Soul, the Captain

Take time to listen to the song of your soul...
And see where it leads you.

Principles:

• The Soul comes here on our DNA to give the personality a passion with which to approach life.
• The Soul comes here to use the individual's ego strengths to create an adventure of universal experience.
• The Soul’s spiritual balance leads the ego through harm's way into God's way.

(Soul)is the indirect presence of your spirit and in your soul sleep all the possibilities of your human destiny.(John O’Donohue)

“We all come to earth with field orders.” (Søren Kierkegaard)

Consider that all harm to the body and mind comes from a starvation in the human ego—a spiritual starvation. Call, then, on that part of self that knows its divine Source—your soul.

In HOPE Groups and SoulCircling workshops, where we help people establish a dialogue with their soul, people often ask me what soul is and if it isn’t the same as their spirit. Have you ever wondered what soul means?

What is the soul?

The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that the soul has the following five qualities:

1. Soul is the “immaterial essence of a human being.” Soul is not material—not of the body—and yet its presence is vital to our being, our essence.

2. Soul “confers individuality and humanity.” Soul is “considered to be synonymous with the mind or the self.” This creates an identity between mind and self. The Self is our individuality—those unique qualities that distinguish one person from another and that comprise both the ego and the soul.”

3. Soul is “considered to be synonymous with the mind or the self.” This creates an identity between mind and self. The Self is our individuality—those unique qualities that distinguish one person from another and that comprise both the ego and the soul. Mind, our collection of conscious and unconscious processes that influence behaviors of all kinds, becomes transpersonal thereby—greater than the brain.

4. Soul is “that part of an individual which partakes of divinity.” It knows The Source and Truth—that which cannot be interpreted.

5. Soul is commonly “considered to survive the death of the body.” It has eternal aspects—it precedes me and succeeds me.

Our Western spiritual traditions believed that The soul was one of the four essential parts of every human (the other three are body, mind, and spirit). Our belief in the existence of the soul and its process of reincarnation enriched our lives for about 2000 years from Plato (died 486 BCE) to Descartes. When the Age of Reason came along and subjected The soul to the test of objective reason, it failed and was left by the wayside. As Plato’s thoughts on the soul are considered fundamental to Judeo-Christian beliefs, so, René Descartes’ thoughts on the body and mind are considered fundamental to contemporary, Western philosophy of science. Descartes did us all a favor by not throwing the soul in the garbage—he hid it from the rest of the rationalists by putting it in the  brain.

The soul could never stay in the recesses of the brain; it is endowed with the spiritual power that created the physical brain. Even Hitler had to have a fragment of soul hidden deep in the recesses of his incredible, evil, ego-directed being. The soul’s patience will always be rewarded … evil is ephemeral.

John O’Donohue tells us that the soul comes here to love and beloved. A Course in Miracles tells us that we can always perceive others as extending love or giving a call for help. Neither statement explains why some souls come to inhabit bodies directed by evil egos — egos that define love in their own narcissistically self-satisfying, corrupt, destructive ways. These souls collect their energy from the human experience of “flight-or-flight” responses to fearful situations and ego’s use of fear to control and dominate others. As the soul’s home is the heart, its attitude is love and its function is compassion and forgiveness. Our soul has been holding our ego in its loving, compassionate arms, waiting for the time when the ego can open a dialog with the soul.

The soul knows to let the ego run its own race—and fall in holes that are apparently not of its own making. The soul knows that the ego makes these holes in order to learn lessons of the spirit; so it bides its time. Now, when the ego gets out of the hole, it is ready to engage the soul in dialog.

Meet the soul. The soul is our divine Self, the essence of who we are. When we express concern about who we are to a SoulCircle or a HOPE group, the group usually responds with, “Have you asked your soul lately?”

The eternal soul, preceding and succeeding each individual life, comes to find truth and love. We have certainly made many mistakes in our lives, both individually and collectively, and the soul’s work is to make lessons out of mistakes—the lesson is always love in the context of truth. The soul’s ways of going from mistakes to lessons, from problems to possibilities, are far more powerful than the ego’s ability to control things. With eternity on its side, the soul can, indeed, direct many lifetimes to learning the lesson. It would seem today that our souls have devoted many lifetimes to this transformation, and at this time in human history, we move, under the soul’s direction, toward one of the great transformations of our species and our world.

