PDF Summary:The Seat of the Soul, by Gary Zukav

The Seat of the Soul is Gary Zukav’s best-selling exploration into the soul’s purpose and how to align your life with it by developing your intuition and tapping into your heart's knowledge.

Zukav argues that humans are primarily spiritual beings living in the material world. Our souls have incarnated in order to learn lessons and fulfill a mission, and ultimately to evolve. Therefore, Zukav says, our true life’s purpose is to become fully aligned with our souls in order to help them evolve. However, humans have become disconnected from our spiritual nature, and this causes much sorrow and suffering in the world. Zukav says we need to tune into our souls and to messages from the universe and our spirit guides, so we can fulfill our soul’s mission and aid in its evolution.

In this guide, we’ll compare Zukav’s ideas with those of other spiritual and New-Age thinkers, like Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle, and to the religious traditions and concepts that Zukav’s philosophy draws upon, most notably Hinduism.

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Zukav’s theory about the collective consciousness groups that we all belong to is reminiscent of the concept of the karass, invented by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle. In this exploration of the fictional religion of Bokononism, Vonnegut describes a karass as a group of people who are spiritually linked with one another, to fulfill some cosmic purpose, usually unknown to them. However, Vonnegut distinguishes a karass from a granfalloon, which he defines as a group of people who share some observable commonality, such as members of one’s country or one’s gender. These categories have no spiritual significance, while a karass is spiritually and energetically linked. You can only recognize a member of your karass by a sort of gut feeling you get about a person, but your energies will be intertwined throughout your lifetimes.

As spiritual beings living in the material world, Zukav says, our true essence is light energy, which flows through us from the universe. So, all of our interactions and behaviors on the material plane have an energetic component as light vibration, he explains: Negativity creates lower vibration energy, and positivity creates higher vibrations. These vibrations are felt by us as our emotions. Higher-vibration emotions, for example, are love and compassion, whereas anger and resentment are lower-vibration emotions. Zukav says this is why you feel lighter and higher when you’re happy, and heavy and dull when you’re unhappy. He also says that lower-vibration people can drain others of energy, and higher-vibration people can raise others up.

Because of these emotional frequencies, Zukav explains, you also will attract others of similar vibration to you, so if you consciously raise your energy, you’ll attract higher-energy people and you can co-create a more enlightened reality together. He says that this energy can be directed by your thoughts, so positive thoughts will create more positive emotions and therefore higher vibration, and vice versa with negative thoughts. So, by consciously choosing your thoughts, Zukav says, you can consciously raise your vibration, and therefore become brighter light energy—this is why we say such high-vibration people are “enlightened.”

The Law of Attraction

The idea that energy attracts like energy is called the law of attraction, which dates back to the New Thought Movement of the early 19th century. This concept is central to the book The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne, which says that your thoughts generate a magnetic energy that will pull that same frequency of energy toward you. Similar to the concept of karma, the law of attraction can affect you negatively or positively, and it happens whether you are conscious of it or not. Byrne argues that you can use this to re-create your life, by consciously directing your thoughts to generate the energy you want to attract. According to Zukav you should try to attract other positive light-energy people to your life, and The Secret tells us that to do that, we should begin with visualization. If you want to attract a certain kind of partner or friends to your life, envision them. Think about every detail of the kinds of qualities they would have, and then believe that they exist and they’ll come to you. Then make space for that person or people in your life, and be open to finding them.

The Nature of the Material World

The biggest challenge our souls face in incarnating on Earth, according to Zukav, is that they are constrained by the choices we make with our rational minds, which think from a less enlightened perspective. If you are not consciously in touch with your soul and listening to its guidance, he says, you will make decisions based on the desires and fears of your lower self, your physical form. And yet those choices will affect your soul’s karma and therefore its chance for evolution. Next, we’ll discuss the mistakes humans make, according to Zukav, when we don’t live attuned to the guidance of our souls.

