“Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you’re alive, it isn’t.” Richard Bach
By now in our collective progress towards fuller states and higher stages of being, humanity has explored innumerable understandings about the Soul. Where some authors attribute responsibility for past karma and current dharma to our Soul, others espouse there simply is no such thing. Readers of the Energy Transformation Newsletter clearly are more resonant with the former opinion, that the human Soul is the divine spark, inexhaustible and ubiquitous, present in all material creation.
In my work, I’ve come to deeply appreciate how nuanced the notion of a Soul can be to each individual and to attend to learning my clients’ most resonant definition of the word before using it actively in our work together. Ancient Greek philosophers inherited from their predecessors (Egyptian Hermeticists and Mesopotamians) the idea of an ‘unknowable’ quality of the Divine and added a sub-layer, which they called the ‘lower Soul’. By this they were pointing to the highest level an individual could reach in consciousness (while still remaining an individual). A similar precept is found in the Taoist distinction between “the Tao that cannot be named or known” and “the Tao that can be named or known.”
In our postmodern times, most Western culture seekers enjoy easy access to an extraordinary diversity of spiritual and philosophical teachings in addition to the ones we receive and steward ourselves! This celebrated influx of wisdom and practices has caused some very noticeable language problems. A word used in one tradition has often been mistaken to mean the same thing in another. The word “mind” is a good example. Western religions see mind as the place in us where our thoughts our ‘thunk’, or alternately, the part of us responsible for all our mental activity. But in Buddhism the translation of “mind” constellates much closer to what we typically refer to as “consciousness.”
Another challenge has arisen from the melding of so much spiritual information. I think most English-speaking lightworkers would agree that English is simply not up to the task of capturing the precious, often subtle and important nuance required to adequately convey our personal experience. As more of us have become more fluent in more types of practices and ‘angles on the divine’, the same words or sensory references which used to capture it simply don’t. There are more reasons for this than the spiritual melting pot situation I’ve described, but I have seen many instances where “words don’t cut it.” A common response has been to…make up new ones! I’ve had lots of fun with this in my trainings and workshops over the years; some students began to call them ‘adamisms’ and I learned to identify for students which were mine and which weren’t to avoid confusion. Two examples that come to mind are:
- Intercreation – a deeper and/or more intimate collaboration with others than ‘co-creation,’ it has also come to include the 1+1=3 Principle.
- Relationing – all activity – implicit and explicit, conscious and unconscious, gross and subtle – within and without us when we are relating with Other (other people, other aspects of self, or other facets of Life, such as guides and angels).
I’ve also enjoyed learning of others’ new words and what those new terms meant to them. I am an ardent fan of making up our own words and encourage it in others whenever there is opportunity to do so in the spirit of fun and creativity.
If we return to the word “Soul,” perhaps we can better appreciate the wide range of meanings it carries for hundreds if not thousands of authors and speakers.
As an author, I’ve defined “Soul” as: our essential energetic uniqueness, our divine spark of God-light and sound, and our consistent, ‘individuated’ consciousness persisting through incarnations. The Soul is a light traveler guided only by its inherent growth needs which get met in incarnation. In the Soulsign view, the Soul is your Self-Essence. Connecting the notion of essence to the Soul is a useful tool as the Soul is not fixed in time or to one incarnation. This implies the idea of essential-ness or beyond context. Throughout its experience in incarnation, the Soul retains its essential nature as one-with-God, regardless of how much its current Identity remembers of itself” (excerpted from The Soul’s Desire for Wholeness, Soulsign Publishing, 2002).
“By descending to this world, the Soul increases the flow of her power to guide the human being through the world. Thereby… attaining a higher state by being fulfilled in all dimensions.” ~ Moses de León (c.1250-1305)
Further, when the Soul is in motion – when it is engaged in an incarnation’s time and space reality – I term this the Soul’s Desire which is more of a spectrum within the totality of consciousness than a single direction. I also distinguish this level of desire from our daily desires, such as those for food, security and love. This is capital-D Desire, the Divine Desire seeking Itself through (what we believe is) our individual selves.
This Desire is our involutionary imperative, ever instigating us toward greater fullness, richness, meaning, depth and in-bodied aliveneness. It’s sister drive, the evolutionary urge, is our path up the spiral toward highest enlightenment. While our human identity is in service to evolution, our Soul serves the involutionary nature of the divine. And just as reaching deeper involutionary levels within makes our evolutionary awakenings more profound, so too do our evolutionary leaps catapult us into ever-richer involvements with Life in all its forms. As it reads on our web site, ‘[These two cosmic principles within the human being] are like two lovers, locked together, moving differently to the same Song.”
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