the journey of human soul

What is the Soul’s Journey?

January 22, 2024

Lauren Williams

Starting my exploration of the soul’s journey, I’ve realized it’s much more than a spiritual concept.

It’s a personal adventure, unique to each of us.

Every experience, every choice, shapes this journey. It’s about understanding our past and how it influences who we are now.

I find it empowering to think of myself as the creator of my soul’s path. It’s not just about destiny; it’s about making choices that define me.

This journey is a deep dive into who I am, uncovering layers of my purpose and true self.

So, let’s begin this exploration.

It’s a journey of discovery, growth, and potential transformation.

Table of Contents

What is your soul’s journey.

Your soul’s journey is an expansive and interesting concept, stretching far beyond the confines of a single lifetime. It encompasses the many lifetimes and experiences your soul undergoes, spanning across your life within the spirit world. This journey is not just about the physical experiences we encounter in our lives; it’s about the continuous evolution and growth of our soul through various incarnations and spiritual realms.

At its core, the soul’s journey is about the accumulation and understanding of experiences. Every action you take, every word you speak, and every emotion you feel contributes to this journey. It’s a path of learning, experiencing, and evolving. The real essence of the soul’s journey isn’t just about what defines it; it’s about how you choose to define and shape it with your actions and decisions.

This journey is also an overarching narrative that intertwines our physical incarnations with our existence within the spirit world. It’s a continuous flow, a path that your soul takes from its inception to its evolution into a fully empowered creator being. Unlike a predetermined route, each soul’s journey is unique, marked by individual choices, lessons, and experiences. This journey is your personal story of spiritual evolution and self-discovery.

Understanding the Purpose of the Soul’s Journey

When I think about what the soul’s journey means, it feels like it’s about finding our true purpose and learning from life’s experiences. It’s like each of us is on a personal mission to understand who we are and why we’re here. This journey isn’t just about the big milestones in life; it’s also in the small, everyday moments where we learn, grow, and change.

Every decision I make, every challenge I face, feels like a part of this journey. It’s as if with each step, I’m getting closer to understanding my true self. Sometimes, it’s hard to see the bigger picture, but I believe each experience, good or bad, teaches me something valuable.

This idea makes me look at life differently. I start to see each obstacle as a learning opportunity and each success as a step towards a greater understanding of myself. It’s a journey that’s unique for everyone. Our paths might be different, but we’re all trying to find our way, learn from our experiences, and grow as individuals.

Thinking about the soul’s journey this way makes it more than a spiritual concept; it becomes a practical approach to life. It’s about making choices that lead to personal growth and understanding, constantly evolving and adapting as we walk our unique paths.

Spiritual Journey vs. Soul’s Journey

As we explore and understand our existence, it becomes clear that the spiritual journey and the soul’s journey, though distinct, are deeply interrelated. Each journey offers unique insights and experiences, yet they converge at a point of deep self-awareness.

This interconnection is where we find the I AM Presence, the unchanging core of our being that links our spiritual exploration with the evolution of our soul. Recognizing this interplay enhances our understanding of both journeys, allowing us to navigate our path more clearly and purposefully.

The Spiritual Journey

The spiritual journey is a personal and conscious quest for deeper understanding and connection with the spiritual aspects of life. It’s a path marked by exploration and discovery, where one seeks to understand the nature of the divine, the universe, and their place within it. This journey is unique for each individual, shaped by their beliefs, experiences, and the spiritual practices they adopt.

• Exploration and Awakening : On this journey, individuals may explore various religious beliefs, engage in spiritual practices like meditation or yoga, and seek experiences that offer enlightenment and deeper understanding. It’s a process of continual learning and awakening, where each step brings greater insight into one’s spiritual nature.
• Connection and Growth : The spiritual journey is also about developing a deeper connection with the self, others, and the universe. It involves recognizing and nurturing the spiritual essence within, which some might relate to the I AM Presence . This journey encourages personal growth, compassion, and a sense of interconnectedness with all things.

The Soul’s Journey

The soul’s journey, while intersecting with the spiritual journey, encompasses a broader scope of our existence. It is the path our soul takes through various lifetimes, gathering experiences, learning lessons, and evolving.

• Continuity Across Lifetimes : This journey considers the soul’s continuity beyond our current life. It is about the evolution and learning that the soul undergoes across different incarnations, with each lifetime contributing to the soul’s growth and understanding.
• Learning and Purpose : The soul’s journey is deeply connected to the lessons we learn and the experiences we accumulate. It’s about understanding the deeper purpose of our soul and the journey it takes to achieve its ultimate goals. This path is less about conscious seeking and more about the soul’s innate drive to evolve, learn, and fulfill its purpose.

While both journeys are integral to our growth and self-realization, the spiritual journey is about our conscious search for spiritual meaning in this lifetime, and the soul’s journey encompasses the soul’s continuous evolution across various lifetimes.

Understanding their distinct yet interconnected nature helps us appreciate the depth and breadth of our journey towards self-awareness and fulfillment.

The Soul as a Lifelong Student

The concept of the soul’s journey portrays our soul as a lifelong student, enrolled in the ever-evolving curriculum of life. This perspective views every experience, whether joyous or challenging, as a learning opportunity for the soul.

• Learning Through Life’s Experiences : Our lives are filled with a variety of experiences, each holding multiple possibilities for growth and understanding. The soul, as a student, absorbs lessons from every interaction, relationship, and situation. These lessons contribute to the soul’s evolution, helping it to grow wiser and more mature with each lifetime.
• The Soul’s Curriculum : The curriculum for the soul encompasses all aspects of human experience. From the trials we endure to the moments of happiness we cherish, every aspect of life teaches the soul something valuable. This process of learning is continuous and does not end with physical death, as the soul carries its wisdom into future incarnations.

The Process of Inner Exploration

The soul’s journey is deeply introspective, involving a process of inner exploration to understand the depths of our being. This exploration is essential for the soul to become ‘all knowing’ about its nature and purpose.

• Connecting with the Soul : This journey requires us to connect deeply with our inner selves, listening to the subtle whispers of our soul. It’s about going beyond the surface of our conscious mind to explore the deeper aspects of who we are. This exploration often leads to surprising discoveries about our strengths, desires, and life’s purpose.
• Inner Answers and Guidance : The process of inner exploration allows us to find answers to our deepest questions and guidance for our life’s path. The insights we gain from this journey are unique to us, as they are based on our soul’s individual experiences and lessons. This inner guidance is invaluable, helping us to navigate life with greater clarity and understanding.

In exploring our soul as a lifelong student and delving into the process of inner exploration, we come to realize the depth and richness of the soul’s journey. It’s a path that not only encompasses learning from life’s experiences but also involves a deep dive into the essence of our being, uncovering the wisdom and knowledge that lie within.

Stages Of Your Soul’s Journey

1. Awakening

The first stage of the soul’s journey is often marked by an awakening. This is a moment or period where there is a significant shift in awareness, leading to a deeper questioning of life’s purpose and one’s true self. It’s a stage of realization where the soul starts to see beyond the mundane aspects of daily life and seeks a deeper meaning.

2. Exploration

Following the awakening, the soul enters a phase of exploration. This stage is characterized by seeking knowledge, understanding different spiritual paths, and experimenting with various practices. It’s a time of curiosity and openness, where the soul is eager to learn and experience new things.

3. Challenge

The challenge stage involves facing and overcoming obstacles that are essential for the soul’s growth. These challenges can be internal, like confronting personal fears or limiting beliefs, or external, such as navigating difficult life circumstances. This stage strengthens and refines the soul, preparing it for further evolution.

4. Enlightenment

Enlightenment is a pivotal stage where the soul gains significant insight or understanding. This doesn’t necessarily mean reaching a final state of total enlightenment, but rather experiencing moments of clarity and profound realization that fundamentally change the soul’s perspective and approach to life.

5. Integration

After enlightenment, the soul enters the integration stage. Here, the insights and lessons learned are assimilated into everyday life. This stage is about living the wisdom gained, applying new understanding to daily actions, relationships, and decisions. It’s a process of aligning one’s life with the soul’s true purpose.

6. Contribution

In the contribution stage, the focus shifts from personal growth to serving others. The soul, having gained wisdom and understanding, now looks to share this with the world. This can manifest in various forms, such as teaching, healing, or engaging in acts of compassion and service.

7. Completion

The final stage is completion, where the soul reaches a sense of fulfillment in its journey. This doesn’t imply the end of growth but signifies a phase where the soul has achieved its major objectives for a particular lifetime. It’s a time of reflection, gratitude, and understanding the interconnectedness of all life.

Each stage of the soul’s journey offers unique lessons and opportunities for growth. Understanding these stages helps us to navigate our own journey with greater awareness and purpose.

Reflecting On Your Journey

It’s important to remember one fundamental truth: we are in control of our journey. This realization empowers us to embrace each stage with intention and purpose.

Our journey is ours to shape. Every decision we make, every challenge we face, is an opportunity for growth and learning. It’s a reminder that we are the architects of our soul’s evolution.

Reflecting on this journey, I’m struck by our profound responsibility. It’s not just about moving through life passively; it’s about actively engaging with our soul’s growth.

We own our journey. This ownership isn’t about control in a rigid sense, but about embracing our power to influence our path. It’s about making choices that resonate with our deepest selves.

In this journey, every moment is significant. From the major crossroads to the seemingly small decisions, each step shapes our soul’s narrative.

Looking ahead, the journey continues. It’s an ongoing process of discovery, growth, and transformation. With this understanding, we can approach each new day as an opportunity to further our soul’s evolution.

Remember, your soul’s journey is a reflection of your innermost self. How you navigate it is your greatest expression of personal power and purpose.

Lauren believes spirituality shouldn't be intimidating. She blends ancient practices with modern tools to help you unlock insight, improve your focus, and find deeper meaning within your everyday life.

How to Start Your Spiritual Journey

What is a Starseed? 9 Signs You Might Be One

Discover. Reflect. Grow. At Inner Growth Center, turn insight into meaningful change. Join our community and create a life with less stress and more joy.

Privacy Policy

© 2024 Inner Growth Center. Empowering personal journeys, one story at a time.

Exploring the Depths of the Human Soul: Meaning, Purpose, and Existence.

From philosophy to theology, the human soul has been a subject of fascination for millennia. Defining it has been one of the most complex and challenging quests, but also a source of inspiration for many. In this post, we explore the various perspectives and debates surrounding the fascinating concept of the human soul. Join us on this journey of discovery as we delve into the depths of our being to uncover the meaning, purpose, and existence of the soul. Read on to learn more.

Table of Contents

Defining the Human Soul: Philosophical and Spiritual Perspectives

Have you ever wondered what your soul truly is? The concept of the human soul has been the subject of philosophical and spiritual debate for centuries, as it serves as the bedrock of our existence and the driving force behind every decision we make.

From a philosophical perspective, the human soul is often thought of as the essence of our being. It’s the intangible part of us that gives us our identity and distinguishes us from one another. For some, the soul is a part of us that is eternal and lives on even after we die. While others argue that the soul is simply a product of our consciousness and our perception of self.

On the other hand, spirituality offers a different perspective on the human soul. Many religious and spiritual beliefs hold that the soul is a divine creation, a gift from a higher power that connects us to something greater than ourselves. Some see the soul as the energy that animates us and gives us life, while others believe that the soul has a specific purpose or mission to fulfill in this life.

Regardless of the perspective, the human soul is universally seen as an essential element of our existence. It’s the part of us that makes us uniquely human and gives us purpose and meaning . By exploring the concept of the human soul, we gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.

To summarize, here are the key takeaways about defining the human soul from both philosophical and spiritual perspectives:

• The soul is the intangible essence of our being that gives us our identity.
• From a philosophical perspective, the soul is the product of our consciousness and our perception of self.
• Spirituality views the soul as a divine creation that connects us to something greater than ourselves.
• Regardless of the perspective, the soul is an essential element of our existence that gives us purpose and meaning.

Stay tuned for the next section, where we’ll explore the relationship between the mind and the soul.

The Relationship between the Mind and the Soul: Consciousness and Identity

As a Christian, understanding the relationship between the mind and the soul is an essential part of exploring the depths of the human experience. Philosophically, the mind is often associated with consciousness, perception, and rationality, while the soul is linked to the essence, identity, and purpose of a person’s existence.

In Christian theology , the mind and the soul are believed to be interconnected, with the soul serving as the core of a person’s being. It is through the soul that we can connect with God, and it is where our true identity and purpose reside. However, the mind also plays a crucial role in our faith journey. It is through our thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes that we can deepen our relationship with God and understand our place in the world.

When considering the relationship between the mind and the soul, it’s essential to understand that both are necessary for a healthy Christian life. The soul provides us with a sense of identity and a purpose for our existence, while the mind allows us to think critically, make informed decisions, and engage with the world around us.

Additionally, the mind and the soul can often be at odds with one another. Temptation, doubt, and fear can cause us to question our faith and stray from our Christian path. However, by nurturing our soul and engaging our mind in scripture, prayer , and service, we can overcome these challenges and strengthen our relationship with God.

In conclusion, the relationship between the mind and the soul is a complex and essential aspect of the Christian faith. By understanding the interconnectivity of these two components of our being, we can deepen our relationship with God and gain a greater sense of purpose and meaning in our lives.

Exploring the Purpose and Meaning of Life through the Soul

The human soul has remained a mystery for centuries, with many theories and explanations provided by different philosophers and spiritual leaders. Nonetheless, one of the most compelling aspects of the human soul is its connection to the purpose and meaning of life.

Many people believe that the soul is the driving force behind our motivations and desires , guiding us in our search for meaning and fulfillment. While some argue that the soul is immortal and eternal, others suggest that it is merely a product of our consciousness.

Regardless of one’s beliefs, the human soul has always been associated with one’s purpose and destiny. As a Christian, you might find solace in knowing that God created your soul with a specific purpose and mission in life.

Some ways to explore the meaning of life through the soul are:

Connecting with one’s inner self: Taking time to reflect on oneself and meditate. This can help an individual clearly understand who they are and figure out their life’s objectives and goals.

Serving others: Christians believe that helping their community and serving others is an essential aspect of living a purposeful life. This can provide a sense of satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness.

Pursuing one’s passions: Finding out what one enjoys doing and aligning it with their life’s purpose can bring a profound sense of meaning and joy.

Seeking God’s guidance: For Christians, seeking guidance from God can provide them with a sense of direction and purpose. This can include prayer, studying the Bible, and attending church.