Indeed, historically rich concepts of soul are rushing back into our consciousness. Book sellers enlarge their sections on spirituality to make room for books about the soul written by physicists, theologians, and psychologists, to name but a few of the professions (re-) discovering the soul. The soul always works in such grace notes and the soul of its author wants to be close to your soul. The soul’s inherent qualities of passion, feeling, relating, sharing, and tenderness are feminine. As a tragic result, billions of us have grown up in high-tech, low-touch, ego-rich, soul-poor societies whose heart-less minds have no conscious awareness of their own soul. Mind and heart, ego and soul must come to work together for our advancement.

When we blind the eye of the heart, our soul, we allow our minds to corrupt thought, and we misapply our knowledge. A respected teacher of our young in recognizing and correcting the application of knowledge, lost two lovely sons, one due to self-inflicted drug use, and the other to the bullets of a stalker. She saw that each had lost his life because of the misapplication of knowledge. The first had died because he misapplied his own knowledge and the second had died because of another person’s misapplication of knowledge. Without heart, the mind is capable of dehumanizing people. We need our souls to guide us back to love, the way of the heart. We must remember that the soul never left us; we left it.

Reflect now on the idea that your soul carries with it the reason for your existence here on earth... the reason that gives your life meaning. Friedrich Nietzsche had this to say about life’s meaning: “it is more important to find out why you live than how you live.” Viktor Frankl’s experience in Nazi concentration camps fully substantiated Nietzsche’s statement. You live because Life, itself, wants your experience of It. That is your work—your soul’s calling. Your soul came here to encompass your entire life with its love—to experience how you love, were loved, and showed others the way to love.

Your soul, in its eternal wisdom, chose to move into the background and become invisible to your finite, ephemeral ego. A cloud of the ego’s perception came across the shining of your soul’s vision and dimmed your sight. The supreme challenge of a lifetime is to first convince the ego of the existence and presence of the soul, and then to encourage it to move into a dynamic relationship with the soul.

Soul: a holographic fragment of Creation:

We have life because The Source is Life. The Life is in us, and we are in It. It is us but we are not It. We are but fragments of It— holographic fragments—fully dimensioned, but slightly fuzzy images of The Source’s experience.

Sacred time, sacred art

A soul lives only in the sacred time of the present moment. Secular time comprises the historical past and the mysterious future—the time of memory and projection—time that does not exist except in the thinking of the linear, masculine ego. Keep in mind that all of us, women and men alike, have both masculine and feminine attributes. When we choose to live in the present moment, we choose to live in God’s time. In the time of the Beloved, we can make our lives a collaboration of our personal ego and individual soul. In this way, our lives become lives of service of the universal spirit—consecrated lives. The soul’s journey begins in the glorious, passionate birth of the stars. That soul swam the primordial seas with the first single-celled organisms. Each one of us writes a unique life story, a single volume in an encyclopedia of the experience of one soul.

Popular wisdom maintains: "We are spiritual beings experiencing the human condition, rather than human beings merely trying to be spiritual." The name of our spiritual being is “soul.”

Body, mind, soul and spirit:

In many ways, mind resembles spirit. In many ways, body resembles soul. As we reach out to our spiritual nature, the mind evolves into the spirit and the body evolves into the soul. In short, we transcend our old, limited nature and discover the wonder of a creative life without limits. The discovery of neuropeptides has revealed the connections between the mind and the body. These remarkable chemicals render feelings tangible and measurable — they are part of the tangible soul.

Of the many neuropeptides and their emotions, only two are necessary for raw, immediate survival: fear and its stepchild, anger. Because of their importance, the ego uses these emotions to protect us from harm and thinks it is essential to life. Love, on the other hand, is essential to life and is capable of taking the projection out of fear and anger and turning them into awareness and presence.  Love is the attitude of spiritual life common to all great religions. This single attitude contains a remarkable constellation of emotions that evaluate our life-giving experiences: happiness, joy, bliss, serenity, and inner peace — the emotions of the soul. Today, ever more people are becoming aware of the wonder of experiencing these emotions. This awareness leads us out of the way of ego and into the way of soul.

Soul is, then, the essence of life, whereas spirit is the source of life; and, as soul encompasses an individual body-mind, spirit encompasses that body-mind-soul.

