Episode 11 – Soul Friends, Soul Family, Karmic Relationships and the Great Misunderstanding About Twin Souls

Amina was once told that she and the man she was in a deeply destructive relationship with were twin souls, one soul split in two, and she swallowed it whole. A year and a half ago, while giving a talk at the Alternative Fair in Oslo, she noticed a smiling man in the audience who seemed very secure in himself, and they have now been together for a year. As a boy, Pål-Esben would sit outside in the evenings, looking at the stars and longing to go home.

In this eleventh episode, Amina and her teacher and guide, Pål-Esben Wanvig, continue with the ninth of the 9 Pillars for Finding the Path of the Heart: becoming a master of understanding and living out your soul’s desires and life mission in this incarnation. They talk about soul friends, soul family, karmic relationships and the great misunderstanding about twin souls, why karma is memory and not punishment, and why so many people feel they don’t belong on Earth. It is part of “The Journey to Self-Realization”, a podcast about the bravest journey a human being can set out on: the journey home to yourself.

This episode is an English translation of our Norwegian original, voiced by the digital avatars of Pål-Esben and Amina.

In this episode

• The twin soul journey: Amina’s destructive relationship, and why being close on the soul level doesn’t make two people a good match
• The metasoul as a disco ball whose rays of light are individual souls, and why some people feel like family while others feel like aliens
• Why suffering is never needed for growth, and the 9 Pillars as a practical alternative to esoteric ideas that glorify suffering
• From trauma partner to safe love: letting go of the idea that a partner will save you, and meeting the right one at the Alternative Fair
• Karma as memory, not punishment, and how karmic pressure between two people can make a relationship explode
• Changing the music you radiate to attract the right part of your soul family, and why there are no shortcuts at the elite university for souls
• Starseeds, the longing for home and the midlife crisis, and why the soul has chosen to be here, level by level, like a gamer
• Viktor Frankl, burnout as a gift, and new perspectives on illness

This podcast is for you if you:

• Seek real depth in your spiritual practice
• Want to understand yourself on a more fundamental level
• Are curious about shamanism but tired of superficial “new age” spirituality
• Have taken many alternative courses but still feel that something is missing
• Feel an inner longing for freedom, love and wholeness

In a time when so many get lost in external methods and promises of quick fixes, this podcast invites you back to the only place where true answers can be found: your own heart.

Listen above, or read the full conversation below.

Transcript

A warm welcome to the podcast “The Journey to Self-Realization”, a primordial shamanic journey of development back to your true nature. This podcast is a collaboration with our favourite magazine, the health and lifestyle magazine Medium, and is devoted to exploring the bravest journey a human being can set out on: the journey home to oneself. We follow Amina, a student at the Yggdrasil Shamanic School, as she goes through a deep primordial shamanic process of development together with her guide and teacher Pål-Esben. It is a raw, unpolished journey of discovery towards true joy in life, deeper meaning, and a life that truly feels good to live.

This episode is an English translation of our Norwegian original, voiced by the digital avatars of Pål-Esben and Amina.

Today’s topic: the soul’s journey, part 3

Pål-Esben: Hi, and a warm welcome to a new episode, Amina.

Amina: Thank you so much, and likewise, Pål-Esben.

Pål-Esben: Thank you so much, and a warm welcome to you as a listener too. Today we’ve come to part 3 of the soul’s journey. We’re now working our way through the 9 Pillars for Finding the Path of the Heart. The ninth pillar is becoming a master of understanding and living out your soul’s desires, its vision and its life mission. It’s quite a big topic. In the two previous episodes we talked a great deal about the soul, and today we’re going to take up some typical questions that many people ask about it. So, Amina, why don’t you start with what’s most on people’s minds here, the thing a lot of people probably ask and wonder about?

The twin soul journey: Amina’s story

Amina: Yes, I get a lot of questions, and I remember that I had a great many questions about the soul myself at the beginning of my spiritual journey. One of the first things I was introduced to, or thrown into, was what’s called the Twin Flame journey. You often hear that we have something called a soul family, that we have twin souls, and then we have karmic soul encounters and soul friends and that sort of thing. And there are different categories of this.

I remember I had a very intense relationship with a man. It was very, very destructive. We brought out the worst in each other, and it wasn’t healthy in any way at all. But I searched everywhere for something that could confirm I was on the right track, because I didn’t want to let go of this destructive thing. After all, it would have been a shame to let go of something so terrible. Then I was introduced to what are called twin souls. I was told that we’re really the same soul that has been split in two. He has one part of the soul, I have the other, and together we’re meant to mirror each other and bring things out in each other. One chases and the other runs, and then it goes back and forth a bit. That’s the short summary.

And I swallowed it whole, because I felt there was so much love there. I know there are many people who have been on that twin soul journey, and who are still on it. Today I look at it and think: “Wow, this is a very destructive relationship dressed up as something grand and lovely.” So one of the things I’d like to take up in this episode and hear your thoughts on, Pål-Esben, is this: what is a soul family? What are twin souls really? Because I know there are a lot of misunderstandings out there about this.