By exploring the purpose and significance of life through the soul, one can reach an understanding of their unique and important role in the universe. Whether it be through serving others, connecting with oneself, or seeking guidance from a higher power, the human soul can be a powerful tool in finding meaning and fulfillment in life.

In conclusion, exploring the purpose and meaning of life through the soul is a vital aspect of living a fulfilling, purposeful life. As one aligns their passions and goals with their soul’s purpose, they can lead a life that not only brings joy and happiness to themselves but to others as well.

The Role of Religion and Spirituality in Understanding the Human Soul

When it comes to understanding the human soul, religion and spirituality have played a fundamental role throughout history. It’s important to note that while religion and spirituality are often used interchangeably, they have distinct differences. Religion involves a specific set of beliefs and practices within a community, while spirituality can be understood as an individual’s personal relationship with the divine or higher power.

Within Christianity, the soul is often described as the essence of a person, the part that gives life to the body . Christianity teaches that the soul is immortal and that after death , it returns to God. The teachings of Christianity provide a framework for understanding the meaning and purpose of life through the lens of faith.

Spirituality, on the other hand, can be a more personal and flexible approach to understanding the soul. It often involves introspection, meditation, and connecting with a higher power or energy force. For some individuals, spirituality can be a way to feel a sense of connection and purpose in life.

Regardless of one’s approach to understanding the soul, religion and spirituality can offer comfort, guidance, and community. Participating in religious or spiritual practices can help individuals feel a sense of belonging and find meaning and purpose in life.

As a youth pastor, it’s important to recognize that while religion and spirituality can be of great value, they may not be for everyone. It’s crucial to approach the topic with an open mind and not impose beliefs onto others. Encouraging individuals to explore their own beliefs and feelings about the soul can be a helpful and empowering approach.

In conclusion, religion and spirituality play essential roles in our understanding of the human soul. Whether one’s approach is rooted in faith or personal reflection, the exploration of our essence and purpose can provide comfort, guidance, and a sense of connection to something greater than ourselves.

The Existence and Transcendence of the Soul

Have you ever wondered if there is more to life than what meets the eye? Is there something that transcends beyond our physical existence? That something is what we call the human soul. The human soul is a complex and profound concept that has been explored through various philosophical, religious, and spiritual perspectives. In this section, we will dive deeper into the existence and transcendence of the soul.

The Immortality of the Soul Christianity teaches that the soul is immortal and that it lives on after physical death. The Bible says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16, NKJV) This means that those who believe in Jesus and accept Him as their Lord and Savior will inherit eternal life.

The Transcendence of the Soul The human soul is not limited by time, space, or matter. It transcends beyond our physical existence and connects us to a higher power. This is why many spiritual and religious traditions emphasize the importance of connecting with the divine and transcending beyond the material world.

The Role of Karma In Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, the concept of karma is closely related to the existence and transcendence of the soul. Karma is the law of cause and effect that governs the universe. According to this law, every action has a consequence, and every individual is responsible for their own actions. The consequences of our actions follow us from one life to the next, and they determine the quality of our future lives. This is why the goal of many Eastern spiritual traditions is to break the cycle of rebirth and attain enlightenment.

The Importance of Self-Reflection In order to connect with our soul and transcend beyond our physical existence, we must engage in self-reflection. We must take a step back from our daily routine and become aware of our thoughts, emotions, and actions. Through self-reflection, we can identify our weaknesses, our strengths, and our core values. We can also identify the things that hinder our spiritual growth and learn to overcome them.

In summary, the human soul is a profound and complex concept that transcends beyond our physical existence. It connects us with a higher power and serves as the source of our immortality. By engaging in self-reflection and connecting with the divine, we can tap into the power of the soul and transcend beyond our material existence.

Morality, Ethics, and the Human Soul

As you continue to explore the depths of the human soul, one question that may arise is how morality and ethics fit into the equation. After all, if there is a soul, is there also a sense of right and wrong that comes along with it?

From a Christian perspective, the answer is undoubtedly yes. In fact, the Bible has a lot to say about morality and ethics, and how they relate to the human soul. For example, many of the Ten Commandments are directly concerned with issues of morality, like “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

But beyond specific commandments, Christianity also teaches that we should strive to live a righteous and virtuous life, guided by the Holy Spirit. This means treating others with kindness, showing compassion and forgiveness , and acting with integrity and honesty. It also means recognizing that we are not perfect, and that we will make mistakes—but that through faith and repentance, we can seek forgiveness and strive to do better.

Of course, what constitutes “right” and “wrong” can be somewhat subjective, and there are many different ethical frameworks that people might use to make moral decisions. Christianity emphasizes the importance of seeking guidance from God when making moral choices, and also offers resources like prayer, scripture, and fellowship with other believers to help us stay on the right path.

All of this is grounded in the idea that the human soul is valuable and sacred, and that we have a responsibility to treat ourselves and others with respect and dignity. It also reminds us that our actions have consequences—not just in this life, but in the afterlife as well.

Ultimately, exploring morality and ethics in the context of the human soul can be both challenging and rewarding. It asks us to confront some of our deepest beliefs and values, and to strive for a life of meaning and purpose guided by principles of love, compassion, and justice. Through faith and reflection, we can continue to grow and develop as individuals, and build a better world for ourselves and those around us.

Love and Connection in Relation to the Human Soul

When we talk about the human soul, we cannot ignore the aspects of love and connection. Love is the defining emotion of the human experience, and it is said to be the force that binds all creation together. It is through love that we find meaning and purpose in our lives, and it is through connection that we feel a sense of belonging and kinship with those around us.

So, what is the relationship between the human soul and love? Many religions and spiritual traditions see love as an essential part of the human soul. In Christianity, for example, the Bible says that “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and that we are created in His image. This suggests that our very essence, our soul, is imbued with love and that love is the guiding force of our lives.

When it comes to connection, many people believe that our soul is connected to the souls of others and to the larger universe. This idea is rooted in the concept of Oneness, which suggests that we are all part of a larger whole. The idea of connectedness is also central to many spiritual and religious traditions, which teach that we are all brothers and sisters and that we should treat each other with love, kindness, and compassion.

Here are some ways in which love and connection relate to the human soul:

Love is the essence of the soul: According to many spiritual traditions, our soul is made of love. This means that love is not just an emotion but also a fundamental aspect of our being.

Connection is essential for our soul’s well-being: We are social creatures, and we thrive when we feel connected to others. This is why loneliness can be so damaging to our soul.

Love and connection help us find meaning and purpose: When we feel loved and connected, we feel a sense of belonging and purpose. We are more likely to be happy and fulfilled when we have meaningful relationships in our lives.

Love and connection can transcend death: Many people believe that our soul lives on after we die and that we are connected to our loved ones even after they have passed. This provides comfort and hope in times of grief.

In conclusion, love and connection are essential aspects of the human soul. They bring meaning, purpose, and fulfillment to our lives, and they help us feel connected to something larger than ourselves. By nurturing our relationships and practicing love, kindness, and compassion, we can live more fully and experience the true depth and richness of our soul.

About The Author

Adam Phillips

Related posts.

Unveiling the Divine: How God’s Dreams and Visions Shaped the Bible and Are Still Transforming Lives Today

Unveiling the Surprising Differences Between Disciples and Apostles – You Won’t Believe 4

Unveiling the Miraculous Secrets Behind God’s Right Hand – You Won’t Believe Number 5

The Astonishing Symbolism of Water Baptism Revealed – Prepare to Be Amazed

Olga Rose Sohmer

The Unfolding Soul: An Exploration of Soul in Jungian Psychology

If the human soul is anything, it must be of unimaginable complexity and diversity…  I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature.  Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism.  My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with nonspatial images.  And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors…  Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of soul. (as cited in Jung, 1989, p. 387)

The soul in Jungian psychology is a complex domain that is a challenge to delineate, yet, by following her trail we are led along a fascinating journey into the depths of human experience. [1] At once the name that points to the totality of the human psyche (psychology is after all, the “logos”, or study, of “psyche”, the soul), the soul in Jung’s personal account and psychological theory is encountered through imaginal figures, or soul images, of a particular nature.  That is, while the “Soul” in the capital letter sense [2] expresses the immeasurable uniqueness of a human being—the incarnation of the vast spiritual Cosmos through the vessel of a human life embedded on Earth—certain faces of the Soul can be experienced directly through attentive inner and outer explorations.  These faces, or personifications, of Soul mediate our contact with the greater mystery of the personal Soul and the even more vast collective unconscious.  C.G. Jung, perhaps unlike any other psychologist, has charted this terrain through his own explorations, leaving those of us who wish to embark on the journey ourselves an invaluable record in his Liber Novus: The Red Book (2009) and subsequent reflections.  While Jung’s personal experience-born map of the psyche bears potent relevance for modern Westerners, we are repeatedly reminded by Jung that the Soul journey is a solitary one that must be approached anew by each of us.  In this spirit, I hope to explore the insights that Jung gathered regarding Soul, while drawing on his contemporaries who continue to place Soul at the center of psychology, as well as my own experiences and intuitions.

Employing Mythic Imagination

“Fear the soul, despise her, love her, just like the Gods.” (Jung, 2009, p. 495)

The beginning of deep inquiry into any dimension of human life requires some demarcation of the terrain we wish to explore.  Even if our intent is openness and discovery, we need to know the direction toward which we yearn.  Positioning the Soul at the center of such an inquiry, thus, proves challenging because its very nature seems to resist definition, requiring a gentler, more imaginative approach.  Jung explained in Memories, Dreams, Reflections that his Liber Novus period [3] was essentially a dialogue with his soul.  As he reflected on the dawning of this awareness, “In putting down all this material for analysis I was in effect writing letters to the anima, that is, to a part of myself with a different viewpoint from my conscious one. I got remarks of an unusual and unexpected character. I was like a patient in analysis with a ghost and woman!” (Jung, 1989, p. 186).  Early in The Red Book: Liber Novus itself, we witness the utter humility and the dissolution of prior understanding that was required to initiate this dialogue:

I still labored misguidedly under the spirit of this time, and thought differently about the human soul. I thought and spoke much of the soul. I knew many learned words for her, I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object.  I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my soul. Therefore, the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul… I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system. (Jung, 2009, p. 128-129)

Before Jung could return to his Soul, he had to realize the limits of his ability to intellectually “know” this dimension of himself.  Yet, during this time, Jung also realized the centrality of Soul and “dedicated [himself] to the service of psyche”, knowing it was “the only way [he] could endure [his] existence and live it as fully as possible” (1989, p. 192).

Jung’s contemporaries who focus on furthering the Soul project provide a similar message.  Thomas Moore (1992) for example, famous for his work Care of the Soul wrote, “The ‘Soul’ is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves.  It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance” (p. 5).  And James Hillman, whose Revisioning Psychology (1976) returns Soul to the heart of psychology eloquently elaborated in a related vein that the Soul is:

… a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself.  This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens.  Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment—and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.  It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate—an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence—that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego and consciousness go into eclipse.  Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed.  Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it by itself apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light.  But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives one the sense of having or being a soul.  However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even divinity. (p. xvi)

These accounts inspire us to pursue Soul with an artistic sensibility, the temperament of a lover, seeking to appreciate and experience rather than capture or define.

The Greek myth of Psyche (soul) and Eros (love) lends further insight into the nature of Soul and suggests an approach to her mysteries.  In the myth, the beautiful Psyche is cursed by jealous Aphrodite to fall in love with whatever hideous creature Eros commands (Graves, 1955).  But Psyche is so alluring, that Eros himself falls in love with her and marries her, hiding his own identity.  The passionate love between the two is initially all Psyche needs for her fulfilment, but over time, a mix of curiosity and fear about her lover’s truth compels her one night to look at his face in the oil-lamp light, ready to murder him if he is in fact the serpent monster that her sisters suggested.  In her attempt to see Eros directly, she wakes him and he flees.  Simultaneously, Psyche loses her lover to her faithlessness and falls deeper in love having glimpsed his Godliness.  A seemingly hopeless underworld journey ensues, but eventually, the two are reunited eternally when Zeus elevates Psyche to the stature of a Goddess.

Amplifying this myth, Psyche embodies both the qualities of the human Soul as well as the turbulent path toward Soul discovery.  Psyche as personification of Soul is the most beautiful young woman yet cursed to endure sorrow in love, she is perfect yet fallible, she is the ultimate lover yet commits betrayal at the hands of mistrust and fear.  However, through her passion, commitment, and grief, Psyche fulfills her apotheosis into Goddess, uniting Soul with her eternal consort—Love. [4]   Reflecting this complexity, in an appendix to The Red Book Jung’s soul described her identity:

I, your soul, am your mother, who tenderly and frightfully surrounds you, your nourisher and corruptor; I prepare good things and poison for you… I am your body, your shadow, your effectiveness in this world, your manifestation in the world of the Gods, your effulgence, your breath, your odor, your magical force. (2009, p. 582)

In both the myth and Jung’s account, the Soul necessarily encompasses the light and dark. Through her longings we are ushered into the joys and sorrows of life.

Offering another interesting parallel with the myth, in an encounter with his soul [5] in The Red Book , Jung expresses profound mistrust toward her and accuses her of stealing a precious jewel from the human realm.  After Jung presses her, his soul admited to what she was trying to take: “Alas, that I can neither keep it nor conceal it! It is love, warm human love, blood, warm red blood, the holy source of life, the unification of everything separated and longed for” (2009, p. 502).  Like Psyche’s myth, the cunning behavior of Jung’s soul reflects the eternal dance between soul and love, the imperfect ways that soul may act in the pursuit of love, and intimates the curious relationship between the Soul and the human being.  That is, while Soul may be the “greater” entity, she depends on human life for her expression.  In Jung’s later reflections on his encounters with soul figures—and their stagnation during periods of his disconnection from them—Jung articulates the primacy of consciousness and embodied human life.  He explained, “The figures from the unconscious are uninformed too, and need man, or contact with consciousness, in order to attain to knowledge” (Jung, 1989, p. 306).  From this vantage, the human being bears the responsibility to maintain contact with and incarnate the Soul.

