most people are not aware of why they have the feelings, reactions, and judgments they do. This is because most of them formed many years ago and the circumstances have been long forgotten that contributed to the conclusions we reached, but they continue to function like an auto-pilot that takes a person’s life in certain directions. By addressing the symptoms and merging the soul into them, they can be dissolved and replaced with the qualities of the soul which in turn, become the creators of new positive patterns in a person’s life.

11. In your book you discuss soul healing and energy healing. Please clarify the difference.

There are many forms of energy healing which, in many cases, can bring physical and emotional relief by addressing the subtle-energy components of a disturbance. While these techniques can be quite palliative and sometimes curative if the underlying beliefs are not addressed what caused the disturbance in the first place may find another way of coming to the surface and expressing itself in another disturbance. The soul goes to the depths of the causes of difficulties and replaces them with a new level of consciousness which does not support the creation of future problems.

12. Please compare and contrast meditation and prayer, from your perspective.

The type of self-guided meditations in The Soul Solution book are composed of what I call prayerful intentions. The soul’s qualities and resources are accessed by wanting them, asking for them, and holding an intention for them to reveal themselves. In fact, the key to what triggers the process of engaging the soul is knowing about it, acknowledging it, and requesting its participation. So, in a real sense, the self-guided meditations in the book are prayerful requests done in a relaxed and meditative state.

13. What are your thoughts on subjective vs objective reality?

For the most part, objective reality is an illusion. Objective reality may be said to be what the five senses respond to, however, everything about it is subjective. Living inside of each person is a perceiver that creates points of view, opinions, and conclusions about everything and then warehouses them. The perceiver gives birth to identities which run like programs creating sub-personalities a person thinks makes up who they are. This perceiver believes its perceptions are real yet they are all subjective interpretations of reality and work subtly, behind the scenes, out of day-to-day awareness. It draws conclusions with incomplete information and treats those conclusions as facts. This leads to fear, anger, depression and other emotional responses which are essentially a construction of the perceptions, stories, and myths that form the basis of everyone’s life. If you take the position that something is real, you imbue it with reality, and act as if it were real. This is why people are passionate about their points of view which they are convinced are true and real, when in many (or most) cases, they are actually arbitrary opinions based on a self-determined belief of truth or right and wrong.

Can you see how life is composed of ideas and stories derived from perceptions. And can you see how this can lead to trouble? It wrecks relationships between husbands and wives, between governments and citizens, between employer and employees, between friends, and, of course, between enemies.

14. Are experiences in life stored at the cellular level? If so, how does that affect our experience of life?

We are complex beings composed of many aspects. To a large extent humans are the accumulation of their beliefs, emotions, conclusions, and perceptions, and these components are stored at many levels. This can create challenges in eliminating the negative elements a person doesn’t want. Here is a list of some of the places where beliefs, emotions, conclusions, and perceptions can be found. The brain, the nervous system, the subconscious mind, the aura and chakras, various subtle bodies, and the organs and systems of the physical body including at a cellular and quantum level. Issues can arise from any of these areas and cause reactions and conditions. It is helpful in the clearing process to address all these areas as we tend to only clear what we identify and acknowledge.

15. What is the one life lesson that has had the greatest impact on your life?

I’m not inclined to think of my life as a series of lessons as much as a series of awakenings, and I would put the awakening to the underlying realizations that we are more than our physical bodies or experiences as having the greatest impact. My first experience of this happened more than 30 years ago in my early explorations through meditation. When it happened I felt as though I was recalling an ancient memory of what felt like home, but it was not of the earth. I felt like I was being pulled into a vast ocean of love at the beginning of time and I was witnessing the creation of my soul and the universe out of the deepest and purest love imaginable. I realize we all have an ancient past and a dynamic destiny, and our life journey is the discovery of that.

16. If we talked in a few months, what would be something that might have changed, some internal shift, some freedom, some new frontier you are trying to reach inside of you?

I view our spiritual journey as an ever unfolding and expanding experience. Part of the fun of the journey is not knowing what revelation or discovery is next, but there is always a further evolution of our participation in the creation with ever expanding love and beauty.

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