> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://blog.desinda.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Foreword: An Introduction to Forging a New Path - URL: https://blog.desinda.dev/foreword-an-introduction-to-forging-a-new-path/ - Published: 2026-10-17T14:17:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-18T17:22:51.000Z - Description: Let's discuss various definitions of words that float around spiritual spaces before we delve deeper into our history. - Author: Luke Selman - Tags: Forging a New Path # Foreword Before any articles are written, I'd like to take the opportunity to explain how the section of this website works and how it is presented. First, it is important to distinguish between "spiritual" and "a way of thinking". Spiritual "advice" should never try to alter or influence your way of thinking, your mindset or your personal experience. If you find that happening anywhere, including on this website, switch off immediately. True spiritual advice is neutral. It makes no assumptions about your personal circumstances, and it generally focuses on how to bring clarity into your life so that you can form your own conclusions. That, in its very essence, is what it means to *be* spiritual. Spirituality is a deeply personal relationship between your body and your higher self, and no one knows you better than you do. Any description or information that leads you away from that path is very likely being used to manipulate your thoughts or decisions. What I cover in these articles is less about spirituality for its own sake and more about how we navigate the world around us, and what we can achieve once we reach a sense of spiritual growth. By spiritual growth, I mean experiencing life and exploring parts of yourself that have yet to be explored, then questioning what those parts are and how they can help you grow your knowledge of the world around you. In spiritual communities, you will come across terms such as "Life Path", "Soul", "Higher Consciousness", "Connection" and "Oneness". Let's explore these terms. ## Life Path Your Life Path is a series of decisions made before you entered your physical, mortal form. Think of the human "being" as exactly that: a state of *being*. Rather than a whirling energetic sensation wandering aimlessly through space, you are focused and concentrated at a single point where geometry and biology converge into a physical form. The Life Path is the link between the Soul and the body. The body acts as the Soul made real, while the Soul drives the body to explore different parts of itself. The Soul could explore everything all at once if it wanted to, but there is something truly wonderful, more intimate and more grounded, about experiencing an "illusory" reality through a single state of being. And so, people ask: "Why do I exist? What is the point?" People who ask this profound question are usually still finding their feet, still coming to understand their Life Path, or have lived a good part of their life and are struggling with the present. Whichever it is, they are generally *not* "being in the present". This is not a criticism. These junctures in life are an opportunity to question ourselves and ask of our Soul where we go. Deep down, we already know what we *should* do. Sometimes the physical body simply cannot comprehend it. It doesn't understand the images or the nuance that the Soul and higher self carry, and the Soul is willing to wait until the body is ready. Your Life Path *is* the journey. The intimate details of what we do with our lives are irrelevant to the Soul. We make those decisions ourselves, out of free will. But first and foremost, the Soul plays a role in how we conduct our lives and what we came down here to do. ## Soul I've mentioned the Soul a lot already and briefly described its essence, but its true nature is beyond human comprehension. The best human analogy I can offer is someone using a computer. Imagine you are sitting at a computer writing a script. Each key you press sends an electrical signal (in our case, a signal through our "neurons") corresponding to the character you want to type. That signal travels through the motherboard to the CPU and the Operating System (our "brain"), which decides where to send it: to the muscles for movement, to the organs for life, etc. The result then appears on the screen, which is the reality you perceive once those signals have produced an outcome. What you see on the screen is a "simulation" of the result. The Soul is already "you", but because there is a gap between you, the interface and the result (the person, the keyboard and the screen, in the computer analogy), it *feels* less like connection and more like separation. The Soul is our guiding consciousness. It assists us where we need it. It's always there, and all we need to do is ask. ## Higher Consciousness When people talk about "Higher Consciousness", they often mean the Soul. That's true in some spiritual spaces, but in others the term refers to the subconscious mind. I will use "Higher Consciousness" to mean the subconscious, because the Soul and the subconscious are separate, though connected. The brain is wired for survival; the subconscious is wired for intuition. The subconscious is where the heart speaks, and the heart has its own network of neurons, separate from the brain. That places the heart at the junction between the higher self, the conscious mind and the flesh. When we ask Higher Consciousness for help, we are generally redirected to the heart, because the subconscious speaks only in images, not words. The heart can be thought of as the translation unit between the subconscious and the conscious mind. So when we speak, we are either speaking "from the heart", as