What is the Soul?
Given that I talk soul a lot and situate it at the center of my work, I’d like to take a moment to share what I mean by soul. For a long time, I didn’t really have clarity about the difference between soul, spirit, and higher self. I used soul and spirit interchangeably but would still have a hard time fully describing what I meant.
Distinguishing between Spirit and Soul
I currently see spirit as the transcendent, evolutionary, up-and-out, still, pervasive, yang-essenced, unifying great eternal Mystery that animates everything in Creation. Spirit is what we all have in common. It unifies us all; it is our Oneness. It is ethereal, immaterial, perfect, out-and-above our ordinary lives. The path of spirit takes us to the upper or Celestial worlds.
Soul, on the other hand, is inscendent (the journey of descent), involutionary (spirit into matter), down-and-in, moving, particular, yin-essenced, and unique to each human and animate being. Soul is what makes us a unique spark of the Divine, of Spirit. It is embodied, indwelling, imperfect. The path of soul can take us to the lower or underworld realms. Soul can also deliver us back to the Middle World in our most whole, authentic and empowered form.
“[Soul] keeps a woman powerful and grounded in herself, complete in herself, belonging to herself, and yet connected to all that is.”
We need a balanced path of soul and spirit journeying to truly become and come home to our true essential nature.
Soul
Poet David Whyte calls soul:
· the image you were born with
· that small, bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart
· the one life you can call your own
· the one line already written inside you
· the shape that waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky.
Soul runs deeper than the personality (which is ideally meant to serve the soul). It includes the essence of our being as it is meant to particularly express in this lifetime: our core and enduring qualities of being. These enduring core qualities include:
· the ideals, values and principles for which we’d be willing to live and die for
· our deepest core purpose for incarnating
· the natural talents, capacities and abilities we possess to actualize our soul essence on Earth
· those things we know at the deepest levels without effort and without learning
· the core lessons and gifts we came to experience.
“Soul to me means ‘embodied essence,’ when we experience ourselves and others in our full humanity—part animal, part divine. Healing comes through the embodiment of our soul . . . soul grounds us; it loves and accepts us in our totality.”
Human souls are embodied. They exist in the living breathing universe of our flesh and bones, our cells and DNA. Human soul has a deep affinity to the natural world. In fact, soul is the most natural, organic, wild, and untamable aspect of our being. The human soul and the soul of nature often act as mirrors for one another, and are designed to be in deep communion with one another.
The soul is part-accessible and part-inaccessible to the conscious mind. The soul doesn’t speak in English and is not of the mind’s fashioning. Soul doesn’t conform to linear, rational, practical ways of being or knowing. Soul speaks in symbols, images, archetypes, emotions, and through sensation and movement. Soul is centered in intuition and imagination. It reveals itself in dreams, songs, poetry, art, the eyes of our beloved ones, and in the wild.
“The Soul doesn’t seem to make the distinction between the light and the dark. It chooses both. It doesn’t care whether you do something successfully or fail at it; it just wants to know, did you do it in your way? Was it you who failed or were you trying to be someone else when you failed? If it was you, the soul is happy, because it was your experience, your failure, and no one can take that away from you.”
Soul doesn’t care about doing something “right” or “perfectly,” it cares about doing things authentically, and exploring the full range of human experience.
Dimensions of Soul
Taking soul a step further, we can also come to see different levels or dimensions of the soul. We’ve been talking about the soul of a single human consciously occupying a single body and moving through perceived linear time and space on the planet Earth. But we are more than this.
Our Higher Self is our planetary consciousness; the aspect of our essence that is focused on our earthly experiences. This level of our being has immediate access to all parallel experiences your soul is embodied in that are playing out and have relevance to who you are in the now. It is also our access to collective consciousness. It has access to past, future, and parallel human life experiences of our Being.
The Oversoul or multi-dimensional self, is universal and galactic, including and operating beyond the Earth. The oversoul retrieves, contains, and organizes your past, present, future and parallel lifetimes and experiences as a multi-dimensional being in the galactic universe. This includes Earth and non-earth experiences. As I understand it, this is what Sera Beak calls our Divine Soul.
Different traditions give different names to aspects of Self and the All. I offer these definitions not as The Truth, but as a way to share terminology, to use the approximation of language to understand one another as we speak about Soul, Spirit, and Beyond.