If we accept this responsibility, Psyche’s story sheds light on the way we might engage the Soul journey.  Like Psyche, turning inward, we are compelled to learn the truth of our Souls, but must assume a posture of humility, unable to steal a direct look without risking loss.  Reminiscent of the moment that Psyche glimpses Eros, Hillman (1975) stated, “The soul is immeasurably deep and can only be illumined by insights, flashes in a great cavern of incomprehension” (p. xvi).  Francis Vaughn (1995) suggested the Soul is even more obscure from daylight vision:

The soul, because it is seer, can never be seen. As the eye cannot see itself, the soul as witness can never be observed.  The subtle realms of the soul are characterized by multiplicity rather than unity, and the soul as witness is never fully satisfied by the shadows or phenomena that these worlds offer. (p. 110)

From this perspective, Psyche’s story may issue a warning about seeking to know the Soul through ordinary, overly direct means. Psyche must be utterly transformed to behold her love again.  Appropriately, Psyche is sometimes depicted as a Goddess with wings and associated with the butterfly—the quintessential symbol of transformation.

It seems then, that the Soul gestalt necessitates an underworld descent.  The Soul pertains to the dimension of depth after all, rendering Psyche’s turbulent fall as an integral component of the Soul journey.  As depth psychologist Elkins (1999) elucidated,

We are not likely to encounter the soul if we move along the horizontal dimension, skimming the surface of life; nor are we likely to find the soul if in spirit fashion, we are always ascending, achieving, and growing up the vertical plane. Rather, the soul is found by going down, down into the depths of our being, down into the depths of our relationships, down into the depths of life itself. (p. 86)

In this sense, it was never an option for Psyche to simply trust Eros without seeking to know him more fully.  Von Franz (1964) discussed this archetypal pattern so common in myth—in which a woman or Goddess must endure an initiation of suffering when she breaks the promise to see only a limited dimension of her lover—in her exploration the animus [6] in the individuation process.  The individual necessarily seeks greater consciousness of her soul figures despite, or even for the sake of , the trials along the way.  Unfolding the human Soul journey, Moore (1992) affirmed, “Soul enters life from below, through the cracks, finding an opening into life at the points where smooth functioning breaks down” (p. 26).  Just as Jung’s soul reminds us that she prepares both the “good things” and the “poisons” (2009, p. 582) for him, Psyche’s fate reflects the depths we must face in the incarnation of Soul.

Drawing on the Psyche myth along with the reflections of Jung and his contemporaries, we can discern some of the qualities of Soul and “soul work,” while avoiding rigid definition.  Like the butterfly, Soul intimates an unfolding process rather than a static entity.  Carrying us through the storms and fires of life, the Soul breathes meaning and vitality into our humblest moments.  As Elkins (1995) described, “Soul is always about falling back to Earth, about coming down, about descending to our depths. Soul is about learning the lessons that triumph and achievement cannot teach” (p. 85).  It seems the Soul is necessarily discovered in the embodied experiences of life rather than in lofty spiritual aspirations.  We can take lesson from the threefold nature Jung (2009) discovered in his Liber Novus encounter: his soul presents as a snake, a bird and a woman—representing the interconnected instinctual, spiritual, and human realms that the Soul spans.  Additionally, we can gather from the insights that Soul delivered Jung that she gives rise to imagination, while at the same time, requiring imagination to be perceived at all.  Keeping this expanded vision of Soul, we can explore the particulars of the soul image, for these personifications can be consciously experienced, opening the door to the Soul journey.

The Soul and Soul Images

To this point, we have been exploring the expansive terrain of the Soul, which necessarily remains shrouded in mystery, too vast to be known fully by the conscious ego-mind.  Yet, Jungian psychology skillfully discriminates between this unknowable “Soul” and the “soul images” that can be encountered directly.  Soul images are multiple and evolve throughout the Jungian individuation process.  In their most essential form they manifest in an unfolding triad: the shadow, anima/us, and wise old (wo)man (Von Franz, 1964). [7]  We can experience them inwardly through dreams and imagination, as well as outwardly through projection in relationships.  Importantly, soul images must be recognized as partial expressions of the Soul, understood as an essential bridge to, but not to be confused with, the greater Soul mystery.  At the same time, consciously engaging with soul images plays an essential role in the path towards psychological wholeness and is our primary means to directly encounter the dimensions of the Soul.

It is important to emphasize, as Jung did repeatedly in his Red Book (2009) and later reflections, that these soul figures are not merely symbolic or consciously constructed but are a psychological reality that is independent of the conscious ego.  As Jung explained, “Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life… It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche” (1989, p. 183). Repeatedly, Jung described his surprise at the autonomy that these figures enjoy from his conscious mind.  For example, in Jung’s later discussion of the anima and animus in Aion he wrote, “Many of [the contents of anima/us] appear spontaneously in dreams and so on, and many more can be made conscious through active imagination.  In this way we find that thoughts, feelings, and affects are alive in us which we would never have believed possible” (1971a, p. 158).  He later went on to clearly state that, “[The anima] is not an invention of the conscious but a spontaneous product of the unconscious” (Jung, 1971a, p. 151).  As such, the anima and other figures of Jung’s soul are held in a tension throughout his reflections, sometimes cast in the symbolic-archetypal dimension they intimate (such as Eros, for anima, or Logos, for animus) while maintaining their reality as unique entities or experiences.  Ultimately, Jung (1989) asserted, “It is more meaningful to let the figures be what they were for me at the time—namely, events and experiences” than to reduce them to symbolic interpretations (p. 182).  Jung (1928/1972) similarly cautioned when presenting his theory of the anima and animus that, “Nobody can really understand these things unless he has experienced them himself.  I am therefore much more interested in pointing out the possible ways to such experience than in devising intellectual formulae which, for lack of experience, must necessarily remain an empty web of words” (p. 221 [ CW 7, para. 340]).  So, while we can learn of the archetypal qualities of the soul figures in Jung’s personal account, it remains important to hold his theoretical interpretation of them lightly when we are contemplating our own experiences, always privileging their unique expressions as they come through rather than trying to fit them into a particular theoretical mold.

Still, the three archetypal categories of figures that Jungian psychology recognizes to be essential to the individuation process—the shadow, the contrasexual anima/animus and the wisdom figure—have a universal resonance.  At the same time, their particular manifestations are shaped by personal and cultural contexts.  For example, the specific expression of the anima is influenced by a man’s relationship with his mother figure(s) and is, therefore, unique to each individual (Von Franz, 1964).  Also, while the unfolding encounter with these figures is not necessarily a linear process, there is a typical progression through which they become accessible to the conscious ego.  The shadow—the qualities that the conscious-ego suppresses or rejects—is closest to consciousness and therefore first and easiest to access.  Importantly, Von Franz (1964) clarified, “The shadow is not the whole of the unconscious personality” but “…represents unknown or little-known attributes and qualities of the ego—aspects that mostly belong to the personal sphere and that could just as well be conscious” (p. 168).  We encounter the shadow most directly through projection and must recognize the aspects we see and reject in others are actually rejected parts of ourselves.  This work to integrate the disowned shadow typically precedes an encounter with the anima/us.  As Jung explained, “…the integration of the shadow, or the realization of the personal unconscious, marks the first stage in the analytic process and that without it a recognition of anima and animus is impossible” (1971a, p. 161).  And Jung poignantly stated otherwise, the integration of the shadow is the “apprentice-piece” to the “masterpiece” of the encounter with the anima/us (1946/1969, [ CW 9, pt. 1]).

While shadow-work can continue indefinitely, after some amount of shadow confrontation, the contrasexual soul figures—the “anima” for a man and the “animus” for a woman—become accessible to the conscious mind as well (Jung, 1989, p. 186).  Jungian scholar Murray Stein (1998) explained, “The anima and animus are subjective personalities that represent a deeper level of the unconscious than the shadow… they reveal the features of the soul and lead into the realm of the collective unconscious” (p. 126).  Similar to the repressed, unconscious nature of the shadow, the anima/us [8] forms a complement to the outward persona of the individual, compensating for the qualities that a person typically presents to the outer world (Jung, 1921/1971b, p. 496 [ CW 6]). [9]  Externally, the anima/us is expressed through the unconscious personality of the individual or is constellated as a projection onto a person of the opposite sex.  Internally, the anima/us manifests as a figure—or figures, as the case may be with the animus—that connects us to the greater unconscious.  Stein (1998) provided a helpful summary: “Abstractly, the anima/us is a psychic structure that (a) is complementary to the persona and (b) links the ego to the deepest layer of the psyche, namely to the image and experience of the self” (p. 128).  But like all of the soul images, the anima/us is not only an abstract concept but is psychologically real .  Hence, the anima/us can present as an entity entirely distinct from and capable of interacting autonomously with the conscious ego.  As Jung (1989) described,

It is not too difficult to personify [the figures of the unconscious], as they always possess a certain degree of autonomy, a separate identity of their own.  Their autonomy is a most uncomfortable thing to reconcile oneself to, and yet the very fact that the unconscious presents itself in that way gives us the best means of handling it. (p. 187)

By gradually differentiating and externalizing the anima/us, it becomes possible to integrate its contents and power into the conscious self (Jung, 1928/1972 [ CW 7]).

While the anima/us is not the end of the road with regards to Soul, s/he remains the most elaborated facet of Soul in Jungian psychology and opens many doors along the Soul journey.  According to Jung, anima/us is the deepest most will go in our travels into the unconscious (Von Franz, 1975, p. 72).  However, for the committed few, the contents of the anima/us can be gradually integrated and the figure no longer becomes necessary as a bridge to the Self.  As Jung (1989) reported from a retrospective vantage in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections ,

Today I no longer need these conversations with the anima, for I no longer have such emotions. But if I did have them, I would deal with them in the same way.  Today I am directly conscious of the anima’s ideas because I have learned to accept the contents of the unconscious and to understand them.  I know how I much behave toward the inner images.  I can read their meaning directly from my dreams, and therefore no longer need a mediator to communicate them. (p. 188)

Von Franz (1964) similarly explained the possible progression from the presence of the anima/us to the central archetype of the Self:

If an individual has wrestled seriously enough and long enough with the anima (or animus) problem so that he, or she, is no longer partially identified with it, the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form, representing the Self, the inner most nucleus of the psyche.  In the dreams of a woman this center is usually personified as a superior female figure—a priestess, sorceress, earth mother, or goddess of nature or love.  In the case of a man, it manifests itself as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature, and so forth.  (p. 196)

Both accounts suggest that one can transcend the anima/us entirely, gaining more direct access to the material of the collective unconscious and the personal Soul.

Despite this possibility of integrating the contents of the anima/us to the extent that this figure no longer appears in the psychological landscape, the anima/us remains of especially important in Jungian psychology and is often defined interchangeably with the “soul”.  Perhaps this emphasis remains because the dimension of anima/us is as deep as most are able to go along the individuation journey.  But there seems to be more substantial ground for the affinity between the anima/us and the Soul itself.  We might speculate that this has to do with the particularly attractive and compelling nature of the anima/us, versus the often frightening, repulsive nature of the shadow, or the role of anima/us projection in romantic love (Stein, 1998).  Or maybe the affinity persists because the Soul does, in fact, serve as this intermediary function between the human individual and the greater spiritual whole, and thus, remains tied to the anima/us as the Soul’s closest personification.  In any case, the anima/us seems to hold the key to the greater Soul mystery and deserves further elaboration.

Deepening into the Anima and Animus in Jungian Psychology

Comparing Jung’s later reflections and psychological theory to his soul encounter as presented in The Red Book , we can trace an important evolution in his understanding of the anima/us as well as an enduring connection between the anima/us and the soul.  Shamdasani (2009) described Jung’s contribution to our understanding of the soul as anima/us:

Jung provided a definition of the soul.  He argued that the soul possessed qualities that were complementary to the persona, containing those qualities that the conscious attitude lacked.  This complementary character of the soul also affected its sexual character, so that a man had a feminine soul, or anima, and the woman had a masculine soul, or animus. (p. 59-60)

Although throughout The Red Book , Jung refered to his “soul” in the general sense (while interacting with a soul image that most closely resembles the anima) he later identifies that this figure that he had originally called “soul” had a more specific nature.  In Aion , Jung (1971) clarified, “I have suggested… the term “anima,” as indicating something specific, for which the expression “soul” is to general and too vague” (p. 151).  While the original link between the two remains, this differentiation of the “anima” from the general “soul” is important.  Reflecting on the evolution of his conceptualization of the “soul” Jung (1989) explained,

I was greatly intrigued by the fact that a woman should interfere with me from within.  My conclusion was that she must be the ‘soul’, in the primitive sense, and I began to speculate on the reasons why the name anima was given to the soul.  Why was it thought of as feminine?  Later I came to see that this inner feminine figure plays a typical, or archetypal, role in the unconscious of a man, and I called her the “anima.”  The corresponding figure in the unconscious of woman I called the “animus.” (p. 186)

As if delineating the accessible terrain within the murky territory of the broader “soul,” Jung’s subsequent psychological theory elaborates upon the differentiated anima/us and clarifies her/his essential role in the individuation process.

Perhaps most importantly, the anima/us enables communication between the conscious ego and the strata of the unconscious.  As Jung (1989) described, “The animus and the anima should function as a bridge, or a door, leading to the images of the collective unconscious, as the persona should be a sort of bridge into the world” (p. 380).  Repeatedly in his Red Book experiences Jung relied on this mediating function of his anima to illuminate the images of the unconscious.  At times, the anima was inaccessible and her absence was potently felt.  As Jung (1989) described, “… I had written down a fantasy of my soul having flown away from me.  This was a significant event: the soul, the anima, establishes the relationship to the unconscious” (p. 191).  Jung (1989) elaborated the primary value his interactions with the anima offered him:

It is she who communicates the images of the unconscious to the conscious mind, and that is what I chiefly valued her for.  For decades I always turned to the anima when I felt that my emotional behavior was disturbed, and that something had been constellated in the unconscious.  I would then ask the anima: “Now what are you up to? What do you see? I should like to know.” After some resistance she regularly produced an image.  As soon as the image was there, the unrest or the sense of oppression vanished. (p. 187-188)

Not only did the anima provide insights from the unconscious, but Jung reported a relief in the images she revealed.  In this sense, the anima/us has a restorative or healing faculty.