Mind Over Heart

Zukav explains that we humans dwell mostly within our lower, materialist selves, and have created a whole world based on this. We live a life of the mind instead of the heart, he says, so we don’t make proper choices about our behavior, we don’t hear our spirit guides, and we dismiss messages because we lack spirituality. Because of this, humans have created a world built on pursuit of external power instead of internal power, Zukav says.

The soul’s approach to the world is one of honoring all of life as sacred, and refraining from harming any other life, but our lower selves don’t perceive the world this way. A perspective of honoring life is to see that everything has spirit and is equally divine. When we don’t honor life as divine, Zukav says, we judge some things and people as better than others, we create hierarchies, we exploit nature and other humans, and we accumulate resources, even to the detriment of others. In nature, animals don’t do this. Although some eat other animals, Zukav says that’s all a part of the cycle of life. They don’t take more than they need—the cycle of life is a balanced act of species offering up energy to others. If we revere and honor life and the natural world, he says, we’ll act within that same framework.

Zukav explains that living life according to this principle of honor may require challenging social norms, because it’s not the way of mainstream society. As flawed humans, perceiving the world through our materialist lens, he says, we are all fragmented beings. Often we’ll feel conflicted about how to act because our material and spiritual aspects are in conflict with one another. For example, parts of us are peaceful and parts of us may be violent. So, according to Zukav, when we have to make a choice about how to act or react in life, we need to choose which one of those aspects of ourselves to indulge. A human who doesn’t even believe in, or is not in touch with his/her soul, he says, will often make the wrong choices, and thus we’ve created a world with much suffering and violence.

The Quest for Power

Zukav argues that finding our authentic internal power means tapping into the spiritual world outside of us, to which our souls are connected. By contrast, in his book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari argues that moving away from religion and the belief in an all-powerful God has actually empowered humans to improve the world. When humans can’t rely on a deity to solve their problems, to heal illness, and to prevent suffering, he says, they must find the resources within them, to do those things for themselves. Harari explains that this is the basis for Humanism, the philosophy that humanity is essentially empowered by their own rational minds, to create meaning and purpose in life without need for a belief in the supernatural.

Harari admits, though, that this humanistic drive toward empowerment through scientific advancement has led to the development of technologies that may ultimately destroy us, and the Earth. Zukav would connect this to the loss of reverence for life. Perhaps another non-supernatural approach to this problem could be Atheopaganism, a recently established non-theistic religious path that puts honor and reverence for the natural world at the center of its ideology.

Ultimately, Zukav argues, the divide within us is always between fear and love. Fear is at the root of all other negative emotions, such as anger, jealousy, grief, and sorrow. While love is at the root of all positive emotions, such as joy, contentment, and gratitude. These emotions lead to corresponding behaviors, Zukav says—if we act from fear, according to our lower instincts, we behave in harmful ways such as lying, cheating, and manipulating. If we act from love, according to our heart, we will have peaceful, respectful behaviors toward others. Also, he says, we’ll continue to attract those same emotions and behaviors toward us, because of the law of attraction—energy attracts like energy. All of these choices will result in the kind of world we create on the material level, Zukav explains, as well as how our soul progresses in this lifetime.

(Shortform note: Episcopalian Bishop Robert O’Neill explores the idea of fear as the opposite of love through the narrative of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. He says that when the story is analyzed, it becomes clear that the persecution of Christ was based in fear, and that fear, when spread to a large group, created a mob mentality that ultimately killed the savior, who represents love. In the end, however, he points out that the resurrection of Christ represents the ultimate triumph of love over fear.)

Pursuit of Power

Since we live a life of the mind, which chases material pursuits, Zukav says, we’ve come to understand life as a “survival of the fittest,” so we try to control and dominate our environment and others around us. He says that the feeling of powerlessness underlies all our fears, so we try to alleviate that by seeking power. However, he explains that we perceive power as external to us, something outside of us that we can have more or less of than others, and which determines our social position and thus our value. So we’re constantly in conflict, competing with one another, vying for power. This happens between individuals, races, countries, social classes, religious groups, and so on.