people say, or "from the mind". When the Soul intervenes directly in a conversation, it is probably for the best: it is speaking through your subconscious, and your heart translates that message into words that both you and the other person understand. The subconscious, then, bridges the communication between the Soul and the heart. It is another translation unit, one that speaks in images. Here is how the layers fit together: ``` ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Soul │ │ communicates in the ethereal │ │ ↓ │ │ Subconscious / Higher Consciousness │ │ understands the ethereal, │ │ communicates in images │ │ ↓ │ │ Heart │ │ understands images, │ │ communicates through neurons │ │ ↓ │ │ Brain │ │ understands and communicates through │ │ neurons, and produces the output │ └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘ ``` ## Connection "Connection" can be misleading. Some people use it to mean being connected to the higher self; others mean connection with other people. I'm speaking about the latter. As we navigate the world, it's easy to believe that by working on ourselves in isolation we are developing a truer understanding of who we are, and that this alone helps us evolve as a human race. There is nothing wrong with that. However, evolution cannot truly manifest until we interact with other people, and those people will see you differently from how you see yourself. These independent perspectives are how the self evolves through connection. We can choose to shut ourselves off from the world, which can be good for recovery when the body needs it, but it is not good for spiritual growth. Spiritual growth yearns for connection: communicating and speaking with others, regardless of language barriers. It is the most intimate form of spirituality because it grounds us in the moment. There are at least three forms of connection we know: - Friendships and Passing Remarks - Relationships and Bonding - Business ### Friendships and Passing Remarks Here, heart-centred communication has less influence, and the brain acts as the mediator. Picture yourself in a room full of strangers. When it's your turn, you're asked to introduce yourself, so you do, saying as little as possible because you're not sure what to make of everyone else yet. Depending on the room and its atmosphere, you either feel welcome or isolated. What matters about this scenario is that it represents the "silent majority". Strangers are people we speak to from time to time, and connections form when "time to time" turns into frequent conversation. Nothing we don't already know. ### Relationships and Bonding This really belongs in two separate categories, but for simplicity I'll keep it brief here, as it deserves its own article. Relationships are a two-way process of communication. Most people think of a "relationship" as *only* a sexual or intimate one, and treat a bond of friendship as simply being "close friends". In my opinion, that is a narrow way of viewing relationships. Relationships are complex psychological and spiritual evolutions of ourselves. The bond between two people doesn't have to be sexual. It only has to be strong enough that your conversations with them give you a sense of freedom you have never felt before. I say "two people" deliberately, because a relationship is best in that form. In my view, it is unhealthy to think of a relationship as a bond between more than two people; it is a little like breaking the spiritual contract you made with the other person. Someone may have a relationship involving three or more people at the physical level, but spiritually it always remains two-way: never more, never less. You are either aligned with a person spiritually or you are not. There is no crossing or mixing in that sense. I will discuss relationships, and how they help us evolve, in a later article. ### "Business" Relationships The third kind of relationship is a "business" relationship: in essence, a contract to communicate on agreed terms and rules, presented as a trading agreement. One "party" (as it's called in "Law") makes a contract with another party, agreeing payment terms and what will be provided in return. I put "Law" in quotation marks because, strictly speaking, a law is something that cannot be broken, like the laws of physics. Since all human laws *can* be broken, they aren't technically laws by that definition. That minor detour aside, business relationships range from simple verbal agreements all the way to complex contracts between businesses or employers and employees, plus all the "laws" surrounding them. In the coming months, and possibly years, we will discuss how business relationships might evolve: what leadership could become (and whether that is evolution or devolution depends on your perspective), and how we can make our business relationships more heart-centred rather than purely transactional, as they are in our modern world. ## Oneness Oneness describes the idea that we are all connected to one consciousness, one source and one ethereal energy. I prefer to describe Oneness simply as that ethereal energy, because it describes what it is, rather than offering a speculative, human-perceived view of it. Ethereal energy is *not* ethereal in the sense you might think, though. These are real places with real locations in space and time; they are simply drawn toward higher frequencies, timelines or "densities". "Density" is an important word here, and you will hear it often in spiritual spaces. Density refers to the energy that Higher Consciousness is aligned to. Remember the diagram above: as the subconscious aligns with higher frequencies, it aligns itself with the Soul. "Raising your vibration", which is invariably what people mean by this, is