Although Jung’s personal accounts emphasized the experience of the anima in the inner imaginal landscape, the anima/us is also constellated in the external world of relationship.  This occurs when the anima/us archetypal image is projected onto a well-matched other in the physical world.  In fact, this is likely the most common way in which the anima/us is encountered.  Projection is inherently unconscious, and hence, typically goes unnoticed by the participating partners.  Jung (1921/1971b) described the prevalence of this dynamic: “Wherever an impassioned, almost magical, relationship exists between the sexes, it is invariably a question of a projected soul-image.  Since these relationships are very common, the soul must be unconscious just as frequently—that is, vast numbers of people must be quite unaware of the way they are related to their inner psychic processes” (p. 471, [CW 6]).  When operating unconsciously, this cycle can go on repeatedly, motivating a lifelong search to fulfill the anima/us encounter—the longing for one’s own Soul—through romantic relationship (Hollis, 1998).

For the anima/us to regain his/her productive and growth-inspiring role, however, the projection onto the other must be withdrawn.  In The Red Book , Jung (2009) cautioned, “For if you do not see your soul, you see her in fellow men and this will drive you mad, since this devilish mystery and hellish spook can hardly be seen through” (p. 496).  In the grips of projection, we are as though possessed, no longer the agents of our actions or perceptions.  Jung (1946/1966) described the two poles of this condition:

The withdrawal of projections makes the anima what she originally was: an archetypal image which, in its right place, functions to the advantage of the individual.  Interposed between the ego and the world, she acts like an ever-changing Shakti, who weaves the veil of Maya and dances the illusion of existence. But, functioning between the ego and the unconscious, the anima becomes the matrix of all the divine and semi-divine figures, from the pagan goddess to the Virgin, from the messenger of the Holy Grail to the saint. (p. 133 [ CW 16])

When we hold the tension between projection and inner realization a triad forms between the participating ego, the physical relationship partner, and the transcendent soul figure of the inner world (Jung, 1971a).  Then, Jung explained, “The missing fourth element that would make the triad a quaternity is, in a man the archetype of the Wise Old Man… and in a woman the Chthonic Mother” (Jung, 1971a, p. 161).  The anima/us, thus, draws out the Self.  Stein (1998) elaborates, “In the presence of this quaternary, we find the numinous experience of the self, as a relationship.  Provided that enough consciousness prevails to see the differences between human and archetypal features in this situation of love and attraction there is the opportunity here for a full experience of the self” (p. 145).  As such, the anima/us presents his/her multidimensionality and essential function in arguably the two richest dimensions of human life, the inner world of imagination and the outer manifestation of romantic love.

However, in his/her least differentiated or developed form, the anima/us expresses through the unconscious personality of the individual as a compensation for the outward persona of the individual.  Classically, in the problematic form, it would be said that a man with “anima issues” might withdraw into moodiness and over-emotionality, while a woman possessed by her animus tends to attack, criticize, and seek power (Stein, 1998).  Jung (1921/1971b) described this compensatory function of the anima/us and the influences of the unconscious on the character of the anima/us:

As to its common human qualities, the character of the anima can be deduced from that of the persona.  Everything that should normally be in the outer attitude… will invariably be found in the inner attitude… In the same way as the persona, the instrument of adaptation to the environment, is strongly influenced by environmental conditions, the anima is shaped by the unconscious and its qualities. (p. 469-470 [ CW 6])

Yet, given the inextricable opposition of the externally influenced persona and the internally influenced anima/us, we can extend that the environmental factors that shape the persona, affect the anima/us as well.  In this sense, as the anima/us becomes conscious s/he abides in a dynamic feedback loop with the environment and the semi-conscious persona. [10]   Thus, at once very personal, the anima/us is highly influenced by the historical and current collective context within which the individual is embedded.

This perspective sheds a telling light on Jung’s explicitly gendered and contrasexual understanding of the anima/us.  Although this topic cannot be adequately addressed in this brief discussion, it should be acknowledged.  If we recognize the anima and animus as living, culturally influenced personifications of soul, it would hold that rather than remaining static their presentations would evolve along with culture.  While Jung clearly articulated his perspective on the foundational differences between men and women—and therefore, the anima and the animus—I think a more dynamic understanding aligns with Jung’s perspective on the necessary evolution of mythology and the Gods, as well as his personal experience of the unfolding relationship with his own anima (1989, 2009).  Certainly our current time—yearning toward post-patriarchal society—warrants a critique of the classical Jungian assumption that men are emotionally and relationally underdeveloped while women carry this insufficiency regarding assertiveness and logic.  Likewise, taking a more fluid stance on sexuality and gender invites a revision of the contrasexual dimension of the anima/us.  Vaughan (1995) suggested that a sexed, gendered figure as a personification of the soul needs to be transcended altogether and that Soul is rather, “…an androgynous subtle body existing in the imaginal realm,” mediating “…between formless Spirit and material substance” (p. 150).  Exploring alternatives to the classical Jungian theory of the anima and animus begs attention beyond the scope of this discussion and presents fertile ground for future research and revision.

Concluding Thoughts: The Contemporary Soul Journey

“To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth.  In the depths, being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth. You think you are standing still like swamp water, but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth’s greats deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea. (Jung, 2009, p. 238)

As we have explored, a Jungian perspective affords gentle guidance within the fecund, mysterious waters of the Soul.  Like a lighthouse in the stormy sea, Jung left us with a direction toward which to steer.  But while his theory of the anima/us and the other images of soul certainly provides helpful signposts along the journey, I believe Jung would invite us to enter the landscape of our own Souls with fresh eyes and curiosity about whatever we might find.  As he repeatedly conveyed, “What is to come will be created in you and from you.  Hence look into yourself.  Do not compare, do not measure.  No other way is like yours.  All other ways deceive and tempt you.  You must fulfill the way that is in you” (Jung, 2009, p. 384).  The invitation is always to return to unique unfolding of ourselves with appreciation for the inner world that can be so easily missed in constant activity of modern life.  As Moore (1992) cautioned, “Soul cannot thrive in a fast-paced life because being affected, taking things in and chewing on them, requires time… The vessel in which soul-making takes place is an inner container scooped out by reflection and wonder” (p. 286).  I think beyond what the theory can convey, Jungian psychology draws us deeper in to reclaim our natural wonder regarding the psyche, our Soul.

For myself, engaging with Jungian psychology and Jung’s (2009) Liber Novus in particular, has felt more like a catalyst than a map, watering my depths toward the flourishing of yet unseen fruits.  As I attend to the figures arising in my own dreams and the dynamics present in my relationships, I find my life enriched with the possibility of incarnating my Soul more fully.  While at times I have been tempted to pin the messages of my Soul in place—longing to receive clear directions for my life—I have been accompanied by deeper message of surrender inherent in Jung’s teachings.  I appreciate Moore’s (1992) reminder that, “The human soul is not meant to be understood.  Rather, you might take a more relaxed position and reflect on the way your life has taken shape” (p. xix).  Reflecting back and visioning forward, I know my capacity to dialogue with my Soul has deepened in my sustained encounter with the Jungian perspective.  Against my proclivity to lean into the future, I am inspired to pause.  And with humility, I accept the task of psychology that Hillman (1976) articulated: “…psychology is conceived as a necessary activity of the psyche, which constructs vessels and breaks them in order to deepen and intensify experiences” (p. xviii).  Certainly, in the final days of pregnancy, feel myself expanding to bring forth and contain greater life.  I trust the resources I have gained in my encounter with Jungian thought will provide both strength and flexibility to support my “endlessly slow growth” forward.

Elkins, D. N. (1995). Psychotherapy and spirituality: Toward a theory of the soul.  Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 35( 2), 78-98.

Graves, Robert. (1955). The Greek myths . London, England: The Penguin Group.

Hillman, J. (1976). Revisioning psychology . New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Hollis, J. (1998) The Eden project: In search of the magical other. Toronoto, Canada: Inner City Books.

Jung, C. G. (1966). The psychology of the transference. In H. Read, M. Fordham, & G, Adler (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 16, pp. 163-323). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1946)

Jung, C. G. (1969). Archetypes of the collective unconscious. In H. Read, M. Fordham, & G, Adler (Eds.),  The collected works of C. G. Jung  (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 9 pt. 1). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1946)

Jung, C. G. (1968). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self .  In H. Read, M. Fordham, G, Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.),  The collected works of C. G. Jung  (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 9, pt. 2). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1959)

Jung, C. G. (1971a). The portable Jung . (J. Campbell, Ed.). New York, NY: Penguin.

Jung, C. G. (1971b). The psychological types. In H. Read, M. Fordham, & G, Adler (Eds.),  The collected works of C. G. Jung  (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 6). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1921)

Jung, C. G. (1972). The relations between the ego and the unconscious. In H. Read, M. Fordham, & G, Adler (Eds.),  The collected works of C. G. Jung  (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 7, pp. 123-244). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1928)

Jung, C. G. (1989).  Memories, dreams, reflections . New York: Vintage Books.

Jung, C. G. (2009). The red book: Liber novus . S. Shamdasani (Ed.) New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co.

Moore, T. (1992). Care of the soul: A guide for cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life . New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.

Hoerni, U. (2009). Preface. In C. G. Jung, (S. Shamdasani, Ed.), The red book: Liber novus (pp. xi-xiv.) New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co.

Shamdasani, S. (2009). Introduction. In C. G. Jung, S. Shamdasani (Ed.), The red book: Liber novus (pp. 1-95). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co.

Stein, M. (1998).  Jung’s map of the soul: An introduction.  Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing Company.

Von Franz, M.-L. (1964). The process of individuation (pp. 158-229).  In Jung, C. G. Man and his symbols. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company Inc.

Von Franz, M.-L. (1975).  C.G. Jung, his myth in our time . London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Vaughan, F. (1995). Shadows of the sacred . Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, Inc.

           Notes

[1] Written originally at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the graduate course Jungian Psychology and East West Spirituality with Dr. Stephen Julich, 2016

[2] Hereafter, I will capitalize Soul in reference to the greater dimension beyond soul figures or images.

[3] Beginning in 1913, C. G. Jung embarked on a “self-experiment” that became known as his “confrontation with the unconscious” (Hoerni, 2009, p. xi). This process unfolded for Jung over phases of direct encounter with the figures of his soul through dreams and active imagination captured in journals and paintings, followed by layers of elaboration on these encounters, and eventually, revisions and meticulous calligraphic rewriting in a leather-bound book entitled Liber Novus (Shamdasani, 2009).  Although Jung did not complete this book, the experiences that it contained arguably formed the foundation for all of his future psychological theory.  In his own words, this exploration of his “inner images…was the prima materia for a lifetime’s work” (Jung, 1989, p. 199).

[4] And the two give birth to a daughter named Hedone, the Greek root for pleasure, enjoyment and delight (Graves, 1955).

[5] Here, I am referring to the soul image that Jung encounters as his anima in an active imagination.  The following section will unfold the difference between soul images and the greater Soul, and will explore the anima/animus in Jungian psychology.

[6] The masculine soul image for women, to be discussed in greater depth in the following section.

[7] To this we could add the trickster, and perhaps other archetypal entities, but for the sake of this discussion, I will hold to the three most essential figures that are recognized in Jungian psychology. The anima/us bears particular relevance to the soul while the wisdom figures can be seen as personifications of the Self (Von Franz, 1964).  Still, because the triad is essentially inextricable, I think it is fruitful to recognize them all as figures of the soul.

[8] While the anima and animus bear important differences—especially, the Latin meaning of anima actually being “soul” and animus being “spirit” and the singularity of the anima versus the multiplicity of the animus—for the sake of clarity, I will discuss them together as the constrasexual soul figure(s) that a man or a woman may encounter on the Soul journey (Stein, 1998).  In so doing, I largely defer a discussion of the problematic nature of ascribing contrasexual and gender-specific qualities to anima and animus for later project (see a brief discussion of this issue below).

[9] The common example given by Jungian psychologists is that a highly rational, logical man will have a sentimental, emotional, and/or dramatic anima.

[10] While the persona is outwardly visible, Jung maintains that it is not entirely conscious to the ego (e.g. 1921/1971b [ CW 6]).

2 thoughts on “The Unfolding Soul: An Exploration of Soul in Jungian Psychology”

Synchronus visitation.

Hi Olga, hope all is well with you and yours I’ve been studying my dreams from a Jungian perspective for over 30 years now. And I have reached a point in inner development where I required a more substantial description of my soul. Thankfully I have found it in your writings above. Recently, I dreamt that my soul is waiting for me. For what I wondered? I later read the quote from Jung that it is waiting for us to unite and reconcile. I am humbled by this possibility. Coincidently, as you were formulating the article above I made my way on a personal pilgrimage to Kusnacht. There I unexpectantly got to meet Frau Jung, the wife of the great man’s son. She gave me permission to tour the grounds of his house and I saw first hand the jetty from where Jung launched his small boat onto Lake Zurich. It was a great day for me to experience. Namaste.

Thank you for sharing Merlin! Sounds like a synchronous unfolding indeed! Wishing well on your journeys into soul-discovery. Warmly, Olga

Comments are closed.

Friday essay: what do the 5 great religions say about the existence of the soul?

Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland

Disclosure statement

Philip C. Almond does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Queensland provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

View all partners

A recent survey found almost 70% of Australians believed in or were open to the existence of the soul — meaning they believe we are more than the stuff out of which our bodies are made.

The soul can be defined as the spiritual or non-material part of us that survives death.

Western pop culture is currently bewitched by what happens to us after death with TV shows such as The Good Place and Miracle Workers set largely in the afterlife. And the Disney film Soul depicts the soul of a jazz pianist separating from his earthly body to journey into the afterlife.

Read more: Disney Pixar's Soul: how the moviemakers took Plato's view of existence and added a modern twist

The five great world religions — Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism — all believe in some version of a “self”, variously named, which mostly survives death. But they imagine its origin, journey, and destination in some quite different and distinctive ways.

The origin of the soul – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

These three religions all believe there was a time when souls were not. That is to say, before God created the world, there was nothing at all.

Within Christianity, how the soul was united with its body was a matter of uncertainty. But all were agreed that the soul was present within the foetus, if not at the moment of conception, then within the first 90 days. When it comes to contemporary Christian debate about abortion, this moment is a crucial one. Most Christians today believe the soul enters the body at the time of conception.

Christianity adopted the Greek philosopher Plato’s view that we consist of a mortal body and an immortal soul . Death is thus the separation of the soul from the body.

According to Judaism, the soul was created by God and joined to an earthly body. But it did not develop a definitive theory on the timing or nature of this event (not least because the separation between body and soul was not an absolutely clear one). Modern Judaism remains uncertain on when, between birth and conception, a human being is fully present.

Similarly, in Islam, the soul was breathed into the foetus by God. As in Christianity, opinions vary on when this occurred, but the mainstream opinion has it that the soul enters the foetus around 120 days after conception.