A materialistic person seeks external power, Zukav points out, by dominating and exploiting others, by wanting to be better than others, and by dominating nature. When we seek external power, he says, we’re acting from fear, and when we can’t attain it, or feel a lack of power, we feel anxiety. Anxiety, Zukav explains, is the fearful feeling of disempowerment. This manifests in the body, in the throat, or stomach, or chest, he says, and we can eventually create disease by not acknowledging it.

(Shortform note: There’s scientific evidence that Zukav is correct that anxiety can manifest physically in the body as disease. In his 2011 book When the Body Says No, Gabor Maté explores the connection between stress and disease, and cites copious research that has shown a link. And, specifically, according to Maté, one of the major stress-response triggers in the body is a feeling of lack of control, which would equate to the disempowerment Zukav refers to.)

However, Zukav reminds us that we all have an internal source of power—our souls. And we can tap into that by developing our sixth sense, our intuition. When we tune into our higher intuition, he says, we recognize that true power is within us, and there’s no longer any need to seek external power. Internal power is unlimited and nobody has more or less. There’s no need to dominate, compete, or struggle for a power that’s within us. We see everyone as equal and act from love and compassion. Zukav calls this “authentic empowerment.” (Shortform note: Brené Brown warns in The Gifts of Imperfection that a major barrier to developing our intuition is our brain’s wariness due to an overwhelming need for certainty. She argues that the key to overcoming the need for certainty is embracing faith, or moving forward with trust despite not knowing what’s ahead.)

Evolution of the Soul

So, now that we understand how our lower selves may be preventing our souls from evolving, how do we correct this so we can find our soul’s purpose and follow it? Zukav explains that this involves developing our intuition, listening to our heart, and tuning in to our emotions, which will allow us to be guided by our soul. And, he says, we must learn to seek our internal power and let go of our pursuit of external power. We’ll take a look next at how he advises going about doing these things.

Develop Your Heart Knowledge

To understand what our soul needs in this lifetime, we need to learn to listen to our hearts, Zukav says, which begins by attuning to our feelings. When we’re in touch with our deeper emotions, we can understand them as messages from our soul and from other spirit guides out in the universe. This constitutes an intuitive way of knowing and understanding the world with the heart rather than the mind, which Zukav describes as a sixth sense. This means valuing emotions and being in touch with our feelings. This deeper awareness of our feelings, he says, will guide us in decision-making. If you’re not sure whether to pursue a particular course of action, tuning in to the feelings in your heart will tell you which way to go.

Intuition, as Zukav defines it, is the sense beyond our ordinary five senses that’s connected to universal wisdom. It’s your soul speaking to your higher self. According to Zukav, we tend to emphasize knowledge of the mind and spend much time developing it and training it, yet we don’t spend time developing our intuitive knowledge. In fact, we often dismiss it entirely. He says when we have a “gut feeling” or a hunch about something, we need to pay attention to those things, and not dismiss them. Those are products of our intuitive sense.

Align With the Spiritual Realm

In The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, Deepak Chopra says that aligning with the spiritual realm is crucial for a successful purpose-filled life. Like Zukav, he argues that without that connection to something spiritual, you’ll have an incomplete and inaccurate perception of reality. Chopra also says that lack of connection leads to a life of fear and anxiety, since you’ll have no higher guidance, and you’ll get caught up in shallow material pursuits, which are ultimately unsatisfying. In order to begin to align yourself with your soul, or the spiritual realm outside of yourself, try the exercises in the Shortform guide to The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.

