phenomeNEWS: Gary, you have written a number of books. With all the experiences you have had, how do you know what you know and what is your philosophy based on?

Gary Zukav: “How do I know what I know?” is as difficult to answer as the question, “Where does life come from?” I pay attention to my experiences. I listen to my inner sense of what is worth listening to. When I feel it, I make a point of remembering what I have heard and applying it to see if it works for me. You have the same ability. Something I have said or written may have caught your attention. Now you want to know more about it.

What did that experience feel like? Simply pay attention to it. Something happened within you that causes you to seek the source of my insights – insights that you recognized. When you recognized my insights, they became your insights. If you say to yourself or others that they come from me, you miss the point. That is like saying what you see in a mirror originates in the mirror. In fact, when you look into a mirror, you see only your reflection. When you recognize wisdom, wherever or however that happens for you, it is your wisdom that is being reflected back to you. Then you must decide whether to trust what you recognize. Will you look outside of yourself to make that decision or inside? That is the question.

Rejecting – for any reason – what you recognize to be significant for you invalidates your own experience, your own power and the impulses of your own heart. I suggest that you decide for yourself whether what stirs you is worthy of your interest. Do not look for footnotes in matters of the heart and soul. Look deep inside yourself. Otherwise, you will always be looking for references and longing to know from others how they know what they know.

Do we have a destiny? And if the Universe determines our destiny, what role do we play in shaping our fate?

The Universe does not burden you with a destiny. It provides you with potential. How much of that potential you realize depends upon the choices that you make. At each moment you are given an opportunity to choose. What you choose leads you to more choices. Each of those choices leads you to yet more choices and so on.

For example, a person who speaks rudely to you gives you an opportunity to choose how you will respond. Will you withdraw emotionally? Will you become angry? Will you be able to see his or her fear and pain and respond appropriately? The choice is always yours whether the issue is a rude person, the death of a friend, losing a job or missing the bus. When you make a choice, you pass through one of several doorways. The rest of the doorways close and your are again presented with more choices – more doorways. In each instance, one of the choices available to you is the optimal choice. The optimal choice that you can make in any situation is to grow spiritually. That means intending to create harmony, sharing, cooperation and reverence for life.

Moment by moment you are presented with an array of choices, one of which is optimal, no matter what you previously chose. There is wisdom in each of your choices because each of them creates consequences that you will experience and if you choose, learn from.

Your path through the Earth school is determined choice by choice – your choices, not the Universe’s.

My wife and partner Linda and I travel often so I have this experience often. Each time it surprises me. When I leave home I see it with new eyes. What was ordinary becomes special. I see the beauty of it. I am deeply nourished by the flowers, the rocks, the trees and the water. I admire the lines of our home and the warm feeling it gives. I see what visitors see and appreciate it with them. The hours and then minutes left to me before we leave for the airport are rich and full. I feel my roots. I remember the wild animals that have visited me here. Most of all I appreciate the growing and loving that Linda and I have done here together. I realize how special our home is and how special our lives are.

All of this happens during the brief interval between the time I wake and the time we leave on our trip. The day before I woke in the same bed, walked through the same house and looked at the same trees, flowers, water and rocks. I thought I appreciated them, but compared to the richness of my experiences before our departure, I realized I did not. When the car and the plane await me, I see my home and my life in full color. When I live there each day, I see them in black and white.

Beauty surrounds you continually. Sometimes you see it only when you are about to leave it. This mini-scene is a reflection of a macro-scene. The macro-scene is the duration between the time you were born and the time you will die. Your daily pre-occupations obscure the beauty around you if you do not make the effort to look for it. When the time comes for you to leave this Earth school, when your death is near, you will see more beauty around you than you can imagine. You will appreciate the people you have loved, those you have disliked and even those you have barely noticed.

You may think your life has no beauty, but that is not so. When your death is very near, you will see old battles from a new perspective and they will take on new meaning and richness. You will see the challenges and struggles of your friends and your adversaries and realize they are not so different from your own. You will see how your experiences, even the difficult ones, served you and others. You will see beauty everywhere you look and you will see it clearly because you may be about to leave it.

Why wait until the moment of your death to appreciate the beauty of your life. That moment is approaching more quickly than you think. The end of your time on this Earth is the conclusion of a powerful and awesome experience. You can touch that awe and power now. You do not have to wait until you are about to leave it. The richness and power of your life are available to you now – through the choices that you make.

Gary, many of us have been taught that when we were born, each of us was a new person with a new soul. Your views are based on the concept of reincarnation. Can you give our readers a better understanding of this concept?

Every night you sleep and the next morning you wake up. If you had an argument with your friend yesterday, you will still have the consequences of that argument to face when you wake up. They don’t just disappear because you went to sleep. You will still be responsible tomorrow for what you did today.