For all three religions, souls will live forever.

The origin of the soul – Hinduism and Buddhism

Within Hinduism, there has been never been a time when souls did not exist. All of us have existed into the infinite past. Thus, we are all bound to Samsara – the infinite cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

Our souls are continually reincarnated in different physical forms according to the law of karma — a cosmic law of moral debit and credit. Each moral deed, virtuous or otherwise, leaves its mark on the individual. At the time of death, the sum total of karma determines our status in the next life.

Like Hinduism, Buddhism accepts there was no time when we were not bound to the cycle of birth and rebirth. But unlike Hinduism, it does not believe there is an eternal, unchanging “soul” that transmigrates from one life to the next. There is nothing permanent in us, any more than there is any permanence in the world generally.

Nevertheless, Buddhists believe our consciousness is like a flame on the candle of our body. At the moment of death, we leave the body but this flame, particularly our flame of moral credit or debit, goes into a new body. In Buddhism, this “karmic flame of consciousness” plays the same role as the “soul” in other religions.

The destiny of the soul – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Within Christianity, it is believed the soul continues its existence immediately after death. Most believe it will do so consciously (rather than in a sleep-like state). At the point of death, God will determine the soul’s ultimate fate — eternal punishment or eternal happiness .

Still, by the end of the first millennium, there was a recognition that most of us had not been sufficiently good to merit immediate happiness, nor sufficiently evil to merit eternal misery. Catholicism thus developed an intermediate state — purgatory — offering the slightly or moderately wicked a chance to be purified of their sins. All souls will be reunited with their resurrected bodies on Judgement Day when Christ returns and God finally confirms their destiny.

Judaism remains uncertain about the consciousness of the dead in the afterlife, although the dominant view holds that, after death, the soul will be in a conscious state.

Orthodox Judaism is committed to the idea of the resurrection of the body on Judgement Day and its reunion with the soul, together with heavenly bliss for the saved. Liberal forms of modern Judaism, like modern liberal Christianity, sit lightly on the idea of the resurrection of the body and emphasise spiritual life immediately after death.

Within Islam, souls await the day of resurrection in their graves. It is a limbo-like state: those destined for hell will suffer in their graves; those destined for heaven will wait peacefully.

There are two exceptions to this: those who die fighting in the cause of Islam go immediately into God’s presence; those who die as enemies of Islam go straight to hell.

On the final Day of Judgement, Muslims believe the wicked will suffer torments in hell. The righteous will enjoy the pleasures of Paradise.

The destiny of the soul – Hinduism

In the modern West, reincarnation has a positive flavour as a desirable alternative to the traditional Western afterlife. But the Indian traditions all agree it is the ultimate horror — their aim is to escape from it.

They do, however, differ radically in their views of the destiny of the soul beyond the eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Within Hinduism, we can distinguish four different schools of thought on this.

In the first of these, known as Samkhya-Yoga , the aim is to realise the essential separateness of the soul from its material body, thus enabling us to live in the here and now without attachment to the things of the world. At death, the liberated soul will exist eternally beyond any further entanglements with the world. Modern Western postural yoga derives from this, although it is intended, not so much to remove us from the world, as to enable us the better to function within it.

The second view, known as the Dvaita Vedanta school, is completely focused on the soul’s loving devotion to God, which will help liberate souls beyond death. As George Harrison sang , by chanting the names of the Lord (Krishna and Rama) “you’ll be free”. This is the dominant philosophy underlying the Hare Krishna movement and of all the Indian traditions, most closely resembles Christianity.

The third view is that of the Vishishtadvaita Vedanta school. Here, liberation occurs when the soul enters into the oneness of God, rather as a drop of water merges into the ocean, while paradoxically maintaining its individual identity.

The final view of the destiny of the soul within Hinduism is that of the Advaita Vedanta school. Liberation is attained when the soul realises its essential identity with Brahman — the impersonal Godhead beyond the gods.

The destiny of the karmic flame – Buddhism

Although there are divinities galore in Buddhism, the gods are not essential for liberation. So, it is possible to be a Buddhist atheist. Liberation from endless rebirth comes from our realisation that all is suffering and nothing is permanent, including the self.

In Theravada Buddhism (present in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos), the realised person enters Pari-Nirvana at death. The flame of consciousness is “extinguished”. The “soul” is no more.

In Mahayana Buddhism (in Japan, Vietnam and China, including Tibet)), liberation is attained when the world is seen as it really is, with the veil of ignorance removed — as having no ultimate reality. This means that, although at one level the many gods, goddesses, Buddhas, and Bodhisattvas can assist us on the path to liberation, they too, like us, have never really existed.

At the everyday level, we can distinguish between truth and falsity. But from the perspective of what is ultimately real, there is only Emptiness or Pure Consciousness. Liberation consists of coming to know that the idea of the individual soul was always an illusory one. In short, the individual soul never really was. It was part of the grand illusion that is the realm of Samsara.

The practice of Buddhist “mindfulness”, now becoming popular in the West in a secular form, is the continual attentiveness to the impermanence or unreality of the self and the world, and the suffering caused by thinking and acting otherwise.

The meaning of the soul

Within the Christian tradition, the idea that each individual was both mortal body and immortal soul distinguished humans from other creatures.

It made humanity qualitatively unique; ensuring the life of each individual soul had an ultimate meaning within the grand, divine scheme. However, even without a belief in the transcendent, atheistic humanists and existentialists still affirm the distinct value of each human person.

The question of souls is still one that matters. It is, in effect, wrestling with the meaning of human life — and whether each of us has more ultimate significance than a rock or an earthworm.

This is why the belief in souls persists, even in this apparently secular age.

• Christianity
• Friday essay
• Reincarnation

Want to write?

Write an article and join a growing community of more than 182,100 academics and researchers from 4,941 institutions.

Register now

• Skip to main content

Michael Newton Institute

• Journey of Souls

Dr. Michael Newton

Acclaim: Over 700,000 copies sold (in English alone, as well as being translated in many languages). A best seller for over 25 years. #1 Ranking on Amazon in three categories.

Published Languages: English, French, Italian, Hindi and more

Books like this come along once in a lifetime. Michael Newton’s groundbreaking first book on the Afterlife is one of the great spiritual books of our time. Decades of detailed research made this book possible and it finally emerged when it was most needed, as humanity was starting to open more to the metaphysical roots of our existence. What makes it even more special is that Michael didn’t believe what he was finding at first, though through the eyes of thousands of client cases he was able to build a working model of the afterlife, an understanding of our connection to it and the possibilities of having the wisdom it offers within a life rather that wait for the end of it. This book has changed the lives of hundreds, upon hundreds of thousands of people…

Why are you here on Earth? Where will you go after death? What will happen to you when you get there?

Many books have been written about past lives, but there has been very scant information about the ongoing existence of our souls as we await rebirth – until Journey of Souls was published in 1994. Still a best-selling classic, Journey of Souls summarizes Dr. Michael Newton’s research and work with individuals whom he placed in a state of deep hypnosis during which they recalled their experiences between lives as eternal spirits.

When Dr. Michael Newton, a certified Master Hypnotherapist, began regressing his clients back in time to access their memories of former lives he stumbled onto a discovery of enormous proportions: that it is possible to “see” into the spirit world through the mind’s eye of subjects who are in a hypnotized or superconscious state. Moreover, clients in this altered state are able to describe what their soul was doing between lives on Earth.

In Journey of Souls , Dr. Newton narrates and comments upon the progressive “travel log” of 29 of his clients who movingly described what happened to them between their former reincarnations on earth. They revealed graphic details about how it feels to die, who meets us right after death, what the spirit world is really like, where we go and what we do as souls, and why we choose to come back in certain bodies.

Finding one’s place in the spirit world initiates a deep process of healing for it provides understanding of the purpose behind significant life choices, and how and why your soul – and the souls of those you love – lives eternally. After reading Journey of Souls , you will gain a better understanding of the immortality of the human soul… and you will meet day-to-day personal challenges with a greater sense of purpose as you begin to understand the reasons behind events in your own life.

Through the 29 extraordinary case studies presented, you will learn specifics about:

• How it feels to die
• What you see and feel right after death
• The truth about “spiritual guides”
• What happens to “disturbed” souls
• Why you are assigned to certain soul groups in the spirit world and what you do there
• How you choose another body to return to Earth
• The different levels of souls: beginning, intermediate, and advanced
• When and where you first learn to recognize soulmates on Earth
• The purpose of life

Journey of Souls is a life-changing book. Already, over 1,000,000 people have taken Journey of Souls to heart, giving them hope in trying times. After reading Journey of Souls , you will gain a better understanding of the immortality of the human soul. You will meet day-to-day challenges with a greater sense of purpose. You will begin to understand the reasons behind events in your own life.

Table of Contents

• Death and Departure
• Gateway to the Spirit World
• The Displaced Soul
• Orientation
• The Beginner Soul
• The Intermediate Soul
• The Advanced Soul
• Life Selection
• Choosing a New Body
• Preparation for Embarkation

Journey of Souls is available in print and audio format

AVAILABLE FROM: Llewellyn Worldwide or Amazon

You may also be interested in . . .

• Advisory Council & Volunteers
• Values and Ethics
• History of MNI
• Dr Michael Newton
• LBL Stories
• LBL Research
• MNI LBL Training
• Alliance Hypnotherapy
• Alliance Past Life Regression

Publications

• Stories of the Afterlife
• Memories of the Afterlife
• Wisdom of Souls
• Little Book LBL
• Destiny of Souls

©2024 Michael Newton Institute. All Rights Reserved.

MNI is a not for profit organization, all accepting.

Coming Soon

Church Life Journal

A Journal of the McGrath Institute for Church Life

• Home ›

Evolution and the Human Soul

by Christopher Baglow June 23, 2020

The LORD God fashioned the human being (Hebrew: āḏām ) out of the clay of the ground (Hebrew: āḏāmah ), and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and so he became a living being. —Gen 2:7

T his single line from the Second Creation Account in Genesis offers a rich field of reflection in light of recent advances in our understanding of the evolutionary beginnings of our species. The connection between the word for “ground” ( āḏāmah ) and the word for “human being” ( āḏām ) suggests that humans are naturally made of physical elements. Therefore, we will first look at the scientific account of how human beings came from the ground like all other creatures, from a long natural evolution from earlier living creatures. On the theological plane in this process matter, the stuff of the ground, is ultimately fashioned into humanity, the image of God. That tells us a great deal about what it means to be human.

We should note that the passage from Genesis also says that God breathes into the human being his own “breath.” This sets humans apart from the other animals, who also have the breath of life (See: Gen 6:17), but not as breathed directly from God. The picture, then, is of an animal that has a life more like God’s than the rest of the animals, an animal who is not simply one of God’s creatures but who becomes a “living being” precisely because of a special relationship to God.

The Hebrew word for “being” in Genesis 2:7 is nephesh , a word that can be translated as “soul” or “life principle,” which the Church teaches is different from any other life principle we see among other animals, because it is capable of things that are qualitatively different and even survives death. But more about that later.

The biggest issue here is how do we bring these two ideas together? How is it possible to look at a human being as both an animal, and the unique image of God with a soul that does not perish at death? We will therefore conclude with the suggestion that in human origins, and in every human conception, God our Creator is involved in a unique way that is different from the way he is present to the rest of creation—unless, of course, other rational animals are out there somewhere in the cosmos.

So, let us start with what evolutionary science tells us by recalling a fossil-hunting expedition that occurred back in the year 2000 in Ethiopia. While fossil hunting, the scientists spotted a small skull peering down a slope. Years of painstaking excavation revealed other bones as well: a torso, a foot, a kneecap, and tiny finger bones. The skull even contained teeth, which, upon further examination, were revealed to be baby teeth. They named her “Baby Selam”— selam means “peace” in Ethiopian.

Scientists estimate the age of the bones to be 3.3 million years old, making it the world’s oldest fossil of its kind. When you see it, you immediately think, “Wow, that looks just like a chimpanzee baby!” But there is a big difference—this baby had an upper skeleton and skull with chimpanzee-like features, including shoulder blades that would be useful for climbing. But she also had a lower skeleton like ours, which meant she could walk upright naturally. When you watch YouTube videos you can see the difference between how a monkey walks and how we walk. You will notice that Baby Selam’s species walks like us—her lower body is built for walking. In a sense, the journey towards being human started from the bottom up. The discovery of Selam corresponded with others in 1976 Laetoli, Tanzania. There 3.6 million-year-old fossilized footprints were discovered that had been made by a group of three australopiths who traveled across open land through volcanic ash between one wooded area to another. The footprints indicate that their feet and walking patterns were like ours.

From here, we see other traits emerging. We find what are called obligate bipeds—hominins that have bodies that are built for upright walking all of the time. Also stone tools, such as handaxes, are found. The earliest ones are haphazard, but as time goes on they become more and more refined. Those tools were used for killing and butchering animals, so some time in there they started eating meat, which meant that more metabolism could go to brain development. The skull size starts to grow. We also see evidence of prosociality, the caring for other members of groups who could not care for themselves.

In the ruins of the medieval town Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia, archaeological digs unearthed artifacts and fossils of Homo Erectus , a hominin species which originated around 1.89 million years ago and only went extinct as recently as 40,000 years ago. One skull, dated to approximately 1.8 million years ago, belonged to an aged male whose tooth sockets had shriveled and who had been toothless (except for one tooth) for many years before he died. For him to have survived without teeth for so many years would have required care on the part of his relatives, in which soft foods were chosen, reserved and probably even chewed for him.

Up until Homo Erectus , all the fossils we find are in Africa, but Dmanisi is thousands of miles away. With new ways to get around, bigger brains and social cooperation, they came out of Africa and spread all over Europe and Asia, even down into the islands of Indonesia.

In Europe, at least 400,000 years ago, their descendants, Homo Heidelbergensis, began building dwelling places with hearths for burning wood and cooking food. They also crafted projectile hunting weapons such as wooden spears. Such spear making required a high level of intelligence and manual dexterity, and spear hunting for large game requires an incredible amount of group cooperation and coordination. These were the ancestors of the Neanderthals, but scientists also trace our own species back to them, but in Africa, not in Europe. So we have taken a detour out of Africa, but we have to go back to continue our part of the story.