If you’re in tune with your soul, Zukav says, you'll know you have a higher guidance. Your lower self doesn’t realize this, so it isn’t able to draw upon that resource, which means you’ll have to learn lessons the hard way, in the physical realm. If you’re tuned in to your intuitive sense, you can access universal guidance and make more conscious choices based on that higher knowledge. To this end, Zukav offers some advice for working on developing your intuitive sense. He says this involves the following:

• “Emotional cleansing”: This means tuning in to your emotions and processing them in healthy ways—he warns us not to repress emotions, because that creates blockage and disease.
• Dietary cleansing: Eat a healthy, clean, non-toxic diet.
• Setting intentions: In order to change your thoughts and actions, and therefore your energy, Zukav says you should consciously set intentions. If you are conscious of the intentions behind your actions, you can make more conscious choices based on those, and that will change your reality.
• Trusting your gut: Consciously try to listen to your feelings and hunches.
• Being open and believing: Be receptive to any messages you receive, and believe in them. Believe that everything happens for a reason.

(Shortform note: Jack Canfield, author of The Success Principles, offers a more focused approach that may be easier to implement than Zukav’s advice. Canfield’s seven steps for tuning in to your intuition include devoting time each day to asking your intuition questions and acting immediately on the information you receive.)

Setting Powerful Intentions

While Zukav doesn’t explain how to set intentions, Deepak Chopra also offers some concrete advice. He says “everything that happens in the universe begins with intention” and that an intention is like a seed from which something will grow. So you must take care to plant those seeds consciously and to nurture them. Some steps to setting intentions effectively are:

• Meditate, to clear your mind of its chatter and get to a place of still, quiet consciousness.

• Think about your intention (what you want to manifest) while you’re in a meditative state, and then let it go—put it out there, and then stop thinking about it.

• Discard any negative beliefs or criticisms from yourself or others, and know that everything will be as it should be.

• Don’t dwell on the outcome, as this creates anxiety. Just let it be, and trust the universe.

Seek Authentic Power

Once you’ve honed your intuition so that you can listen to your heart knowledge and be guided by your soul, Zukav says, you need to let go of any pursuit of external power, and discover your internal power—the power of your soul. In this way you become authentically empowered to live out your soul’s purpose.

The spiritually powerful person realizes that materialistic power is unstable and can’t last, and therefore it isn’t truly power, Zukav says. Spiritual power comes from within, from one’s soul and that soul’s connection to the loving power of the universe. So a spiritually powerful person is:

• Humble
• Harmless
• Non-competitive
• Non-materialistic
• Free to be themselves
• Forgiving
• Wise
• Loving

Zukav says you can learn how to distinguish between what are your genuine needs and what are illusions by contemplating these qualities and considering whether your pursuits are aligned with cultivating those, or not. What things do you perceive yourself “needing” just because it’s conditioned into you, or because you’re seeking external power? What does your soul really need, versus what do you as a flawed five-sensory human think you need?

Be Present

In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle discusses the distinction between your true being and your ego. To learn what your genuine needs are, you first have to learn to distinguish between the two, so you can identify what is your true being. According to Tolle, the most fundamental part of discovering your true being, is to learn to be in the present. Ruminating on the past or worrying about the future will keep you disconnected from your true being and in the space of your ego, which is essentially your thinking mind. While Zukav argues that your emotions are messages from your soul that you need to tune in to, Tolle argues, by contrast, that emotions arise from the mind and so are also associated with your ego, and they act as roadblocks to connecting with your true being. So, according to Tolle, you need to begin to disconnect from both your thinking mind and your emotions, through mindfulness, to get in touch with your true nature. Then, in that still and quiet space when you are fully in the present, you can begin to assess what your genuine needs are.

In order to move in the direction of spiritual power, Zukav emphasizes embracing prayer and faith. Setting intentions and meditating are not enough, he says. These are parts of prayer. But to communicate with your spirit guides, Zukav says you need to actually talk to them, and ask them for guidance. And when you do that, you must actually believe in them, have faith that they’ll guide you, and trust them to do that.

In addition to prayer and faith, as part of the work of tapping into your spiritual power, Zukav offers a few more action items to help shift your perspective:

• Act from your heart, not your mind. To do this, become more conscious of your feelings, and see them as signs and messages meant to guide you.
• Open yourself to connection with other spiritual humans.
• Live mindfully, in the present. Let go of fears and anxieties about the past or future. Just be here now.
• Think of yourself as a spiritual being in a material body, rather than a material being with a spirit.