Pål-Esben: OK. Yes, there are a lot of ideas about things. But the way I see it, we haven’t come here to suffer. Seeking suffering means that we want something the intellect and the ego want, and then we dress it up in some psychology or some esoteric thing that says it’s good to suffer. And then there’s an explanation of why the suffering is good, which really has no place. It’s unnecessary. Because the first thing we talked about in earlier episodes is that we are the soul: you are your soul. And your soul is unique. It has an individuality and a form of identity. And when we talk about the soul family, it’s connected to your metasoul.

The metasoul: the disco ball and the rays of light

My image for this is that the metasoul is like a disco ball radiating light, many, many facets of light. When the light, that is, the creative force, hits the surface of this disco ball, it brings to life what can be called the metasoul, and it radiates thousands and hundreds of thousands of rays. Each ray is an individual soul connected to the metasoul. That means one metasoul can have hundreds of thousands of souls. And when we call it a soul family, it’s about how all these rays of light radiating out from the metasoul interact with each other. You could say that you have the same mother and father, so to speak: the same metasoul.

And the souls that come out of this, that is, my soul and your soul, which go into their individual experiences in our multiverse, are connected to one metasoul. Sometimes two people meet and feel they’ve known each other for many, many years without ever having met before. It’s the kind of meeting where you start talking to someone and it all flows so easily and naturally, and the idea is that you come from the same metasoul. And if you come across people who aren’t connected to the same disco ball, or metasoul, it can be like meeting aliens. There’s no contact. You try to talk to a person, and whatever you try to describe, they don’t understand what you’re talking about. It’s as if they’re from another planet. And you’ve met many people like that, as I have. It’s easy to tell the difference between the people you have that direct contact with, the ones we can say are in our soul family, connected to the same metasoul, and the people who are completely distant from us.

And among these rays of light going out from the metasoul, my individual soul, your individual soul, the listener’s individual soul, there are also groups that are closer to each other or further from each other. And the closer these rays of light are to each other, the deeper the relationship you have with each other. When you meet a person you feel you’ve known all your life, and you can sit and talk for hours with this person you’ve never met before, that’s typically a very close connection. The light from these rays overlaps a little, to use a metaphorical image for it. And then you have other souls in that soul family who are a bit further away, where the light is a bit further apart. You have a relationship, and you can get along with them well, but you don’t have this immediate insight into who they are and how to talk with them. That’s really how this works.

The great misunderstanding about twin souls

And one of the great misunderstandings comes when we talk about souls that are close to each other, that is, close together among these rays of light. Then we start talking about dual souls, twin souls and all that. And one of the great misunderstandings in the esoteric world is this: if I meet someone who is my twin soul or dual soul, meaning that I have this immediate contact with them and understanding of them, then they’re a suitable partner in my life, or a suitable friend. That’s one of the really big misunderstandings. Because even if you’re close from the soul’s point of view, and have a very similar vibration and frequency, that doesn’t mean you’re a good match in this life. That depends entirely on the choices each person makes.

In the old days I also did quite a lot of couples therapy to help couples. Today I don’t do that any more, for various reasons: my focus is on other things, and there are others doing that work, so I don’t think I can say any more about it. But there I came across people who are very close, you could say they’re twin souls and dual souls, but who make decisions that create suffering for each other. And then it makes no difference how close you are, if you mess it up. You can be the closest of twin souls, but if one partner chooses to do destructive things in their life and ignores their heart and their soul, while the other cultivates their relationship with their heart and with the soul, then you have a complete mismatch in this incarnation, in this life. That’s true even if you’re very, very close on the soul level. So even if you’re twin souls or dual souls, nothing says you’re a good match at all in this life. It depends on themes, choices, attitude and how you act.

When suffering is dressed up as development

Because this is the misunderstanding. Say you have a dual soul you know very well, as we’ve talked about, and they’re violent towards you. Then you dress it up in something meaningless and say: “Yes, my partner is violent towards me, but that’s OK, since we’re so close as a soul family, and we’re such a good match as dual souls.” That’s meaningless. It’s destructive, in my eyes. Because if you’re in a relationship and don’t show each other the minimum of mutual respect that is the foundation for love to exist at all, then you don’t belong together. So I find it meaningless to choose suffering in this life, when you can choose things that bring joyfulness and meaning and happiness and insight, something truly good. I simply don’t understand it. Maybe I’m a bit stupid.

And what I find frightening and dangerous is when there are esoteric ways of seeing things that dress things up and say that suffering is good. Through suffering, through struggle, through whatever it may be, we can supposedly grow and deal with our learning themes, whatever the explanation is. That has nothing to do with a healthy reality. It has to do with the destructive world of the ego and the intellect, and it has nothing to do with the heart, nor with the soul’s desire.

Because the soul comes in here with a set of themes it wants to experience and gain insight into. In addition, it’s equipped with a prism that the soul shines through, which refracts the soul’s light into particular perspectives it experiences from. And in this prism, this glass prism, this soul prism, we have our available karma that we have to deal with, the karmic pressure we’ve built up, and our dispositions, talents and everything else we’re born with into this incarnation. The soul, that is, the human being, experiences through this prism, and then the art is this: how do you relate to your learning task? And these trials and exams you’re given, how do you solve them? There’s no need to create suffering in order to pass any trials, experience any theme, go through any process of growth or pass any of the exams we’ve talked about in earlier episodes. Only a human being can seek out suffering, that is, through fear, ego, the first chakra, imprints and so on. That has nothing to do with our soul’s path. So it’s a choice.