Around 300,000 years ago, we begin to see the distinctive anatomy of modern Homo Sapiens , especially in skulls found in Northern Africa and in the Levant, around the Holy Land. But up until 120,000-60,000 years ago, such remains are found accompanied by artifacts that do not differ in any significant way from our Neanderthal cousins, who themselves were not much more advanced than Homo Heidelbergensis . It seems that our modern human skeletal structure, including our large skull cases and brains, were around for a long time before any robust evidence of human uniqueness “arrived.” The oldest example we have of a new kind of behavior comes from Blombos Cave in South Africa from around 77,000 years ago. The pieces of ochre found there, which have a cross-hatch pattern, are the oldest known examples of an artifact that can be confidently interpreted as symbolic. There is no way to know whether or not it was the very first.

What seems clear is that the humans at Blombos existed on our side of the cognitive breakthrough often referred to as the “Human Revolution”—the emergence of symbolic thought, the ability to organize the world around us mentally by generating a vast array of symbols in which one thing stands for something else. The word symbol comes from the Greek verb symbállein , which means “to put together”—in the Blombos Cave, a design appears that shows up in later artifacts and seems to be put together with the intention to stand for some other thing. Once we see symbolism, we are seeing the work of other human beings like us. Consider such 30,000 to 40,000-year-old artifacts and ask yourself, “What other animal does stuff like this?”

We will consider that in a moment. Here is a good opportunity to pause and look back at our guiding verse, especially, “The Lord God formed the Adam, the human, from the earth.” God’s preparation of the human body took millions of years; in fact, it took billions of years of cosmic history for just the first lifeform to evolve on earth. It involved the slow process of primate and hominin evolution, a process that unfolded with fits and starts, with detours and many side-roads. But the delay came not on the part of God but on the part of creation itself, which took time to realize its potential to produce a being capable of being the image of God. Matter had to “mature,” starting all the way back at the Big Bang, to the point where its organization had been realized just so. At that moment, when evolution had produced a brain capable of the processes of language and symbolization, we now no longer speak of hominins but of humans in the fullest sense, rational animals in whom the life-pattern of hominins is taken up as the foundation of a new and greater way of being and acting.

Now you might be thinking, “Wait a minute! You just showed us creatures that make tools, that build houses, that cook meat, that care for their sick and elderly. Neanderthals, whom we did not talk about, even buried their dead. What makes us so different?” The difference is the difference between animal intelligence and human reason.

St. Thomas Aquinas , one of the greatest thinkers in history, saw this difference clearly, and he saw it without disregarding the incredible mental powers of animals. He was aware of a very high degree of cognitive ability, what we might call intelligence or brainpower, in non-human animals. They have the ability to learn from past experience. They are capable of judging situations correctly and can learn to solve problems; St. Thomas called this “natural judgment.” But, the power of reason allows our species alone to make judgments about our judgments, to hold real things in our minds mentally and to come to understand them not only for how they concern us and how we might use them, but for what they are. Animals can make natural judgments, St. Thomas acknowledges, but he also adds, “to pass judgments on one’s own judgments belongs only to reason.”

And, so humans are also capable of freedom and moral responsibility. Because I can make judgments about my judgments, I am responsible for my actions. I can choose to do this or that because I can stand back and think about the nature of this or that choice in itself and in relation to goodness.

Symbolism and language are at the heart of what it means to be a rational animal. Other animals may act intelligently, and make natural judgments, but we human animals have the power of reason —the ability to capture some aspect of a thing in an abstract concept or symbol and to then reason with respect to it to develop a deeper comprehension of both it and how it relates to other things.

What are some examples of the incredible difference between us and all other animals, even our highly sophisticated evolutionary ancestors?

• Abstraction: The capacity for objectivity is the human “ability to go beyond immediate interests and needs and to perceive oneself and others as the beings they are in their own right”
• We can entertain universal concepts like circularity, redness, beauty, truth, and draw from them principles that apply in all instances of each
• We can judge the truth of assertions, like 2+2=4 and then apply it to all such combinations of quantity. A computer can also distinguish between true and false propositions, but only when a human with understanding builds it and programs it to carry out such steps in an automatic way. Unlike a computer, we can reason correctly about true or false propositions even when we have not been programmed to do so, that is, even when we have never been given a precise set of instructions telling us exactly what to do
• We are capable of coming to the conclusion that some things are necessarily true. 1 does not equal 0, and we know that this must be the case in any possible universe
• Reminiscence: we can submit our memories to reason, and see that we misunderstood in that moment but understand better now

In other words, humans have capacities that transcend the powers of the other animals. Our intellectual powers transcend purely material applications and have infinite applications.

How do we make sense of such incredible capacities which, as far as we know, belong only to us in the universe? Now we can move to consider a second issue: the soul. At Blombos Cave, we no longer simply find the remains of evolutionary ancestors but of humans like us. St. Thomas Aquinas concludes that “There exists, therefore, an operation of the soul which so far exceeds bodily nature that it is not even performed by any corporeal organ; and such is the operation of the ‘rational soul’” (ST I.78.4). The human brain does not reason. It just so happens to be the material organ without which we could not reason. There is more to human beings than physical bodily stuff, even more than the brain.

The issue of the origin of the human soul is the one issue about which the Church has qualified her openness to what science has revealed about our evolutionary origins. To quote St. John Paul II, “The doctrine of faith affirms that man’s spiritual soul is created directly by God . . . the human soul, on which man’s humanity definitively depends, cannot emerge from matter, since the soul is of a spiritual nature.” So, from the theological perspective, the “human difference” is located in the fact that the soul is spiritual and directly created by God; it is not merely the result of a biological process. In fact, this is the case for every human being; whenever a new human being is conceived, it must involve the direct creation of the soul of that human being.

So now it is time to bring it all together, by asking: How does God “directly create” a human soul? In our ordinary way of thinking, it is easy to imagine that whenever a human body is “made,” God makes a soul for this body as a separate thing, “attaching” the two. Many mistakenly think of themselves as two things, a living body and a mysterious ghost that is the real self. This, however, is to misunderstand the nature of the soul, which is not a separate thing that God makes but, along with the matter from which our body is made, is one of two principles that make a human being a living being. No part of us is simply soul, no part of us is merely body. In fact, a body without a soul is not a body at all. As the soul is the very life principle of a living body, a body without a soul is only a corpse.

At the beginning of our species, and indeed at the beginning of every human life, we have a paradox. From one perspective, human beings are the natural product of primate evolution, the end-result of a meandering process that involved trends we see in other hominins: bigger brains, more sophisticated tools, social organization, etc. From the other perspective, each human being is a rational and spiritual being, the product of God’s loving initiative that engages each of us in a special relationship with our Creator. The International Theological Commission (ITC) expresses the mystery of the direct (also called “special”) creation of the human soul in a way that sheds light on this paradox: God can “bring about effects that transcend the capacity of created causes acting according to their natures” in which God directly causes the soul in a “non-disruptive” way.

Human souls, then, do come from parents; through the fertilization of the female ovum by the male sperm, human parents are the created causes acting according to their sexual natures. What makes human reproduction different is not that God disrupts this process, but rather causes it to produce a life principle that transcends that of the other animals. The human soul, the very life-principle that makes a human body to be a living body of a specific kind, is not a thing God makes separately. Rather, due to the free unfolding of a universe that God sustains in being precisely for this purpose, a body of the human kind is, of its essence, a body that must have a spiritual soul to be the kind of creature that it is. It is a body that, in the words of the seventeenth century Catholic philosopher John of St. Thomas, “calls out to God out of justice for a soul.” The spiritual soul is the principle that, with the body, makes a human being this kind of living being. Evolution, according to the God-given laws of the universe and due to the activity of creatures over millions of years, has yielded a situation where, in our universe, there is now a material creature for whom to be spiritual is its natural state, whose origins implicate God and require his direct involvement.

This wonderful mystery reveals a truth that science could never discover but which faith and reason together can discern: that Homo Sapiens is the ultimate reason for why the universe exists, the point of God’s creative activity. From all eternity God did not merely will to share his goodness with creatures, but he willed for there to be a creature that could receive the gift of the created universe and, ultimately, the gift of his own divine life, with understanding and freedom. In the words of St. John Paul II:

Creation is a gift because man appears in it, who, as an “image of God,” is able to understand the very meaning of the gift in God’s call from nothing to existence . . . Man appears in creation as the one who received the world as a gift, and vice versa, one can also say that the world has received man as a gift.

The created universe could not be a gift unless there was a creature who, being capable of understanding, could wonder at its beauty, respond to it with delight, and begin to comprehend its patterns and laws. The human difference, and the paradox of special creation, lies precisely in this uniquely human capacity, which places us in an intimate relationship with the Trinity, who calls us into being out of nothingness and then calls out to us in love.      

I would like to return to our opening verse, Gen 2:7. As I noted, the first part, God forming humanity from the clay of the ground, shows us one more feature of what God has revealed to us, and what evolutionary science also demonstrates—all human beings are from God’s good earth. No one of us can say, “I, or my race, is somehow better than all others.” In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “Despite every distinction that culture and history have brought about, it is still true that we are, in the last resort, the same . . . earth, formed from dust, and destined to return to it . . . The Bible says a decisive ‘No’ to all racism and to every human division.”

So does science: it turns out that all human beings are 99.9% genetically the same and that the differences between races and ethnicities are vanishingly tiny. A study conducted in the early part of the last decade tested the DNA of 1,056 people from 52 populations in five major geographic regions of the world: Africa, Eurasia, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. The study shows that of the tiny 1% difference, 94% is among individuals of the same populations, and only 6% between individuals from different populations. By comparison, according to Ian Tattersall , a single population of chimpanzees in West Africa has more diversity in its DNA than the entire human population has today! Skin color, which has been and remains a source of social division and an ocean of misery, violence, and misunderstanding throughout history, turns out to be a micro-adaptation to various climates that has actually been independently acquired numerous times by human populations living in various regions of the world. Our current crisis has an answer, the answer of faith and of science, that we need to heed.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Our special thanks go out to the Lumen Christi Institute where a version of this essay was originally delivered.

Featured Image: Jacek Malczewski, In the Cloud, 1894; Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD-Old-100.

Christopher Baglow

Christopher Baglow is Director of the Science & Religion Initiative of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Faith, Science and Reason: Theology on the Cutting Edge and is the co-recipient of the 2018  Expanded Reason Award in the Teaching category.

Read more by Christopher Baglow

Faith and the Expanding Universe of Georges Lemaître

April 04, 2019 | Jonathan Lunine

Newsletter Sign up

Era of Light

Awaken, a new world is here.

What is Your Soul’s Journey (And Where is Your Final Destination?)

What is your soul’s journey? It’s the journey of many lifetimes, stretching over aeons of time.

Every action you take, every word you speak is a contributing part. The real question of the soul’s journey isn’t about what defines it. The question is, how are you going to define yours?

If you become aware of that the inner voice, you’ll find yourself in places you never imagined.

Just allow yourself to be guided. Your soul never lies…

What is the Journey of a Soul?

Your soul’s journey is the path you take from conception to fully empowered creator being. It’s the overarching narrative that includes both your physical incarnations  and  your life within the spirit world.

The path each soul takes will be unique. There is no set course that  has  to be followed. Each of us is born with a unique set of traits that marks us out as being better suited for some tasks more than others. Some will be teachers, oracles and seers. Other’s will specialise in the arts and so on…

The diversity of soul paths is near limitless. You can choose to specialise in any area you want. You can change course, take on multiple interests, diverge from what is expected of you at every turn and create your own narrative for how you want to progress. It’s entirely within your free-will.

Soul Journey vs Spiritual Journey: How They’re Both Separate and Connected

Your spiritual and soul’s journey are closely related and are both a part of the same whole. But there  are  some key differences between the two. Your spiritual journey is largely concerned with your path throughout each physical incarnation. It’s the path of the “I AM” expression of your soul consciousness.

Your spiritual journey is a gradual awakening process. You come into each new life in a state of amnesia, tasked with the mission of remembering your divine origins. It’s the reason why you continue reincarnate lifetime after lifetime. By transcending the limitations of your physical body, you can realise your unlimited potential.

This part of your development is about introspection. It’s where most of the grunt-work is done that contributes to your soul’s journey. Being on a spiritual path is about introspection, doing the deep inner work and discovering your true essence. It’s about you and  your  journey. That doesn’t mean it’s selfish or self-centred in a negative light. It’s simply self-focused.

The way you progress on your spiritual path is through tackling the immediate challenges that are holding you back. These are usually mental and emotional and relate to your interpersonal relationships and how you perceive your self-worth. The more layers you peel away of instant gratification, judgment and anger, the quicker you’ll go through the great remembering of who you are.

By contrast, your soul’s journey is the overarching narrative of your entire journey as a soul. It takes into account your birth as a soul, your development in the spirit world and the connection between each of your incarnations leading to where you stand, now.

Your Soul’s Origin and Connection with Source Consciousness

The soul birthing process has a lot in common with the stages we’re familiar with in the physical. There’s a form of insemination, an incubation period and eventual birth, which results in the creation of an infant soul.

One thing that marks out the soul birthing process is the lack of conception as we know. There is no mating process. Everything that is created come from source consciousness. In a way, you could think of it as an asexual birthing process.

When a new ‘batch’ of souls is ready to be created, a burst of light energy is emitted from Source. These shards of light are projected towards designated nursery areas in the spirit world. Here, these souls enter in an embryonic state and are cared for by souls known as ‘Incubator Mothers.’

The newly ‘conceived’ souls reside here in honeycomb-like structures until they’re ready to hatch and become a fully-fledged soul. Once they enter into full consciousness, they’re given the same motherly energy that you would expect in a physical expression of being.

Although the way in which souls are birthed is asexual, the same need for feminine care remains. This involves several mechanical processes, such as the disconnection of an umbilical cord, but also of basic attention, expressing warmth and acceptance.

Coming into Your First Incarnations and Finding Your Soul Group

After you become cognizant of yourself as a sentient being, you aren’t rushed off into your first incarnation straight away. You’re given time to acclimatise to your surroundings and recognise your divine nature as a soul birthed directly from Source.

When you are ready for your first steps in life a physical setting, it’s very rare that it’ll be as a hominid – human – being. Most souls begin their journey in the plant and mineral kingdom, progressing to the animal kingdom before taking on a human life.

By progressing this way, it allows a young soul to become familiar with physicality without the burden of dealing with complex human emotions. Starting life as vegetation, for example, means you can go through rapid life cycles, which can amass more experience than you think.

