Chapter Nine

The Help That Surrounds You

If the forgetting is real — if we truly come into this world having lost touch with our deeper nature — then we might expect to find ourselves alone, cut off, abandoned to figure things out on our own. But the traditions tell a different story. According to them, we are surrounded by help, even when we don't perceive it.

The most intimate source of this help is called by various names: the higher self, the oversoul, the guardian angel. In the telling we follow here, it is described as your own consciousness in a more complete form — who you will eventually become, reaching back through time to guide who you are now.

This may sound paradoxical. How can your future self exist already and guide your present? The traditions suggest that time, as we experience it, is not the ultimate reality. At deeper levels, past and future coexist in a kind of eternal present. The version of you that has completed the journey is already real, and from that vantage point, it can offer assistance to the struggling version still in process.

This higher self knows everything — every life you have lived, every lesson you have learned and still need to learn, every choice you will ever make. Yet it does not control you. It guides when asked. It protects when possible. But it respects your freedom completely. The journey must be yours.

Beyond the higher self, the traditions speak of other helpers — beings who have placed themselves in service to your development. Some are discarnate humans who have passed through death and chosen to assist the living. Some are entities who have never been human. Some are friends from other lifetimes, companions across the ages who continue to watch over you.

These helpers rarely communicate in obvious ways. You will not typically hear voices or see visions. The guidance comes more subtly: a thought that arrives with unusual clarity, a dream that offers unexpected insight, a meaningful coincidence that seems to answer a question you were holding. A book appears at just the right moment. A person enters your life carrying exactly what you need to hear.

The traditions suggest that this guidance becomes more accessible through stillness. When the noise of daily life quiets, the subtle voices become audible. This is why meditation appears in virtually every spiritual tradition — not because it earns merit or impresses the divine, but because it creates the conditions in which deeper awareness can surface.

Dreams, too, are a channel. In sleep, the barriers between conscious and unconscious become more permeable. The part of you that knows can communicate more freely. This is why dream journals matter, why paying attention to the images and feelings that arise in the night can offer guidance that the busy day refuses.

The help is real, but it respects boundaries. No guide will make your choices for you. No external force will override your will. You remain the author of your own story, the maker of your own decisions. The guidance is more like a whisper than a command — available to those who listen, never imposed on those who don't.

If any of this is true, then you are not alone. You have never been alone. The sense of isolation that can feel so overwhelming is itself part of the forgetting — a temporary condition, not an ultimate truth. Beneath the surface, connection remains. Help waits for you to turn toward it.

The asking matters. The traditions are consistent on this point: guidance flows more freely to those who seek it. Not because the helpers are withholding, but because free will requires that we choose to open. A simple, sincere request — offered in stillness, held without demand — begins a process that may take forms you cannot predict.