The Path of the Heart: the practical alternative

That’s why you and I, in our shamanic tradition too, are very focused on what we call the Path of the Heart. Here in the podcast we’ve now talked a great deal about the 9 Pillars for Finding the Path of the Heart, which is something very, very practical and pragmatic. It isn’t just this idea of living in love, which doesn’t really mean anything at all. And the Path of the Heart is cultivated through the nine fundamental pillars for finding it: becoming a master of gratitude, becoming a master of forgiving yourself and others, becoming a master of building a healthy value system, becoming a master of self-regulation, becoming a master of seeing the glass as half full, becoming a master of healing your almighty syndrome, becoming a master of healing perfectionism, becoming a master of understanding nature’s healing rhythms, and becoming a master of understanding and living out your soul’s desires and life mission. And by cultivating that, we cultivate a process of development and learning that is filled with meaning, joyfulness and love, and not with suffering.

That means it’s completely unnecessary to go through life with these ideas that you’re twin souls, and that since you’re so close, you have to go through struggle and fighting, whatever it is, and then you break up, and then you come back and fight again. Is that supposed to be healing? No, it’s definitely not healing. It’s suffering. And that’s what I stand for, and you do too: there’s no need to create this suffering, because you can set yourself completely free without suffering. And then the art is to do what you did. After you’d been through relationships full of suffering and began to understand this, you started looking for a partner who doesn’t create suffering. That’s possible too. Absolutely possible.

From trauma partner to safe love

Amina: And I can see that. I’ve been on quite a few journeys with romantic relationships and different men over the years, and I see that what I used to experience as attraction was really more about what I choose to call a trauma partner: being drawn to the destructive without really understanding it. You think those butterflies are love, and then they aren’t. And I’ve found that the more new insights I’ve gained and the more I’ve healed in myself, the more suitable the partners I’ve found. Still not optimal, because there have still been a few issues.

But I remember the last destructive relationship I was in. I thought that was a very… I don’t know whether I called it twin souls then, but soul friends at least. And I remember talking with you quite a bit about it, because this was a man who was a bit more flighty than me, you could say. I’m someone who really wants a bit of security, to settle down and build something together with someone, while he was more like: “I can love you today, and maybe tomorrow, and then we’ll see.” And I suffered a lot from that. When I couldn’t let go of it, it was also one of the things that stopped my development in many areas, because I absolutely had to stay stuck in that suffering.

And I remember one of the last conversations I had with you about that relationship, because I went back and forth with this guy. Then a light went on for me: “Whoa, shit, I’m doing it again.” I began to recognise that energy from fear: “Whoa, now I have to sort out that relationship, I have to sell the house, I have to do this, and I have to do that.” And you helped me back to myself a little, or not a little, but a lot. And after that it was like a light bulb, a snap of the fingers, something that happened in me. After that I felt in my whole body that I don’t need to learn that way any more. And I’d never really believed that.

And now I’ve been with my partner for a year, and we live together. I met him at the Alternative Fair in Oslo a year and a half ago, where I was giving a talk on The 7 Golden Keys, your fantastic book, Pål-Esben. I remember seeing him in the audience. Then someone walked out of the hall, and I got a bit nervous: “So I’m not good enough”, that sort of thing. And I remember I kept my focus on him, this man, because he was smiling, and he seemed very secure in himself. And I felt: “Oh, there you are,” without really knowing him.

And now I can see what people talk about: that we have to face our triggers in relationships, that we can be triggered by each other, that we can face this mirror, and so on. Of course I’ve still experienced things I haven’t agreed with Erik about, or things that have triggered me. But we’ve never had a quarrel. It has always been very constructive. It’s always been like: I felt this when you did that. And then: oh, I didn’t mean it that way, I meant this when I did it. OK. And then we move on. It’s simple. It doesn’t have to be so difficult. You can still go on a healing journey with a partner without it feeling like suffering. Facing some stuff in yourself is one thing; you may have to deal with that. But yes, that’s a bit of my journey with this.

Pål-Esben: Yes. And in a relationship you’re also mirrored. We all experience challenges in a relationship, since we have someone so close to us, and when things are triggered in us, we can say: “OK, here’s an area for growth in me too. Why did this trigger me?” So of course a relationship is also a fine arena for anyone who’s actively growing. But what we’re talking about now is destructive relationships that are dressed up in some airy esoteric idea that says it’s good that things are destructive for you, because then you learn and grow a great deal. Well, I completely disagree with that. When you have a destructive relationship and can’t resolve it, so that it becomes constructive and loving, through help, couples therapy or whatever you do, then perhaps you should find another partner who’s a better match. That’s my attitude to life, anyway. Why should we go through all this unnecessary suffering in life?

But you’re also right in what you say. It’s about what you expect and attract: when you have a belief system that says this is love, this is the struggle, this is how it goes, then as long as you hold that belief system, you’ll often attract whatever matches it. Then you go from one unsuitable partner to the next unsuitable partner, and the same theme plays out again and again and again. That shows, as in your case, that there was something here to learn, something to understand, so that you break out of the vicious circle and begin to attract a suitable partner for you, as you did with the partner you have now. That’s what’s called real healing. That’s what’s called real, genuine personal development.