Everything in existence has consciousness. And by choosing to be a plant, you’re volunteering to be a part of the food chain. That means when you plant body containing your soul essence is consumed, you meld with the being consuming your flesh allowing you to partially integrate their wisdom, also.

After partaking in several on these preliminary lives, you’ll experience your first life as a human/hominid either on this world or another. These will generally be less challenging live to help ease you into the life as an incarnate soul having to deal with complex emotions, social structure and culture.

All these experiences are what will decide which soul group you will be placed in. The purpose of this method is to make sure that souls are placed in groups that are balanced in terms of advancement, ability, attributes and specific goals.

Creating Soul Family, Amassing Soul Codes and Furthering Your Journey

It’s easy to limit our perception of what possible to what’s in front of us. But the totality of creation extends far beyond our Earth, our Solar System and even beyond the universal level we exist on. Creation is in an infinite concept that knows no bounds.

The galaxy and wider universe are teeming with life. The fact that we haven’t been formally introduced to it yet doesn’t invalid its existence. There are many other human and hominid races that predate our own by millions – even billions – of years. We’re just the latest development in that chain of evolution.

All these bodies need souls for them to function, and there is no rule saying you can’t experience life as another race. The potential for your experience as a soul is entirely up to your own free-will. In fact, it’s pretty much a requirement for your progression.

Just as we work our way through the stages of mineral and animal kingdom experiences, leading to a variety of human incarnations, we also need to go through life on other worlds, galaxies and universes to round out our skill set as a soul.

In the first instance, we travel from solar system to solar system creating soul family with the native species that reside there. We do this by incarnating into their DNA skinsuit, which then gives us access to their race DNA memory and soul/solar codes.

These codes valued currency within the context of a soul’s journey. They’re a form of spiritual technology that allows travel between different solar systems by allowing you access through the sun’s stargate.

You cannot come into a star system and incarnate without either having a soul code to enter, relevant soul family members that are already or have incarnated there. If you don’t have these soul codes, it is still possible for you to enter the planetary consciousness and incarnate by invitation – although this is much rarer.

The reason for spreading your wings is obvious. Just as we travel the Earth to experience different cultures and perspective, so do different races across the galaxy have their own perspectives. In fact, many of us can trace our galactic origins back to people’s such as the Pleiadians, Arcturians, and Orions.

We have only come to Earth as one part of our journey to complete a set of soul codes that will allow us greater freedom to travel the universe and create even more learning experiences. All of those will eventually lead to our development on the individual and collective level.

Why Ascension is the Never-Ending Quest of Your Soul’s Journey

Your soul is in a constant state of forward momentum. It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going; you’re always reaching for the next level in your evolution. And the bridge between where your soul resides now and the next frontier of consciousness exploration is the ascension process.

Ascension is how you transcend your current level of awareness and embrace a whole state of being. When you ascend, it means you’ve mastered a set of criteria that make up the concept of the particular dimension you were previously inhabiting.

As we’re now in the 3rd dimension/density, – technically 3.5d, due to the impending ‘event’ – the concept we’re trying to master is unconditional love. Each time you engage in the act of self-love or service to others, it helps raise your vibration and helps align your frequency with the next dimension.

For us, that is the 5th dimension. The universal laws state that you can only ascend one level at a time. However, due to the bottlenecking of consciousness that has taken place on our planet, we’ll skip the 4th dimension, otherwise known as the Astral Realm and go straight to the 5th.

This is the natural order of your soul’s journey. At present, there are 12-dimensional levels that can be experienced with a 13th one currently in creation and 17 universes with an 18th one also under construction – these relatively small number with scope expansion being literally infinite.

It’s your soul’s sovereign right and duty to itself to incarnate within and explore all of these realms and levels of consciousness so you can add your own contribution to the story of creation by taking on the mantle of becoming your own creator being in the distant future.

Your Soul’s Journey Through a Single Incarnation

Your soul moves through several phases during the incarnation process in the spirit world before moving into the physical and returning to back your guides and soul group for your life review. It’s a far more involved process than you might think.

1. Life Choice/Body Selection

You’re permitted to spend as much time in the spirit world as you need to recover and review your previous life. But after a certain length of time, you’ll either be gently encouraged towards taking on another life or will start getting itchy feet and want another physical experience.

When that happens, you aren’t just handed the next available life and sent on your way by your guides. It’s a carefully orchestrated and co-creative process. You work together, first to find the life path you want to play out and then to find the most suitable body and circumstances that will allow you to achieve your goals.

2. Creation of Soul Contracts

Once you’ve outlined what you would like the theme of your next incarnation to be, you’ll then create contracts with those in your soul group and neighbouring soul clusters to perform specific functions for one another during your next life.

This may involve the creation of new dramas to be played out in family settings, work or otherwise. Or it could be the resolution of old past life karma that is now being called in by an old soul because it represents the perfect life to create a karmic resolution between you both.

3. Preparation with Soul Group and Guides

In every incarnation, we are the main protagonist in our own stage play with a cast of supporting characters around us – who are also the main focus of  their  own story. However, some of those we have the most important agreements with won’t be in our life at birth.

Before you embark on your reincarnation process, you will go through a preparation class with other souls who’ll appear within your life. The purpose is to plant seeds of knowingness within your subconscious for you to recognise which people are important to your journey. These cues will take the form of synchronicities, déjà vu and other ‘coincidences’ that draw you towards another person.

4. Final Departure with the Elder Guides

Before you’re ready for the rebirthing process, you’re taken before the council of elders. These are a group of guides who oversee the wider organisation of the spirit world. They’re not dictatorial or bureaucratic. They simply have a larger amount of responsibility.

It’s their job to see that you understand what your goals are in the lifetime you’re about to undertake and to make sure you’re aware of your duties and responsibilities. Here, you’ll be given a final chance to make any amendments to your choice and even refuse to go forward if you don’t feel it’s the right thing for you to do.

5. Your Rebirth and the Mind Meld Process with Your Chosen Body

This is the point you finally separate your consciousness from the spirit world. Although a part of you will always remain in some capacity to work on other projects, you’ll take the bulk of your awareness with you into your incarnations.

When you do enter into the womb-time experience, it’s through a tunnel similar to the one you pass through at death. Once there, you have the oppurtunity to meld with the body, which has a consciousness all of its own. You’re free to come and go as you please in the first 2-3 months of the foetal development. But beyond that point, you make the bond more permanent between your new body.

6. Your Physical Incarnation

Once you’ve entered into the physical world, all your planning will effectively go out of the window. You come into each incarnation with a state of amnesia to prevent you from ‘cheating’ on your journey through life.

You will still have plenty of cues to help guide you on your way from dreams, synchronicities, déjà vu, and other mystical experiences. But you don’t have to follow them. You can always choose a different path according to your free-will.

7. Death and Transition Back to the Spirit World

In most cases, there will be a smooth transition for the physical to the spirit world. People generally report detaching from their body and being called towards a white light. Some feel this light around them while others feel it off in the distance as calling to return ‘home.’

Depending on your level of development, you may be met at this point by someone close to you who’s already passed on, or a spirit guide. But if you’re more advanced, you’ll likely make this journey back to the spirit world unaccompanied.

8. Returning to your Soul Group and Life Review

If you’re not greeted by a guide immediately upon passing, this will usually be the first being you’ll encounter when you re-enter the spirit world. From there, you’ll then be guided back to your soul group for your homecoming and to reunite with those in your previous incarnation.

You’ll then have your final life review with the council of elders who were your last contact in the spirit world before entering into the physical. You’ll be able to pinpoint exactly when and where your greatest victories were and where you could improve next time before you go on further study to prepare for your next life.

The Infinite Nature of Your Journey

The journey of the soul is infinite – we’ve already said that much. But not only does it have the scope for never-ending progression, you choose whichever path you want to follow.

There is no one pressuring you. There is no one insisting that there a specific role that needs to be filled. You’re celebrated for your individualism with each step you take on your journey.

And you don’t ever need to worry about failures, setbacks and errors because in truth none of these exist on the soul-level. They’re constructs of our limited human perception. In the world of spirit, there’s only learning.

Each experience is valued for what it brings to the narrative of your journey. There has to be a balance. You can’t experience good without knowing its opposite.

Your soul’s journey is one of discovery and learning.

But the format is a far cry from the institutionalised settings we’re used to in our physical lives.

The spirit world works in a far more supportive manner.

Your free-will is paramount. And you’re always in control.

Because it’s  your  journey.

Safe travels…

Discover more from Era of Light

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Ancient Theories of Soul

Ancient philosophical theories of soul are in many respects sensitive to ways of speaking and thinking about the soul [ psuchê ] that are not specifically philosophical or theoretical. We therefore begin with what the word ‘soul’ meant to speakers of Classical Greek, and what it would have been natural to think about and associate with the soul. We then turn to various Presocratic thinkers, and to the philosophical theories that are our primary concern, those of Plato (first in the Phaedo , then in the Republic ), Aristotle (in the De Anima or On the Soul ), Epicurus, and the Stoics. These are by far the most carefully worked out theories of soul in ancient philosophy. Later theoretical developments — for instance, in the writings of Plotinus and other Platonists, as well as the Church Fathers — are best studied against the background of the classical theories, from which, in large part, they derive.

Adopting a bird's-eye view of the terrain that we will be covering, and setting many details aside for the moment, we can describe it as follows. From comparatively humble Homeric beginnings, the word ‘soul’ undergoes quite remarkable semantic expansion in sixth and fifth century usage. By the end of the fifth century — the time of Socrates' death — soul is standardly thought and spoken of, for instance, as the distinguishing mark of living things, as something that is the subject of emotional states and that is responsible for planning and practical thinking, and also as the bearer of such virtues as courage and justice. Coming to philosophical theory, we first trace a development towards comprehensive articulation of a very broad conception of soul, according to which the soul is not only responsible for mental or psychological functions like thought, perception and desire, and is the bearer of moral qualities, but in some way or other accounts for all the vital functions that any living organism performs. This broad conception, which is clearly in close contact with ordinary Greek usage by that time, finds its fullest articulation in Aristotle's theory. The theories of the Hellenistic period, by contrast, are interested more narrowly in the soul as something that is responsible specifically for mental or psychological functions. They either de-emphasize or sever the ordinary-language connection between soul and life in all its functions and aspects.

• Supplement: Burnet on the Greek Notion of Soul

2. Presocratic Thinking about the Soul

• 3.1 The Phaedo 's Theory of Soul

3.2 The Republic 's Theory of Soul

4. aristotle's theory of soul, 5.1 epicurus' theory of soul, 5.2 the stoic theory of soul, 6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the greek notion of soul.

The Homeric poems, with which most ancient writers can safely be assumed to be intimately familiar, use the word ‘soul’ in two distinguishable, probably related, ways. The soul is, on the one hand, something that a human being risks in battle and loses in death. On the other hand, it is what at the time of death departs from the person's limbs and travels to the underworld, where it has a more or less pitiful afterlife as a shade or image of the deceased person. It has been suggested (for instance, by Snell 1975, 19) that what is referred to as soul in either case is in fact thought of as one and the same thing, something that a person can risk and lose and that, after death, endures as a shade in the underworld. The suggestion is plausible, but cannot be verified. In any case, once a person's soul has departed for good, the person is dead. The presence of soul therefore distinguishes a living human body from a corpse. However, this is plainly not to say that the soul is thought of as what accounts for, or is responsible for, the activities, responses, operations and the like that constitute a person's life. Homer never says that anyone does anything in virtue of, or with, their soul, nor does he attribute any activity to the soul of a living person. Thus, though the presence or absence of soul marks out a person's life, it is not otherwise associated with that life. Moreover, it is a striking feature of Homeric usage that, in Furley's words (Furley 1956, 4), to mention soul is to suggest death: someone's soul comes to mind only when their life is thought, by themselves or others, to be at risk. Thus Achilles says that he is continuously risking his soul ( Iliad 9.322), and Agenor reflects on the fact that even Achilles has just one soul ( Iliad 11.569). It should also be pointed out that in the Homeric poems, only human beings are said to have (and to lose) souls. Correspondingly, Homer never envisages shades or images of non-human creatures in the underworld. These two facts taken together suggest that in whatever precise way the soul is conceived of as associated with life, it is in any case thought to be connected not with life in general, or life in all its forms, but rather, more specifically, with the life of a human being.

Several significant developments occurred in the ways Greeks thought and spoke about the soul in the sixth and fifth centuries. The questions about the soul that are formulated and discussed in the writings of Plato and Aristotle to some extent arise from, and need to be interpreted against the background of, these sixth and fifth century developments. One factor that is of central importance is the gradual loss of the Homeric connection between mentioning a person's soul and the thought that their life is vulnerable or at risk ( contra Burnet 1916, 253). In ordinary fifth century Greek, having soul is simply being alive; hence the emergence, at about this time, of the adjective ‘ensouled’ [ empsuchos ] as the standard word meaning “alive”, which was applied not just to human beings, but to other living things as well. There is some reason to think that the word ‘soul’ was used in this straightforwardly positive way already in the sixth century. Thales of Miletus, who is credited with successfully predicting a solar eclipse occurring in 585, reportedly attributed soul to magnets, on the grounds that magnets are capable of moving iron (Aristotle, De Anima 1.2, 405a19-21). Thales' thought was presumably that since it is distinctive of living things to be able to initiate movement, magnets must in fact be alive or, in other words, ensouled. Thus, while Homer spoke of soul only in the case of human beings, in sixth and fifth century usage soul is attributed to every kind of living thing. What is in place, then, at this time is the notion that soul is what distinguishes that which is alive from that which is not.

However, it is not just that soul is said to be present in every living thing. It is also the case that an increasingly broad range of ways of acting and being acted on is attributed to the soul. Thus it has come to be natural, by the end of the fifth century, to refer pleasure taken in food and drink, as well as sexual desire, to the soul. (For detailed discussion, see Claus 1981, 73-85.) People are said, for example, to satisfy their souls with rich food (Euripides, Ion 1170), and the souls of gods and men are claimed to be subject to sexual desire (fragment assigned by Nauck to Euripides' first Hippolytus ). In contexts of intense emotion or crisis, feelings like love and hate, joy and grief, anger and shame are associated with the soul. “Nothing bites the soul of a man more than dishonor”, says Ajax in a fragment from a tragedy of unknown authorship, just before he commits suicide (Nauck, TGF, Adesp. fr. 110). Oedipus says that his soul laments the misery of his city and its inhabitants ( Oedipus Tyrannus 64). Moreover, the soul is also importantly connected with boldness and courage, especially in battle. Courageous people are said, for instance in Herodotus and Thucydides, to have enduring or strong souls (cf. Laches' second definition of the virtue that is courage, in Plato's Laches 192c, as “strength of the soul”; also relevant is Pindar, Pythian 1.47-8, “standing in battle with an enduring soul”). In the Hippocratic text Airs, Waters, Places , the soul is thought of as the place of courage or, as the case may be, its opposite: in the case of lowland inhabitants, courage and endurance are not in their souls by nature, but must be instilled by law (ch. 23); similarly in benign climates, men are fleshy, ill-jointed, moist, without endurance and weak in soul (ch. 24).