aligning with the Soul. That doesn't mean reality itself changes. What we manifest is still reality as we have always seen it; we don't mysteriously vanish, as some people might suggest. That said, there is some nuance here, and some truth too. Let me start with the nuance, because it confuses a lot of people who are beginning to explore how the universe works and how density and the self interact. The idea that reality is an illusion, a kind of simulation, is one that some scientists and philosophers have seriously proposed and continue to debate. Physics points in a related direction. M-Theory, better known to the public as "String Theory", proposes that at the very smallest scale, far smaller than the particles inside atoms, everything is made of tiny vibrating strings, and that the way each string vibrates determines what kind of particle it appears as. String Theory has not yet been proven by experiment, but the picture it paints is this: reality, at its root, may be vibration. On a separate but related note, research into nuclear fusion as a cleaner successor to nuclear fission (and, more broadly, to our dependency on fossil fuels) shows just how much energy is released when matter interacts at extraordinarily high temperatures. Fusion is still being tested and researched, but if this engineering feat succeeds, it could be the precursor to a world that harnesses the raw energy of the universe. None of this quite answers the question on density, but it does bring clarity to one thing in particular: the tiny vibrating strands that make up reality. Reality can be seen as one of two things: - Energy vibrating at different frequencies, amplitudes and wavelengths; or, - A biological cell or membrane that has evolved beyond the capacity of its base energies. The first we can influence; the second we cannot. Once a concrete form has taken shape, it *cannot* be changed unless something in that *same reality* interacts with its frequency. In other words, a human body was formed in third density, and it stays in third density. That's final. The universe won't change that just because the frequency of your subconscious changes. Your subconscious is the first of the two: vibrating energy. That is what you can influence. It is shaped by experience and by your life decisions, and what you do with your life can manifest a different reality for you, but you still *live in third density*. The truth in the "density story" is this: as the subconscious learns to align more closely with the Soul, that alignment gives us experiences that are more in tune with the Soul. It does not, however, directly manifest a result. To return to the computer analogy: you can't change the text on the screen until you press Delete or Backspace. In the same way, you can't force your reality to change while you're in a negative state; you first have to shift to a positive one. That's on you, and no one else. Change comes once a positive state is reached and new experiences arrive, or when you shift from one positive state to another, since there can be multiple perspectives (timelines). Timelines are a topic for another time (no pun intended). ## Taking it All In It will take time to absorb all this, as I've packed a lot of definitions into one article, but they are worth holding on to as we move through the articles on this website. Many questions will arise before we continue, but the most obvious one to me is: "What does our future look like?" Our future is not decided. As we navigate the world, we will experience personal hardship, grieve a troubled world, and grieve the loss of those closest to us. Through whatever unexpected hardship comes our way, there is one thing to hold on to: we still have our memories and our experiences. It is our experiences that shape our decisions, and ultimately our future. People who experience less are less inclined to change the world, while those who experience more are more inclined to change it. And the wilder your experiences, the broader your perspective and the greater your view. If you jump into a situation and make statements or claims that don't hold up, don't expect your audience to stay. Political activists should be equally careful about the claims they make of others and of the world, as they are just as susceptible to this confusion. It is important to stay grounded and healthy. I don't claim, or wish, to decide what others do, as that isn't my place. I will say, though, that I don't personally agree with politically motivated "activism", in whatever form it takes. Most activism that makes the news does so because it suits a political goal; that's what makes it politically motivated. So, before you attend your next protest, ask yourself: do the goals of this protest align with my own? There are times when protest is necessary, and there are times when it's time to stop. I rant, as I usually do, so apologies for the detour. The point I'm making is that the experience of the future is the experience of now. What we do *now* is what changes the world. We can either sit and do nothing, or explore new ways of expressing ourselves and share that expression with the world. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fb/21/fb21455e-e1f2-4825-a5db-51aff6ed5ffc/content/images/2026/10/IMG-20260923-WA0000.jpeg) A coffee cup and a soft toy beside my laptop while working in a coffee shop in Gwangju, Korea This is our future. We pave it with subtle expressions of our true selves, whatever form they take. Soften your vibrational energy and let it flow, rather than demanding that people change on your behalf. You may find, through time and changes within, that love and compassion will find you, while a chase will keep the rabbit chasing the carrot without end.