Korpo

One term that might be the biggest misnomer of them all is "soul age." You can find the term for example in the "Michael Teachings" (an entity channeled by many individuals). The term "age" is meant to infer the wisdom that's supposed to come with greater age. Yet in our physical reality frame of reference age progresses regardless whether we accumulate wisdom, knowledge or insight, or almost none at all.

One of the better terms to refer to the actual quality is "insight." It derives from Buddhism and means a quality of knowing that transcends figuring things out with the thinking mind. It is spiritual intuition. In theosophy this would be a quality associated with the body beyond the mental body, the causal or soul body. In theosophy (see for example Powell's "The Causal Body") the soul would accumulate some sort of knowing from all of its incarnations. It would become the place where the distilled insight from all these lifetimes comes to rest and reside and where new lifetimes are spun from to learn new lessons.

It is not experience, as experience is merely the basic element it is distilled from. If you follow Danelek's "The Case for Reincarnation" it is not knowledge, as the knowledge seems to be forgotten between lifetimes, but some sort of intuition built from the knowledge of many incarnations.

To me it is a quality like a built-in compass. When you have it and (re-)learn to read it - and trust it! - it can become an uncanny guide for many of life's challenges. You don't know exactly where it's coming from, but it feels right - not as in self-righteousness, but more like being in the flow, the right place.

When there is access to this quality, the choices you make seem almost self-evident, as if there was a set of morals no one ever had to teach you. When I read Gandhi's "Experiments in Truth" - his autobiography - it was clear to me that many decisions he made were guided by this built-in moral compass, no matter what rationalization he offered for making them.

Because therein lies the rub - a human with just access to the thinking mind can rationalize almost anything. Think of the Greek school of philosophy called the Sophists. They would rationalize whatever end result was desired and build arguments to support that. And even Douglas Adams made fun of it when in "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" he described a very popular set of software for business managers that would, after being given an end result, would devise argument strategies to arrive there.

If all of this sounds familiar, it probably is. "Think tanks" utilize the thinking mind to sell certain messages to the people that someone believes you should believe in (and let's not get sidetracked into discussing who benefits of that). The current state of many political and economical entities in this consensus reality is very much in love with the thinking mind and its many abuses. And its lack of morals.

It was scientists who built weapons of mass destruction not ever seen before. There will be those who say that not to blame science for its applications, but I'd rather "blame" the nature of the thinking mind itself when it operates without the built-in moral compass. When only the thinking mind - the mental elemental - is in charge, questionable outcomes arise in terms of their moral quality. We just rationalize away what we don't like and build a story of what we think the world should be. There's always a reason. There's always an excuse.

Some would say this is human nature, but I'd rather pinpoint it a bit more and say it's a quality of an out-of-control thinking mind.

But there's another catch, and this is where we return to the idea of soul age. Not every person incarnated on the planet has the same soul age. Each one faces a different set of lessons in different configurations to further their own learning as a soul and as groups of souls, and maybe even the whole reality system.

While I believe that ultimately every soul will attain the same learning (which could be termed as "having achieved a certain soul age"), I don't think they all do at the same time. If I look at the world and think all the people are the same (which ultimately means that I think all people are like myself) I would start to randomly judge them for their "evil" acts. But if I shift my view to looking through the lens of different soul ages, I might differing levels of insight and ignorance, wisdom and its absence.

This might not seem much at first, but this is one of the way to unravel the knot of judgement. If we realize that another being has not learned a certain lesson yet we realize also that they could not - as of yet - have known better. We don't expect children to act like adults. I love Willy Wonka's sentence from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" in this regard where he accuses the children of not having put in the necessary effort of having become adults yet. A wonderful example of turning things on their head which becomes a window into seeing them more truly.

Because if we look at children we don't always judge them for their actions, but we might think they need teaching, attention and time. But if we look at adults we are much harsher instead. From the perspective of soul age, however, we may give people a break at times. It might have been self-evident to Gandhi to become a fruitarian or to strictly adhere to a doctrine of nonviolence, but for billions it still isn't.

If we follow ideas like those from the Michael Teachings, instead of judging those billions for not living up to our standards, we could just see them going through their own stage of their personal evolution. Some souls still do not respect human life enough to refrain from murder when for others cruelty towards animals has become literally unthinkable. Some pour their every moment into service while others still have not learned the consequences of greed and exploitations. And if you think human history is a bit repetitive, in certain regards it is and I think that is because of soul age and millions of souls needing a lesson that others chose to learn earlier.

Judgement, by the way, is a quality especially strong being present in the mental elemental. As the mental elemental operates on ideas about the truth, it judges others according to these. In changing perspective to one where many different levels of spiritual evolution may coexist at the same time, we also shift away from the black-and-white judgement of the mental elementals and its simplistic right/wrong and good/evil extremes. As we see that everyone's actions are relative to their own soul evolution we don't require them to think like us and be like us, nor do we judge ourselves for not being like Gandhi.

Everybody can only tread the path in front of themselves, and if they do so with earnestness and as conscious as they can, they do the very best they are capable of.