If your parents had never met, would you still be here? Oprah continues her series on "soul searching" with spiritualist Gary Zukav, author of The Seat of the Soul, exploring the roots of our being.
Oprah shares the story of how she was conceived—a one-time fling under an oak tree. "What if (my mother) had said, 'No, I don't want to go.' Would I be here?" Oprah asks. Gary responds, "Your soul would adapt to other circumstances."
Does this mean that our lives are predestined? Not at all, Gary says. "We have free will, and in fact, that free will is our creative essence." Yet Oprah wonders how one has free will while in prison or in Darfur. Gary says even a prisoner has the free will to love—that his jailors can't take that away from him.
Gary illustrates the concept of personality versus soul by describing the soul as the "mother ship," which determines the direction of the entire fleet. Your personality is represented by all the other boats in the fleet—each of these boats can sail in any direction, he says. "When you decide to sail in the direction that your 'mother ship' is sailing, your life begins to fill with meaning and purpose and creativity and vitality…and you come alive," Gary says. "Making the decision to follow your 'mother ship' is your life's work. That's creating authentic power."
Oprah shares a powerful revelation after an Oprah Show taping when a wife was humiliated by the on-camera revelation that her husband had a pregnant girlfriend. "I felt her humiliation; I felt her pain," Oprah says. It was at that moment Oprah realized that the show was off track and immediately implemented changes to align her work with her conscious intention, she says. "Never again will I be a part of somebody having their life destroyed because of something that I did."
Now, through her work around the world, Oprah is creating authentic power, Gary says, noting it's not the power of beauty or money or "external power." "You are so powerful that the idea of harming others is not in your consciousness," he says.