Amina: Yes. And one of the biggest insights I had on that journey was this. Ever since I was 13, I’d been looking for the perfect partner and thought a partner would save me. A partner was what would make me feel good. But letting go of that, seeing that as I came closer to myself, my heart, my soul, I didn’t need a partner in that way any more, was a real aha experience for me. And after that insight it wasn’t long before Erik turned up. I actually wasn’t looking, and yet he came along shortly afterwards.

Karma is memory, not punishment

But when it comes to soul family, we put different labels on this: dual souls, twin souls, karmic souls, soul friends. Can you call the destructive relationships, whether with women or men, the opposite sex or the same sex, karmic partners? Or is that wrong?

Pål-Esben: Well, karma is really nothing other than memory. A memory of everything you’ve been through, and of the consequences of your choices. It has nothing to do with punishment and that sort of thing; it’s simply a memory of the consequences, of what you’ve experienced and the choices you’ve made. And the more choices you make that come from the ego and the destructive, the higher the karmic pressure that builds up around the learning theme your soul has come here to experience, learn from, grow out of and mature out of.

Now, this isn’t really linear, and perhaps we’ll come back in a later episode to how it all really fits together. But if we look at it linearly and imagine that we incarnate in a linear way, then in each incarnation you experience things, you make choices, those choices have consequences, and it’s all stored in this memory. And the more you resist engaging with your soul’s themes and the learning themes you want to grow with, the higher the karmic pressure that builds up. The karmic pressure is carried into the next incarnation in this prism we’ve explained in earlier episodes. And the more you ignore it in that incarnation, the more pressure builds up, and eventually you’ve built up so much pressure that you’re almost forced to engage with your learning themes.

The karmic pressure between two people

So two people meet, each with the karmic pressure that has built up over a certain number of incarnations, which could be thousands of incarnations, and they mirror that karma and that memory in each other. That’s the setup. Then you could say they have a karmic relationship, and it can explode, go completely haywire and become completely irrational, because both have such great karmic pressure around certain learning themes. And when two people with great karmic pressure meet and mirror their karmic themes, their karmic memory, you get this kind of very destructive relationship. And here it makes no difference how close you are in your soul family, whether you’re twin souls or dual souls or whatever you call it, because the karmic pressure is there whether you want it or not.

So you’re quite right: then you can see it as a karmic bond that’s being lived out in a destructive way. And the solution is to make sure you get professional help to deal with your karmic pressure and your learning themes, as you did. And as you gradually grow out of it, you’ll automatically begin to attract other people into your life. The other partner has their own responsibility for dealing with their things. It isn’t your job to do anything about your ex-partners who weren’t right for you; that’s their choice. Your job was to do your part and grow out of this, and then you see that life changes too, in terms of synchronicity and all these things that turn up on the timeline.

The music you radiate

Amina: Yes, it’s very, very exciting, this business of attracting like-minded people, or your soul family. Can you say a little about how you begin to attract your soul family? Are there any special things you have to do, tasks, a path? How do you find your people, so to speak?

Pål-Esben: Well, it can be done in two different ways. One is filled with suffering, as we’ve talked about. That means you don’t do any work on yourself. You just let your soul’s learning themes, your imprints, your ego and everything karmic play themselves out on autopilot, and then it’s highly likely that you’ll attract people in your soul family who are the same way, and that’s often filled with a great deal of suffering.

If you want to meet the part of your soul family that isn’t filled with suffering, that is, not a relationship that builds up suffering, then you need to change what you radiate. You need to change your own music, the music you radiate. Every human being radiates a vibration, a music, which is of course very complex, a rhythm. It’s connected to our body, to how we think and how we feel, and of course to our light body and our soul. So you radiate a very specific kind of music, and I radiate a music that’s a bit different from yours, but we’re in harmony with each other, so to speak. Let’s use the language of music for these things.

So if you want to live a life with as little suffering as possible, and mostly with meaning and joy and these things, that is, primary feelings, then first of all you need to cultivate yourself, so that you yourself express these values in your daily life. And for that we have the 9 Pillars for Finding the Path of the Heart, where we work with all of this: forgiveness, gratitude and all these things. And the more you cultivate living out your heart and the heart’s principles in everyday life in a practical way, the easier it becomes to attract others in your soul family who do similar things. And through that, relationships are created that are constructive, uplifting, joyful and meaningful. That’s the way to go about these things.

Because there are no tricks. It isn’t as if you can have a special mantra. You can’t sit saying “Aham Prema”, I am love, all day long, and believe that some man or some woman will drop down from the sky, or a Porsche. You send a wish out to the universe, and then it lands here? That’s not how this works. It’s your music: as long as it’s destructive, no constructive people will be in harmony with your music.

And that’s what happened in your case. You cultivated these things we’ve been talking about for so long here in the podcast, took them seriously and did them in an authentic way, not just as a technique, but as part of you. Then you grew out of it. Your music, what you radiate, changed from the destructive part of what you used to radiate to a constructive, uplifting radiance that comes from the heart. And when you were at the Alternative Fair giving that talk on The 7 Golden Keys, what you radiated reached a person who has a basic, fundamental radiance of harmony, as your partner does. It was a match straight away. If you’d stood there radiating what you did a year or two ago, you could never have matched what he radiated there.