Open Your Heart Chakra

To understand what it means to act from your heart, or listen to your heart knowledge, we might turn to another Oprah Winfrey favorite, The Untethered Soul. In this book, Michael A. Singer offers further advice for discovering your true self, through opening your heart chakra. Chakras are understood in the Hindu tradition as energy centers throughout your body. There are seven major chakras; the one that resides in your heart center is called anahata, and is associated with love and compassion. When energy isn’t flowing freely in your chakras, they’re said to be blocked, and you must do spiritual work to unblock them. Singer tells us that your heart chakra can become blocked, or closed, due to past experiences, and that you need to consciously address these blockages to fix them. He offers some advice for opening your heart chakra, by paying close attention to the energy flow as you feel it in your heart and learning to release the negative energy. There are also many guided meditations you can use to practice opening your heart chakra, so that you’re better able to tap into your “heart knowledge.”

Spiritual Psychology

As a final suggestion for spiritual evolution, Zukav offers a recommendation for moving humanity as a whole toward enlightenment. Since we all energetically affect one another and are all tied into the same universal consciousness, we must cooperate with one another to move humanity forward. To this end, Zukav advocates for developing the discipline of “spiritual psychology.” He says this would be a shift in the field of psychology toward examining the spiritual roots of mental illnesses. We should be approaching personality disorders, he says, as fragmentation of the self due to the soul’s karma, and to the multiple lifetimes lived by the soul. If a person’s soul has lived many different kinds of lives, their likes and dislikes and fears and fascinations may all be derived from those. So, for example, phobias might be understood as related to a trauma from your soul’s past life.

Shamanism and Spiritual Psychology

In an indigenous worldview, spirituality and psychology would never be considered separate realms; they would be approached by traditional healers as intertwining aspects of a person. In the article What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Hospital, Malidoma Patrice Somé, a shaman of the West African Dagara tribe, discusses his impression upon observing patients in an American mental health facility. From his cultural perspective, he sees people who are spiritually gifted, or undergoing spiritual crises, being restrained and prevented from going through a necessary spiritual process. He says that the characteristics viewed as “psychotic” from a Western psychology model, are viewed in the Dagara culture as symptoms of a spiritual calling or transformation, and that the response to them would be one of community support. The person is viewed as a healer being born, and the shaman and community approach them as such, guiding them through the process of integrating their spirit and mind, and emerging as a healed, and whole, person. Thus the concept of spiritual psychology proposed by Zukav is akin to a shamanic view of psychology.

The documentary film, Crazywise, explores this theme as well, and includes discussion with Western psychologists who are coming to recognize and embrace the value in the shamanic approach.

Guiding people to understand and develop their intuition would also be part of Zukav’s spiritual psychology. Intuition is the conduit for us to understand these soul-based parts of ourselves, and it aligns us with a knowledge of what our soul needs for its evolution.

Zukav also says that when we deny our soul’s existence, and therefore its needs, we cut ourselves off from all the spiritual guidance available to us. This can lead to personal crises. This is why we need to address the spiritual through psychology.

We humans chose the path we’re on, Zukav says; we were given free will. We didn’t need to choose fear and violence, and other negative courses of action. But we did. And this means we now need to find our way back toward the light and healing. Therefore, Zukav concludes, since we’re at that evolutionary turning point, where we’re learning to recognize our souls, we need guidance through spiritual psychology.

Christian Psychology

Aside from indigenous traditions, even in the modern Western world, taking a spiritual or religious approach to human psychology is not a new idea. Although the merging of the two has often been discouraged in the mainstream scientific community, throughout history, behavioral scientists have been influenced by religious doctrine in their understanding of mental illness as well as approaches to healing. Today in the Western world, Christian psychology is a fairly common practice, involving understanding the human being through the Biblical scriptures. This approach to psychology, similar to what Zukav suggests, addresses the spiritual needs of the soul, as inseparable from the mind, and rests on the premise that humans in their material form are inherently flawed.