The marriage of body and mind, ego and soul:

The great Sufi mystic, Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273 CE), experienced the shift from intellectualism and reason to intuition and ecstasy and wrote about it.  He stressed that the way of the heart was not to negate the way of the mind, but that the two were to work together in balanced relationship. The resulting balance would be, as he put it, the Perfect Man.

Whereas the ego believes that might makes right and that judging is a power that reflects might, the soul knows what is right without needing to judge anything. Consider that the soul uses that word, “right,” as Buddhists use it in their eight-fold path.

As Thomas Merton said, Conscience is the face of soul.” The simple and yet profound truth in these words sing deeply inside of me, touching my soul.

When people ask me about the soul, I like to tell them that soul lies at the heart of everything, encompassing the entire body-mind, including the ego. What matters is the experience of the journey, but in our world of intellectualism, the ego does not know that. It does not know that the soul is a piece of the ever-present divine Spirit that comes here to be an individual who creates a unique volume of life’s experiences. The soul is, then, the essence of any one life, whereas the spirit is the source of all life; and, as the soul encompasses an individual body-mind, so the spirit encompasses that body-mind-soul.

Soul and personality:

Each soul comes into a genetic environment that contains all of the elements of personality. The physical being that will be its home will be born into a family which will respond to its gifts of personality with their own personalities. In this way, the environment of the older persons will begin to exercise an influence on the form, thought, and behavior of the new human, creating a new individual. If that environment is ego-centered, it will try to control the newcomer. If the totality is ego-centered, it will defend the person. If it is soul-centered, it will empower the person.

Soul and creativity:

Soul comes through to our consciousness in many ways. The soul of a playwright comes through to us in his plays. The soul of a mother comes through to us in her nurturance. The soul of a composer comes through to us in his compositions. The soul of an artist comes through to us in her landscapes. The soul of a teacher comes through to us in how she helps us inform our lives. The soul of a physician comes through to us in his healing ministry. The soul of a worker comes through to us in the quality of the product of that work. The soul of a portraitist comes through to us in her brilliant ability to portray the soul of her subject in the painting.

When a skilled musician plays a piece written by someone long dead, the soul of that musician joins with the soul of the composer, and the resulting product is a distinctive, wondrous performance. Can we find the soul of Bach, von Karajan, or Baumgartner by looking at the plastic disc? Is the soul of the composer in the electronic instrument? The soul of the performance lies in the spacing and power of the notes. Rudolf Baumgartner’s soul adds yet another dimension to Bach’s composition—and my appreciation of Bach’s soul grows when I hear this new performance.

The great men and women of music pour their souls out to us in their work. Where do these notes and performances come from: ego-driven men or soul-directed human beings responding to spirit’s presence? Was The Source not wonderfully inspired to create the Universe? The work that you and I are here to do flows from the Soul of the Universe as an unencumbered gift to our own soul’s creativity.

Soul and eternity:

“(Soul) often is considered to survive the death of the body” (Encyclopedia Britannica, op. cit.). This fifth quality of Soul speaks to its ability to endure beyond the limits of time, as we know it. We must use them in order to understand and appreciate this fifth quality of soul.

Whereas reason tells us that there is no evidence of a “soul” that occupies a series of human bodies, intuition appreciates the anecdotal story of the little girl who asked her baby brother to tell her about The Source because she was “beginning to forget.” That same intuition can lead us to appreciate the work of scientifically trained professionals like Raymond A. Moody, Ph.D., M.D., Kenneth Ring, Ph.D., and Brian Weiss, M.D., all of whom have written eloquently about their experiences with people who have either experienced life before their life or after it. Each of these three heard stories from their clients/patients that challenged their scientific, rational minds to the core and lead them to an awareness of the non-rational, mystical nature of life—the life of a soul.

Soul and the heart:

Why the heart? It is central to us and to The Mystery that gave us its life in perfect love. It is impossible to define The Mystery or any of its expressions such as: love, grace, truth, life, and soul. With all that I have said before from my non-rational mind, I offer you this description of soul:

Soul is loving and kind; passionate and compassionate; patient and shy; courageous and persistent. It is an instrument of creativity and transformation: a non-judgmental energy moving effortlessly through space and time gathering experience of unfathomable, universal value. It is the essence of life.