Reincarnation is just like that. What you create will be there for you to face in your next life if you don’t take care of it in this one. Just like the consequences that you create today will be waiting for you tomorrow if you don’t take care of them before you go to bed. You are always responsible for what you do and your responsibility cannot be assumed by anyone else.

When you die, you don’t go to sleep. You go home and you are very much awake. You are also much larger you than you are now. That is your soul. The consequences that you created but didn’t experience before you died do not disappear. They are waiting for you. You may think that you do not want to deal with them, but your larger you – your soul – does. In fact, it creates another lifetime just to do that.

Reincarnation is a compassionate way of learning responsibility. You do not suffer for eternity because you do the wrong thing once or twice or even time after time. It is not possible to do a wrong thing. You do what you do and you experience the consequences of what you do. It’s that simple. If you don’t experience those consequences before you die, your soul creates another life so that you can. That is reincarnation.

Eventually, you begin to treat people the way that you want to be treated. That means you change in big ways. You put yourself in your brother’s shoes before you speak or act. You let yourself feel your sister’s pain. You become more tender and caring. You also become more wise.

Maybe you will make those big changes in this lifetime. You can if you want to. Maybe you will take many lifetimes. Sooner or later you will make them. When you become completely loving and kind – without fear and without thoughts of harming others – you graduate from the Earth school and that is when reincarnation ends.

What are the first steps of spiritual growth that one should take to begin exploring one’s spirituality?

Start by becoming aware of your emotions. You cannot become spiritually advanced while you are unaware of what you are feeling. Emotional awareness requires you to become conscious of everything you are feeling all the time. It is difficult to become emotionally aware because many of your emotions are painful – but your painful emotions offer you the opportunities you need to grow spiritually because they originate in the frightened parts of your personality that you need to locate, challenge and heal in order to grow into your full potential.

Another important thing to do is to become more aware of your thoughts. Thoughts open you or close you. The thought that you might not be able to pay your rent closes you. The thought that the Universe is your friend opens you. The thought that your marriage might dissolve closes you. The thought that you are your own source of well-being opens you. How your thoughts open or close you is your experience. They determine whether you will fear and resist your experiences or whether you will embrace them and be supported by them.

Choosing your thoughts is like choosing a pair of glasses. One pair is dark-gray. They make everything appear threatening. Their lens have built-in distortions that twist everything that you see. When you wear them, all of your experiences are frightening. Another pair gives everything that you see a comforting, golden glow. Their lens do not distort but help you to see more clearly. When you wear these glasses, all of your experiences appear friendly.

There are many other kinds of glasses. Some distort and color your vision more than others and some distort and color it less. Each frightening thought does the same thing that a dark and distorting pair of glasses does. It makes what you see appear to be threatening. Every grateful and loving thought does what a light and clear pair of glasses does. It brightens what you see and reveals the beauty around you.

For example, if you get sick and can’t go on a trip that you planned, your illness will appear as a disaster if you think only about the vacation time you are losing or if you think that the only way you can enjoy yourself is to go somewhere else. It will appear as a gift if you think about what your illness and staying at home can show you about yourself that is important for you to know. The illness is the same in both cases. The lost vacation time and the stay at home are the same, too. The thought that you choose when you think about them is what determines your experience.

A reporter once asked a monk from Tibet, “Why are you always so optimistic? Your country is occupied by a foreign army and you may never be able to see your family again.”

“Because,” said the monk, “it makes me feel good.” This monk knew how to choose his glasses – his thoughts – deliberately.

How can we let go of our expectations of others and why is letting go of our expectations so difficult?

Shift your attention from others to what you feel when you interact with others. When you have expectations and they are met, notice what you feel. Notice also what you feel when your expectations are not met. The most effective way to do this is to notice what you are feeling without speaking or acting. The more proficient you become at feeling these sensations, observing them and learning about them, the less interested you will be in diverting your attention from them by shouting, withdrawing, judging and all of the other ways that you have used in the past. Once you develop emotional awareness, your emotions will become more interesting to you than what appears to cause them. When that happens, your expectations will disappear naturally and you will not even notice that they are gone.

Is it possible to experience my soul? How can I feel my soul?

When your life fills with meaning, you are on the path that your soul wants to take. When your life is devoid of meaning, you are on a path that your soul does not want to take.

When you experience your emotions, you feel your soul. Your emotions are the force field of your soul. Painful emotions, such as anger, jealousy, resentment and vengefulness, are expressions of fear. They are the parts of your personality that your soul wants to bring into wholeness. These parts reflect in the experience of our personality the parts of your soul that your soul wants to heal. Your soul does not experience anger, jealousy, resentment and vengefulness. It experiences distance from Light – uncontaminated, conscious love. You experience that as a form of fear.

When you use your intuition, you sometimes experience your soul. Intuition is the voice of the nonphysical world. Through your intuition, you access information that is not available to you through the five senses. Sometimes this information comes from nonphysical guides and nonphysical teachers. Sometimes it comes from fellow souls and sometimes it comes from your own soul. This is the higher-self experience.