No shortcuts at the elite university for souls

So that’s the only way I know that gives concrete, objective, measurable results. If you want to attract people who are part of your soul family, who are uplifting and connected to the heart, and who can create meaningful, joyful relationships with lots of interest, excitement and whatever else, it all starts with yourself. The problem in today’s world, and in the esoteric world too, is that people are completely preoccupied with shortcuts. “No shortcuts here? Is there nothing? Don’t you have a special technique or method, so that this just happens, like that?” People love this idea of wishing things from the universe with special methods, and then things will just drop down in front of us. But that’s not how the universe is. That’s not how the world is. That’s not how our existence works.

We’ve all come here, our soul has come here, to learn, to grow, to explore things and to go through our tests, trials and exams, as we’ve talked about before. And it isn’t made to be easy. The design isn’t there to make anything easy. Because I call our planet the elite university for souls, one of the most complex and difficult places for a soul to incarnate. This isn’t for the beginner soul. It isn’t meant to be easy, but that doesn’t mean it’s complicated to find the way out of it. But it’s definitely not easy, and it isn’t made to be either. Nor is it made to be just shortcuts and shortcuts and shortcuts. You watch a three-minute YouTube video with a special mantra, and you just become happy, and everything’s fine? That’s delusion, and it means you end up down some blind alley, more and more desperate. And when I or you or others come along and say, “Yes, there’s work you have to do, there’s cultivation you have to do,” the answer is no, they don’t have time for that, no, they don’t want to. And then the suffering continues. Because it takes an effort that you have to be willing to bring to these things.

The effort that changes everything

And my experience, at least over more than two decades with thousands and thousands of students, shows this. Of my students who take this seriously and try as hard as they can to cultivate these nine pillars and the rest of what we’re talking about, I have never seen a single person who didn’t totally change their life and their experience of life. Never, ever have I seen it not happen. But it only happens through effort. It isn’t that it’s difficult, but it’s an effort you have to make. And thank goodness you took that responsibility and made that effort. That’s also why you are where you are today. You’ve gone from a chaotic life filled with anxiety, self-harm and depression, completely stuck, to being freer today than ever before. I call that a miracle. But you designed that miracle yourself, by working a little every day to become a better version of yourself, through a particular programme of cultivation that has proved, decade after decade, that it works. That’s the key to being able to attract the right part of our soul family.

Amina: Yes, and I can see that now. With the people I meet and work with today, and with fellow students, I notice there’s a moment of recognition straight away. We may not quite know each other yet on the human level, but there’s a resonance there. It’s easy, it isn’t that hard, and if something comes up now, it’s also very easy to resolve. Something else came to mind, I can’t remember what prompted it, but it’s a slightly different topic again. When it comes to this business of the soul, I don’t know if there’s anything more you want to say about it before I move on to the next one?

Pål-Esben: Fire away.

Starseeds and the longing for home

Amina: Because when we talk about the cycle of incarnation and spiritual awakening and the soul’s journey and things like that, we have a set of learning themes and so on. But a great many people, especially those going through a spiritual awakening, say that they’ve never felt at home on Earth. They feel they’re a starseed, or they feel they’re from another planet, that they aren’t really meant to be here. Or they think: “OK, I’m a lightworker from somewhere else.” And that’s something I got hung up on myself many years ago, until I started my training with you. Then I decided to put it behind me, and not just to acknowledge but also to embrace that now I’m a human being on Earth. It doesn’t matter what I’ve been; now I’m here.

But it’s still a question I get very often from the people I guide, or who come to me for readings. They wonder whether their birth chart says anything about where they’ve lived before, or whether they can go back in their next life. “How can I choose to go to another planet once I’m done with this life?” And is it the case that all human beings are really from somewhere else? That was a lot of questions. Just do the best you can here.

Pål-Esben: Very good questions. First of all: your soul, what you really are, has chosen to have experiences in your body on this planet. No one but you has chosen to come here. And you as a soul have chosen to come here, to one of the most difficult places to learn and experience. It’s a kind of final exam, so that afterwards you can do completely different things. It’s part of your soul’s process of growth. Your soul has chosen to play this game until you get the point. You could say the soul is in a dreaming state here, and that you’re really in a dreaming state. But that’s a completely different story, and I don’t know whether we should go into it right now. So the first point is that you, that is, your soul, what you are, have chosen to experience from the perspective of this planet. With its own free will, the soul has found that this is a challenge it can handle and wants to take on. It’s something you have chosen yourself.

The soul has chosen to be here

And we as human beings have this idea: living on this planet is so awful, there’s so much suffering here. Yes, we live in a world that’s very chaotic. And then the human being will think: “No, I don’t even want to take this on.” And then along come so many esoteric ideas that are supposed to show you a way so that next time you won’t need to incarnate any more. But only a human being can think this way. Your soul has come here to experience and to pass certain exams it has set for itself, as we talked about in the two previous episodes. And it will keep doing that until you’ve done it, even if it takes an infinite number of incarnations.

