It is one of the most honest spiritual questions I have ever been asked. And it deserves a real answer. Here are three different lenses, from three different traditions, that together paint a complete picture.
1. The moment you incarnate, you forget
One of the defining characteristics of planet Earth is density and separation - separation from the light, from each other, and from the memory of who we actually are. The moment a soul steps into a physical body, that connection is almost completely veiled. And in its place, the ego takes over.
The ego is not evil. It is a survival structure built to protect you in a world that can be harsh and unpredictable. But it operates from fear, scarcity and self-preservation. When we are unconscious, with no spiritual awareness and no impulse to pause and question ourselves, we act from the ego almost entirely. This is where cruelty, hatred and harm come from - not from the soul, but from a human being so disconnected from their soul that they have forgotten it exists.
Think about what life looked like throughout history - and not just the distant past. Executions were public entertainment. Slavery was legal and widely accepted. Entire peoples were colonised and massacred without mass moral outrage. Does that mean those souls were evil? No. It means collective human consciousness was at a much lower point on its evolutionary arc - more deeply veiled, more completely run by ego and survival instinct. We have come a long way since then. The shift happening globally right now is real - more people than ever are pausing before reacting, questioning inherited beliefs, doing the inner work. This is the ascension process unfolding in real time.
And yes - looking at the world today, at war, injustice and corruption, you might ask: is it really better? The answer is not that suffering has ended. It is that we can no longer accept it in silence. The outrage we feel about Ukraine, about Gaza, about systems built on exploitation - that outrage is itself evidence of a collective conscience that simply did not exist at scale hundreds of years ago. Consciousness rising does not mean darkness disappears overnight. It means more and more of us can see it, name it, and refuse to look away.
This is also where karma comes in. Karma (the law of cause and effect) does not factor in what era you were born into, how unconscious you were, or what your society normalised. Every action creates an energetic imprint that must eventually be rebalanced. This is why souls return lifetime after lifetime - not as punishment, but because the account is not yet settled.
A simple example: someone who in a past life caused harm to others - perhaps in a role of power during a war or period of persecution - may find that in a later life they are drawn to work that eases suffering on a similar scale. The soul is not being punished. It is completing the circuit. Karma works in both directions too, every act of genuine kindness, courage or service creates an imprint that will also return to you, often in the form of unexpected help, opportunity or the right people appearing at the right time.
The remarkable thing about the time we are living in right now is that we can burn karma at a speed that simply was not available in previous lifetimes. Every time you choose your soul over your ego - every time you pause, heal, and respond from a higher place - you are not just improving your own life. You are accelerating your soul's entire evolution. The best way to heal the planet is to heal yourself. That is not a metaphor. It is literally how it works.
2. The Kabbalah explanation - why the system was designed this way in the first place
The Creator is pure light, pure giving. Its only nature is to share - endlessly, unconditionally. To have something to give to, it created souls. And the souls began receiving this infinite light freely, with nothing required in return. But something unexpected happened, the souls felt shame. Not because the Creator judged them, but because they were receiving something they hadn't earned. In Kabbalah this is called the Bread of Shame.
So the souls made a remarkable choice, they pushed the light away and asked to earn it instead. Physical life is the answer to that request. Earth, with all its challenges and friction, is the arena where souls earn the light they refused to receive for free. This is why struggle is not a sign something has gone wrong. Struggle is the point. It is the mechanism by which your soul earns what it came here for. You cannot truly appreciate or own something that was simply handed to you, and your soul knew that before you were born.
The Bread of Shame also plays out in your relationships in a way you will immediately recognise. When you give someone something they haven't earned, aren't ready for, or don't truly value - your love, your time, your energy - they reject it. They may even end the relationship, despite being the one receiving. The receiver walks away because, at a soul level, receiving what they haven't earned creates that same internal shame. This is why over-giving destroys relationships. And if you have ever loved someone fully and they still left - this is why.
3. Carl Jung and the shadow - the darkness is not separate from us, it is the unloved part of us
Carl Jung identified something he called the Shadow - the parts of ourselves we have suppressed, rejected and buried, usually from a very young age. Not because these parts are inherently evil, but because somewhere along the way we were taught they were unacceptable. Too angry. Too needy. Too selfish. Too much. We do not eliminate these parts by ignoring them. We drive them underground, into the unconscious, where they continue operating without our awareness - erupting in moments of stress, in our closest relationships, in patterns we repeat over and over without understanding why.
Now scale that to the collective level. The hatred, violence and cruelty we witness in the world is not a separate dark force that invaded God's creation. It is what generations of unhealed human pain looks like when it accumulates and gains power. People who cause the greatest harm are almost always people carrying the greatest unacknowledged pain. Hurt people hurt people. This does not excuse the harm, but it explains it completely.
So are we divine or are we dark?
Both. It is completely futile to try to be one-sided, to try to keep only the light and eliminate the dark. Imagine a magnet: you cannot cut it in half and have only the positive pole. The two sides are inseparable. Every human being carries the full spectrum of human traits, the capacity for love and the capacity for cruelty, generosity and selfishness, courage and cowardice. What you see in others exists in you. What disturbs you most in the world reflects something unacknowledged within you. We are, at the deepest level, one consciousness - experiencing itself through billions of individual expressions, each carrying the full range of what it means to be human.
True spirituality is not becoming one-sided. It is not achieving some permanent state of light where the shadow never surfaces and the ego never speaks. That is not a spiritual goal, it is a spiritual fantasy. True spirituality is the daily, imperfect, courageous practice of choosing your soul over your ego. Again and again and again. Every time you pause before you react. Every time you choose to look inward instead of pointing outward. Every time you do the work of healing rather than repeating the pattern. Not because you will one day arrive somewhere beyond the struggle, but because each choice lifts your consciousness, burns your karma, and contributes something real to the evolution of this planet.
There is an old Cherokee teaching about two wolves. A grandfather tells his grandson: "Inside every person, two wolves are at war. One is dark - anger, ego, fear, cruelty. The other is light - love, compassion, soul." The grandson asks: "Which wolf wins?" The grandfather answers: "The one you feed."
You are not failing at being spiritual because you still feel darkness. Both wolves live in you. They always will. The question has never been whether the dark wolf exists. It has always been which one you choose to feed.
This is the work I walk through with clients in Akashic Records readings - not to show you a perfect version of yourself, but to show you the full truth of who you are at soul level, the lessons you came here to learn, and the karma you are actively here to clear.