Your soul is at the center of all that you experience. It is your essence. It is the part of you that is immortal. It is a powerful presence. As you align your personality with your soul, you become powerful, too. You become more and more able to bring harmony, cooperation, sharing and reverence for life into your life and your life becomes more joyful, no matter what is occurring in it – even events that others would consider tragic. That, also, is an experience of your soul.

Can we really change?

Yes. Set the intention to change and hold it. Return to your intention often. It is better to renew an intention throughout the day rather than to set it once and assume that nothing more is required. The only change you will experience in your life is the change you choose to make. Only the intention to change yourself can change you and you are the only one who can hold that intention.

The intentions of your soul are harmony, cooperation, sharing and reverence for life. In order to create these things, you need to find within yourself all the parts of your personality that want to create otherwise. They are the origin of your unconscious intentions.

The first step is to become aware of everything that you are feeling. Your emotions are the force field of your soul. You can’t become a compassionate or caring person and be unaware of your emotions at the same time. Your emotions lead you directly to the parts of your personality that do not care about other people or the Earth. Finding those parts and acknowledging them is a fundamental step toward authentic power. There are other steps as well.

Another is responsible choice. A responsible choice is a choice that creates consequences for which the chooser is willing to accept responsibility. Becoming aware of everything that you’re feeling enables you to make responsible choices. When you choose to create harmony, cooperation, sharing and reverence for life, you activate all of the parts of your personality that prevent you from creating those things so that you can recognize them and heal them – one by one, choice by choice, decision by decision – as they arise.

Why is life so difficult for many of us?

No one’s life on the Earth is easy. The Earth school is a learning environment. You are on the Earth to learn authentic power – the alignment of your personality with your soul. This requires learning how to create harmony, cooperation, sharing and reverence for life in a world that competes, hoards, values discord and exploits life. It also requires developing the ability to see wisdom and compassion in every challenge. If you already had that ability, your experiences would not be as painful because you would look at the challenges in your life differently.

This requires learning how to create what your soul wants to create. It also requires developing the ability to see wisdom and compassion in every challenge that you encounter. You “get nowhere” in your life by continuing to respond to the difficulties in your life in the same ways that you have responded to them in the past. Your experiences begin to change when your responses to your challenges begin to change. Whether your responses change or not is for you to decide.

When you judge an experience as unfair or tragic or random, you automatically experience anger, emotional withdrawal, depression, fear or another of the many painful emotions that accompany the perception of yourself as a victim. When you see each of your challenges as an opportunity to discover and change the parts of yourself that feel like a victim rather than the creator of your own experiences, you automatically respond to the challenges in your life with gratitude and even joy.

Moreover, when you respond to the challenges in your life with gratitude and appreciation, your responses to them change. Instead of reacting with anger, fear, depression, jealousy, rage or fear, you begin to respond with compassion and wisdom. You become more detached from your painful experiences and that allows you to see the circumstances of your life more clearly and to respond to them more intelligently.

Do you have a meditation practice?

My life is my meditation and everything I do in it is part of my meditation. Here are some of the things that I do: I observe my emotions in terms of the physical sensations in my body, especially my solar plexus, chest and throat areas, as often as I can remember. I challenge frightened parts of my personality. I also pay close attention to my intentions when I speak or act. My intention is my reason or motivation, for acting. It is also what creates the consequences I will encounter. When my intention is an intention of my soul – harmony, cooperation, sharing or reverence for life – I know I am creating authentic power. I also try to enjoy myself and the perfection of the present moment.

Remember that every form of life is sacred. Therefore, it is impossible to have an activity that is not sacred. The Universe is sacred. You are sacred and all that you do is sacred. The life of each individual is a sacred practice, although he or she may not be aware of it.

When you take time to know yourself or to appreciate your life and the lives of others, you open yourself to the experience of the sacred. you do the same thing when you pray. The more you open yourself to the experience of the sacred, the more you see that is sacred. Eventually, you will be that everything is sacred.

Coming to see everything as sacred and honoring the sacred everywhere you see it is also a meditation practice.

What words of wisdom would you like to leave with our readers?

Realize that you are worthy of your life and live it accordingly. Remember your spirit by remembering that the circumstances you are in are designed for your benefit. Sometimes that is difficult to do, but if you hold the thought that no matter how challenging the circumstance may be, it is designed to help you grow spiritually, that thought will allow you to see the situation differently. Instead of taking any situation personally, ask yourself what you can learn from it and what you are learning about yourself.

Once you develop this practice, you will find the deep learning that is waiting for you. Eventually you will discover that you are grateful for all your experiences, including the most difficult. By looking for the wisdom and the compassion that is waiting for you in your most difficult experiences, you will change your life.

Thank you so much, Gary!