The computer game: levels and the soul’s doctoral thesis

And here there are metaphorical images we can use. It’s like a game, a computer game for example. When we incarnate for the first time, when our soul incarnates for the first time in this sphere, in this world we live in, you start on level 1, and there you have challenges and trials. And when you manage them and collect all the gold bars, or whatever it is you’re playing for, and have got through the challenges and exams on that level, you move up to level 2. And then you have to go through experiences on that level until you’ve got the point. If you don’t manage it, you start again in the next incarnation, and you experience and experience and experience until you’ve got through the challenges on level 2. Then you go on to level 3. And so it goes on, until after a certain number of incarnations you reach the last level, level 10 or whatever you call it. And there we have the final exams, including the soul’s doctoral thesis. And the doctoral thesis, and of course we’re speaking metaphorically here, is about the last step: finding the way out of your shell, out of your straitjacket, and back home to oneness. That’s the final exam. To take that exam, we need to go through all the other levels, gather learning and go through our process of growth. And then we come all the way to the point where we have the chance to do it, the last round. How many incarnations it takes is completely irrelevant to your soul. Because in reality time doesn’t exist; all of this happens at the same time. But that’s a story for another time.

So you can picture your soul as a gamer sitting with a console, gaming its way through, and whoops, there it went, so we start a new incarnation and try again. That’s not so far from what reality is like. Now, your soul isn’t a gamer, of course not; it doesn’t sit there with a computer game and a console. But imagine this gigantic soul of yours, which I said earlier can metaphorically be seen as the size of this solar system. It’s a gigantic thing, with massive insight and massive wisdom, connected to everything that is. Your soul chooses to come here to this planet, which is one of the most difficult places in this universe, and it doesn’t do that for things to be easy. So this idea we humans have comes from our karmic memory: “I don’t want to be here, I don’t feel at home here.” And that’s OK. But the day we accept that the soul, that is, you, has chosen to come here to go through learning tasks, tests and exams, the day you do that, that’s when the real process of development begins.

Escape or acceptance

Because then it isn’t escape you’re looking for. The problem here is that if we have this idea that we’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, we look for escape. We look for an alien with a spaceship who’ll come and take us away from here. That’s escape. And as long as we’re looking for escape, we block our soul’s desire to experience and learn in this incarnation. It’s normal for people to feel this way. Having a feeling that you don’t belong here, or that you’ve been completely different things before, is of course completely natural and normal. Because the fact is that your soul and my soul and the soul of you as a listener have done many other things besides just being on this planet. They have done a great many curious and strange things before that process started.

You can picture it like this. Incarnating, for example, in some advanced civilisation in Orion, the Orion constellation, or in areas around the Pleiades or elsewhere, is much easier for the soul. There we have far more developed civilisations than we have here on this planet, at least as of today, in the part of existence we live in. In an advanced, highly developed civilisation like that, you still have contact with your soul and with all your resources when you incarnate. That’s what the beginner soul and the inexperienced soul can do. But once you choose to come in and incarnate in a way where you have no access to your resources, that’s only for those with the most experience, who have matured over a long enough time with all the other things.

So you can say that yes, all of us on this planet, that is, our souls, have done a vast number of things before we come in here. And that’s really the precondition for the soul to be able to choose these complex circumstances we’re in on this planet at all, in the straitjacket, without having that close contact with our soul at all, at least by design. And that’s something we can build up; we’ll talk later about how this fits together. So the first part of the answer here is this: yes, the soul chooses to be here, and the sooner you accept that it’s your task, the sooner you can really get started on the learning task.

And number two: it’s natural to have this longing in you. The longing that you’re something more than what you experience. And it’s the longing that lies deep in each one of us, which we can call the divine spark, or our inner Sahara, or our connection with the divine, our connection with our soul. And it’s this deep, deep voice inside us that says: “This isn’t what I am. This isn’t where I belong.”

Amina: But does that mean the longing you feel isn’t necessarily about being from another planet, but about the deep, divine light, what we really are?

The midlife crisis: when the voice awakens

Pål-Esben: Correct. It’s this light that is in each one of us, which of course is connected to our divine existence, that is, our timeless and spaceless existence, and which says that we’re something more. And people notice this voice inside them very clearly somewhere between their early forties and their mid-fifties, when many have the so-called midlife crisis. You may have everything you need in your life and a good life, but you still feel an emptiness inside. And you go out searching to find what can fill this emptiness. That’s a typical sign that this voice is beginning to wake up, and that it’s time to turn homewards. It’s time to start seeking the way home. And that’s when many people begin their spiritual journey of development and discovery. And then the art is to find a competent teacher or guide, so you don’t end up in one of these esoteric rabbit holes where you just get confused and frustrated. So it’s natural. And remember that all of us have been many other things besides human. But that’s completely irrelevant when it comes to the soul’s desire for the learning task here. We are sitting in this straitjacket by design. Our task is to deal with this and accept that this is our place, and to stop and heal whatever lies behind our urge to escape. Because the escape is often triggered again by the first chakra, by the ego and so on, and then this tendency to escape gets stronger and stronger, which in turn leads to frustration and suffering.

And when we die, depending on where we are on our learning scale, the soul of course chooses to go on to the next incarnation, because there’s learning to be had here. The soul, that is, the gigantic you, can of course end its cycle of incarnation on this planet at any time, anywhere. But for the soul it would be meaningless to do that, since it has come here to pass a test. And that’s the crux of it. Only we humans, suffering from a lack of understanding, can think or say: “No, I don’t want this again. I don’t want this again.” And from the human point of view I can understand thinking like that, because this world can be very, very difficult to live in. But from the soul’s point of view, you’re in the perfect place, the perfect spot, at the perfect time. And it’s up to you whether you want to take hold of your soul’s learning themes and engage with them authentically. That’s something each person chooses. And as long as we ignore it, we’re tested again and again and again, until we reach that point and get going with our tests and exams in an active way. We’ve talked about all of this in detail in the two previous episodes.

Amina: Yes, an image just came into my head. Women give birth, and giving birth is very painful, and you think: “I’m never giving birth again.” And then some time goes by, and then: “Shall we have another baby, then?” You forget the suffering, you forget the pain. And sometimes I think, though I can’t find the right words, that being equipped with the ability to forget can be one of our greatest resources, but actually also one of our greatest sources of suffering.

Pål-Esben: But all in all, we’re in the right place at the right time. There’s nothing wrong with being here. But I can understand the longing in people; I really do. The longing to be something more than what you are goes together with not feeling quite at home in your body, feeling that the body is a bit wrong, that it feels very cramped inside the body. That comes from the karmic memory that lies in our prism, and also from this connection with the greatness in yourself and the divine in yourself. The problem is when it takes over, when it becomes everything. In other words, the challenge is when this longing takes over.

The boy who looked to the stars

I know from my own experience what this longing feels like. When I was little, I think I was different. All along I’ve been different from most people, a bit like an alien. From the time I was seven or eight, I would sit outside in the evenings, especially as I got a bit older, and look out at the stars. I was so fixated on the stars and had a feeling that I wanted to go home. I looked at the stars and had a feeling that I wanted to go home. I didn’t understand why I was in this straitjacket. I didn’t understand why my life was so difficult. I didn’t understand why I came to that point and experienced bullying, and was close to taking my own life, and experienced sexual abuse, all these things I experienced when I was little. I didn’t understand why. So I very often sat looking up at the sky and the stars, wishing I could go home. So I feel for people who experience this, believe me. It’s awful. For me it was very, very difficult, and then you get into these ideas of escape.

But eventually I understood that it’s about this life, and that there’s a reason I came down here. And as I understood that, and understood that there are certain learning themes and certain themes of development and these things that all of this is about, it all melted away like morning dew. But as a child and as a young adult I didn’t understand these things. As I came to understand this, I said: “OK, I can understand this longing, because I’m so much more than what I am, and a great deal of my soul family is connected to stars in different areas of our constellations, in different star clusters and so on. So it’s not so strange. And that’s OK.” But mainly it’s about engaging with this life we have. And as I went through my process, I made peace with it, and then other things also reveal themselves, to do with making contact with your past and all these things. But that isn’t what matters most about our incarnation, because it belongs to the last part of our exams. Until then, there are learning tasks through this level of the game that have to be gone through, and that has to happen through experience. There are no shortcuts. There’s no such thing as just closing your eyes and saying, “Please take me away from this planet.” Only the ego and the intellect can have these ideas.

The privilege of being here

And the day we make peace with the fact that our soul has come here to learn and to go through its process, we can begin to engage with it. And what’s so lovely is that this can happen within one lifetime. No one says you need to incarnate hundreds of thousands of times more. You can understand the learning tasks in this incarnation, you can complete them in this incarnation, and you can complete the last step, this doctorate in finding the way home to oneness, in this incarnation. Everyone can do it, but very few are even interested and engage wholeheartedly and authentically in the process. And of course, to do that you need a competent guide and teacher. Watching YouTube videos and reading books isn’t enough any more. So that’s how I experience and see this. But I have empathy for those who experience these things, and an understanding of it, since I’ve experienced it myself. But it’s also something you can resolve, and you can find complete joyfulness and happiness in this special world we live in.

For me today it’s a privilege to get to come and experience what we experience here. In the soul’s free state I can’t experience the taste of strawberries. Nor can I experience melancholy. I can’t experience falling in love. I can’t experience grief. I can’t experience any of what we experience here, because there you’re in a timeless and spaceless existence. So for me it’s spectacular to get to experience this part of the reality we live in. It hasn’t always been like that, I admit. But today, when you get the point and see how this works, it can change. And there’s hope for everyone. Even if you have problems in your life, even if you’re suffering, even if you’re facing adversity, there’s hope. But that doesn’t mean you have to fix everything in life yourself. That’s why we have helpers. That’s why we have doctors, that’s why we have therapists, that’s why we have spiritual teachers, that’s why we have guides: so that we find someone who guides us through the process. That’s what I did at the start, until I set myself free. That’s what you’re doing with me now, until you set yourself free. And that’s what you do with your students. That’s the key point here, as I see it.

Amina: Yes, that’s beautiful.

Viktor Frankl and the power over perspective

Pål-Esben: I certainly think so, yes. But at the same time it’s very important that we say you can still experience all the things that aren’t beautiful. But when you get there and experience these things I experience today, and that you experience too, you’re better able to see it from a constructive perspective, even when you go through difficult things in life. Take Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who was imprisoned by the Nazis, and who said something along these lines about the concentration camp: “They could take everything from me. They could torture me. They could kill my family and my friends in the concentration camp. But they could never take from me the power over what I think, feel and do about what happens to me.” That’s a very particular perspective to see life from, and it helped him survive there.

And that’s why, when we work with more advanced steps in a process of development, where you are today, we work a great deal on understanding perspectives and choosing perspectives. We work on understanding that we almost always have a choice. But are we willing to make the choice? And then this becomes really spectacular. Because then, when you fall into your hole and slip into suffering, you become able to change perspective very quickly, which means you get out of the suffering and the hole very quickly. This business of changing perspective and the choices we make through the day is high on my agenda. Perhaps we can talk about it in another episode, because it’s hugely exciting, and it’s life-changing when you start to dive into it.

Burnout as a gift

Yes, and here’s an example. When I went through my burnout in 2003, when I nearly lost my life, it was just awful at the start. Everything was awful. I blamed everyone around me for causing my burnout: my boss, my mother. It was only ever them I blamed. That’s how it started. But eventually, as I began to understand this, my burnout turned out to be the second-biggest gift I’ve received in my life. Because it gave me the chance to start my real process of growth, and it gave me the chance to have the life I have today, the understanding and insight I have today, and the joyful existence I have today, where I can help other people set themselves free. It’s quite incredible, really. Without that burnout, without the opportunities it gave me, I wouldn’t be where I am today. And that’s a very particular shift of perspective.

You can see illness as something negative and destructive, but you can also see illness from another perspective. What can you learn? What can you understand? What can you help others with? And I think we talked about that in an earlier episode too. It’s very valuable, and it can totally change how a person experiences their life, both when good things happen and of course when not-so-good things happen. I think we’ll talk about that in an episode of its own, and give tips on how this can be done in practice, because it’s really not that difficult.

Amina: Yes, I have the same experience, and I feel there isn’t a single difficult thing I’ve been through that I’d want to be without. And with every difficult thing I go through myself today, I reach new depths of myself. I expand in a way, and I can also meet people in a different way. So there’s something in that saying, every cloud has a silver lining.

Illness, taboo and new perspectives

Pål-Esben: Yes, but it takes something to be able to embrace that. It requires you to have gone through a process of growth and reached a point where you’re willing to change that perspective. For example, if I say today to someone who’s ill that there may be something positive about their illness too, that’s taboo to say in the society we live in. Totally taboo. You get shouted down. But an illness doesn’t have to be just a problem. It can also be a foundation for insight, growth and so on, as it has been for me over the last 20 years. But it requires you to go through this process of growth to get there; otherwise you become a victim of the taboos in society, where we can’t say certain things. But so many times I’ve seen people with terminal cancer, at stage three or four, who’ve been told by their doctor that they perhaps have a few months left to live, or a year left to live, and who have totally changed their life and gone from suffering to starting to live. I see it again and again. They’ve used their experience to inspire others who’ve been in the same situation, and several have told me they’ve never lived so fully and completely as after they got their life-threatening or terminal diagnosis. So yes, it’s possible. But a person then has to choose to do it. It’s something each person has to decide for themselves.

Anything else to round off with, Amina, about the soul and this and that, before we wrap up this topic?

Amina: I still have a few thoughts and questions left, but I think those are somewhat bigger topics to dive into, which we’ll have to cover in another episode.

Questions from you as a listener

Pål-Esben: If you as a listener have questions for us, things you’d like us to take up here, topics we haven’t talked about, things you perhaps don’t understand or would like us to talk more about, or whatever feedback you have on our podcast, you can go to our website. There you’ll find a feedback form you can fill in. The website address is the Norwegian name of the podcast, “Reisen til Selvrealisering”, written as one word: reisentilselvrealisering.no. We really appreciate getting feedback, and also tips about things you’re interested in. Because we think it’s great fun to talk together, Amina, but we also want to engage directly with you as a listener, and take questions and input from you. We want this to be as good as possible for everyone. So that was a little appeal before we finish. Words of wisdom to finish, Amina?

Words of wisdom to wrap up

Amina: Words of wisdom to finish. OK. Then I feel like saying this. You are here right now. You are exactly where you’re meant to be. It wasn’t supposed to be any other way. Make the best of the moment here and now, and of being a human being on Earth. That’s what I feel like saying after all the deep things we’ve talked about today. Because I know there are many who feel they don’t belong here, and I also know how much it can hurt to feel that. So I just want to encourage you to dive into yourself as a human being, through nature’s healthy rhythms to begin with, and to land safely on Earth, because Mother Earth holds us. On that journey, many, many exciting things turn up that make you feel more and more at home, both on Earth and in yourself, in your body, even if it can feel a bit cramped sometimes.

Pål-Esben: A short word of wisdom from me: tomorrow doesn’t have to be the same as today. We can make different choices today that make tomorrow better. We have that opportunity every single day we have on this planet. Thank you so much for staying with us all the way, dear listener. We really appreciate your feedback, and a five-star rating on Spotify helps our podcast reach more listeners. And thank you so much for being here with me, Amina. I really appreciate it.

Amina: Likewise, Pål-Esben.

Pål-Esben: Thank you for being with us, dear listener. I hope you’ll join us again in the next episode. And until then: have a truly wonderful day, evening, night or morning, wherever you are listening from. Take care.

Outro

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of “The Journey to Self-Realization”, a primordial shamanic journey of development back to your true nature. We hope Amina’s story has inspired you to explore your own journey of self-discovery and development. Remember that the path from suffering to self-realization can be demanding, but with courage, patience and support from a competent guide, mentor, teacher or therapist, almost anything is possible. We wish you all the best on your journey, and we’ll talk again in the next episode.