The connection between the soul and characteristics like boldness and courage in battle is plainly an aspect of the noteworthy fifth century development whereby the soul comes to be thought of as the source or bearer of moral qualities such as, for instance, temperance and justice. In Pericles' funeral oration that Thucydides includes in his account of the Peloponnesian War, he says that those who know most clearly the sweet and the terrible, and yet do not as a result turn away from danger, are rightly judged “strongest with regard to soul” (2.40.3). This text, and others like it (cf. also Herodotus 7.153), indicate a semantic extension whereby ‘soul’ comes to denote a person's moral character, often, but not always, with special regard to qualities such as endurance and courage. While the connection with courage is obvious in a number of texts, there are other texts in which the soul is the bearer of other admirable qualities, such as a Euripidean fragment that speaks of the desire characteristic of a soul that is just, temperate and good (fr. 388). Hippolytus, in Euripides' play named after him, describes himself as having a “virgin soul” ( Hippolytus 1006), obviously to evoke his abstinence from sex. In Pindar's second Olympian, salvation is promised to those who “keep their souls from unjust acts” (2.68-70). The last two texts mentioned may well be influenced by Orphic and Pythagorean beliefs about the nature and immortality of the soul, to which we will turn in due course. But it would be a mistake to think that the moralization of the soul (i.e. its association with moral characteristics) wholly depended on Orphic and Pythagorean speculation. It would, at the very least, be to disregard the soul's connection with courage in poetry, the historians and in Hippocratic writings.

To educated fifth century speakers of Greek, it would have been natural to think of qualities of soul as accounting for, and being manifested in, a person's morally significant behavior. Pericles acts courageously, and Hippolytus temperately (or chastely), because of the qualities of their souls from which such actions have a strong tendency to flow, and their actions express and make evident the courage, temperance and the like that characterize their souls. Once we are in a position properly to appreciate the connection between soul and moral character that must already have been felt to be natural at this stage, it should come as no surprise that the soul is also taken to be something that engages in activities like thinking and planning. If the soul is, in some sense, responsible for courageous acts, for instance, it is only to be expected that the soul also grasps what, in the circumstances, courage calls for, and how, at some suitable level of detail, the courageous act must be performed. Thus in a speech of Antiphon, the jury is urged to “take away from the accused the soul that planned the crime”, in striking juxtaposition of the ideas of life-soul (as in Homer) and of soul as responsible for practical thought. Somewhat similarly, in a Sophoclean fragment (fr. 97) someone says that “a kindly soul with just thoughts is a better inventor than any sophist” (cf. also Euripides, Orestes 1180). Moreover, it is easy to see that there are connections between familiar uses of ‘soul’ in emotional contexts and attributions to the soul of cognitive and intellectual activities and achievements. There is, after all, no clear-cut and manifest difference between, say, being in the emotional state of fear and having a terrifying thought or perception. When Oedipus' soul laments, or Ajax's soul is bitten by dishonor, emotion obviously goes hand in hand with cognition, and if it is natural to refer the one to the soul, there should be nothing puzzling about attributions to it of the other. Thus in non-philosophical Greek of the fifth century the soul is treated as the bearer of moral qualities, and also as responsible for practical thought and cognition. For further discussion, see this supplement on the contrary claims of Burnet 1916:

Burnet on the Greek Notion of Soul

From Homer to the end of the fifth century, the word ‘soul’ undergoes remarkable semantic expansion, in the course of which it comes to be natural not only to speak of soul as what distinguishes the living from the dead and (not the same distinction) the animate from the inanimate, but also to attribute to the soul a wide variety of activities and responses, cognitive as well as emotional, and to think of it as the bearer of such virtues as courage, temperance and justice. As a result of these developments, the language made available something that Homeric Greek lacked, a distinction between body and soul. Thus the Hippocratic author of Airs, Waters, Places writes of “endurance in body and soul” (ch. 23). Antiphon says of a defendant who is sure of his innocence that though his body may surrender, his soul saves him by its willingness to struggle, through knowledge of its innocence. For the guilty, on the other hand, even a strong body is to no avail, since his soul fails him, “believing the vengeance coming to him is for his impieties” (Antiphon 5). Homer, by contrast, knows and speaks of a whole lot of different sources and bearers of psychological predicates, but lacks a word to pick out the soul as a single item to which the predicates in question can, in some way or other, be referred and which can be distinguished from, and in suitable contexts contrasted with, the body (cf. Snell 1975, 18-25).

The semantic expansion of ‘soul’ in the sixth and fifth centuries is reflected in the philosophical writings of the period. For instance, once it becomes natural to speak of soul as what distinguishes the animate from the inanimate, rather than as something that is restricted to humans, it becomes clear that the domain of ensouled things is not limited to animals, but includes plants as well. Empedocles and, apparently, Pythagoras (cf. Bremmer 1983, 125) thought that plants have souls, and that human souls, for instance, can come to animate plants. (Note, though, that Empedocles, in extant fragments, rarely uses the word ‘soul’, preferring the word daimôn .) Empedocles in fact claimed to have been a bush in a previous incarnation, as well as, among other things, a bird and a fish (fr. 117, Kirk, Raven & Schofield 1983 [in what follows KR&S], 417). Incidentally, Empedocles, like Anaxagoras and Democritus, referred to plants as animals, presumably precisely because they are alive ( zên , from which the word for animal, zôon , derives) (for details, cf. Skemp 1947, 56). In this he was followed by Plato ( Timaeus 77b), but emphatically not by Aristotle ( De Anima 2.2, 413b1f).

There is, moreover, some reason to think that philosophical activity, notably Pythagorean speculation (beginning around mid-sixth century), contributed to the semantic expansion of ‘soul’. As we have seen, at least some of the earliest extant texts that associate with the soul moral virtues other than courage suggest Pythagorean influence. It is, in fact, not difficult to see how Pythagoreanism may have furthered the expansion of ‘soul’. Pythagoreanism was concerned with, among other things, the continued existence of the person (or something suitably person-like) after death. It is obvious that against the Homeric background, ‘soul’ was an eminently appropriate word to use so as to denote the person, or quasi-person, that continued to exist after death; there was, after all, the familiar Homeric use of ‘soul’ as that which endures in the underworld after a person's death. To make the continued existence of this soul significant as the continued existence of the person in question, at least some of the states, activities, operations and the like that seemed crucial to the identity of the person had to be attributed to the soul (following Furley 1956, 11, who goes further than that, writing of the need for the soul “to include all the functions of personality”; cf. Barnes 1982, 103-6; Huffman forthcoming). This tendency is well illustrated by a story about Pythagoras, reported by Xenophanes (fr. 7, KR&S 260): “Once, they say, he was passing by when a puppy was being whipped, and he took pity and said: ‘Stop, do not beat it; it is the soul of a friend that I recognized when I heard its [i.e., the soul's!] voice.’” It is not just that the soul of Pythagoras' friend accounts for the character of the yelping (or whatever). Pythagoras is in fact quoted as saying that it is his friend's soul that is doing the yelping!

Heraclitus (fl. around 500 BC), who repeatedly mentions Pythagoras, attributes wisdom to the soul provided that it is in the right state or condition: “a dry soul”, he claims, “is wisest and best” (fr. 118, KR&S 230). He may have been the first thinker to articulate a connection between soul and motor functions. “A man when he is drunk”, Heraclitus remarks, “is led by an unfledged boy, stumbling and not knowing where he goes, having his soul moist” (fr. 117, KR&S 231). On the most plausible construal of Heraclitus' sentence, he is saying that the drunken person stumbles because his perceptual abilities have been impaired, and this impairment is due to moistness of soul (Schofield 1991, 22). Like many (or indeed all) sixth and fifth century thinkers who expressed views on the nature or constitution of the soul, Heraclitus thought that the soul was bodily, but composed of an unusually fine or rare kind of matter, e.g. air or fire. (A possible exception is the Pythagorean Philolaus, who may have held that the soul is an ‘attunement’ of the body; cf. Barnes 1982, 488-95, and Huffman .) The prevalence of the idea that the soul is bodily explains the absence of problems about the relation between soul and body. Soul and body were not thought to be radically different in kind; their difference seemed just to consist in a difference in degree of properties such as fineness and mobility.

3. Plato's Theories of Soul

The various developments that occurred in the sixth and fifth centuries in how Greeks thought and spoke of the soul resulted in a very complex notion that strikes one as remarkably close to conceptions of the soul that we find in fourth century philosophical theories, notably Plato's. There is thus some reason to think that the philosophical theories in question are best interpreted as working with, and on, the relatively non-theoretical notion of the soul that by the end of the fifth century has come to be embedded in ordinary language. In what follows our main concern will be to characterize some of the theories in question. But we should also attend, wherever this seems appropriate and helpful, to ways in which familiarity with the ordinary notion of the soul might enable us better to understand why a theory or an argument proceeds the way it does. In addition, we should note ways in which philosophical theories might seem to clarify and further articulate the ordinary notion. We begin with Plato, and with a question that is intimately tied up with the ordinary notion of the soul as it developed from the Homeric poems onwards, namely whether a person's soul does indeed survive the person's death.

3.1 The Phaedo's Theory of Soul

It is probably true that in mainstream fifth century Greek culture, belief in an afterlife of the soul was weak and unclear (Claus 1981, 68; Burnet 1916, 248-9). If so, it is fitting that Socrates' arguments for the immortality of the soul, most prominently in the Phaedo , are offered to interlocutors who, at the outset of the discussion, are by no means convinced of the idea. (In fact, in the Apology , 40c, Socrates himself is presented as being noncommittal about what happens to the soul at death, and even about whether it survives at all.) “Men find it very hard to believe”, Cebes says at Phaedo 70a, “what you said about the soul. They think that after it has left the body it no longer exists anywhere, but that it is destroyed and dissolved on the day the man dies.” This view is restated by Simmias (at 77b) as the opinion of the majority (cf. 80d); note that the view includes the idea that the soul is a material thing, and is destroyed by being dispersed, “like breath or smoke” (70a). Glaucon, in the last book of the Republic (608d), is taken aback by Socrates' question,

“Haven't you realized that our soul is immortal and never destroyed?” He looked at me with wonder and said: “No, by god, I haven't. Are you really in a position to assert that?”

Moreover, apart from the question of immortality or otherwise, there is the further question whether the soul, if it does have some form of existence after the person has died, “still possesses some power and wisdom” ( Phaedo , 70b; cf. 76c). Answering both questions, Socrates says not only that the soul is immortal, but also that it contemplates truths after its separation from the body at the time of death. Needless to say, none of the four main lines of argument that Socrates avails himself of succeeds in establishing the immortality of the soul, or in demonstrating that disembodied souls enjoy lives of thought and intelligence. The arguments have been discussed in some detail, for instance in Bostock 1986, and for our purposes there is no need to state and analyze them systematically. It will suffice to comment selectively on aspects of the arguments that bear directly on Plato's conception of the soul. The argument that sheds most light on what Plato takes the nature of the soul to be is the affinity argument (78b-80b). This argument confronts head-on the widespread worry that the soul, at or soon after death, is destroyed by being dispersed. It begins by distinguishing between two kinds of things: on the one hand, things that are perceptible, composed of parts, and subject to dissolution and destruction; on the other hand, things that are not perceptible, but intelligible (grasped by thought), not composed of parts, and exempt from dissolution and destruction. These two categories are obviously mutually exclusive. It is not clear whether or not they are meant to be exhaustive. Moreover, the category of imperishable, intelligible being is exemplified, but not, it seems, exhausted, by Platonic forms such as equality, beauty and the like ( contra Bostock 1986, 118). Intelligible being evidently includes what Socrates calls the divine, whose nature it is to rule and to lead (80a), and there is no indication that the forms exhaust the divine, or even include the divine, so understood. Thus the argument leaves room for the idea that souls are not forms, but are nevertheless intelligible, partless and imperishable ( contra Robinson 1995, 29). In fact, in framing the argument in the way he does Plato furnishes the conceptual framework needed for saying that body and soul differ in kind, the one being perceptible and perishable, the other being intelligible and exempt from destruction. However, the argument does not support such a strong conclusion, and Socrates is aware of this.

What he does, in fact, conclude is that the soul is most like , and most akin to , intelligible being, and that the body is most like perceptible and perishable being. To say this is plainly neither to assert nor to imply (as Robinson 1995, 30, appears to think) that soul in some way or other falls short of intelligible, imperishable being, any more than it is to assert or imply that body in some way or other falls short of, or rather rises above, perceptible, perishable being. The argument leaves it open whether soul is a perfectly respectable member of intelligible reality, the way human bodies are perfectly respectable members of perceptible reality, or whether, alternatively, soul has some intermediate status in between intelligible and perceptible being, rising above the latter, but merely approximating to the former. Socrates does seem to take his conclusion to imply, or at least strongly suggest, that it is natural for the soul either “to be altogether indissoluble, or nearly so”, but, in any case, that the soul is less subject to dissolution and destruction than the body, rather than, as the popular view has it, more so. If this position can be established, Socrates is in a position to refute the popular view that the soul, being composed of ethereal stuff, is more liable to dispersion and destruction than the body. However, as Cebes points out (88b), unless Socrates can establish that the soul is altogether exempt from destruction, confidence of survival in the face of death is misplaced. Socrates' soul may be a great deal more durable than his body, but as long as it is not truly imperishable, there can be no guarantee that it will survive Socrates' impending death. For it might have experienced any number of incarnations already, and the current one might be its last. So Socrates launches his most elaborate and final argument for the immortality of the soul, which concludes that since life belongs to soul essentially, the soul must be deathless — that is, immortal.

The affinity argument is supposed to show not only that the soul is most like intelligible, imperishable being, but also that it is most akin to it. Socrates argues that the soul is like intelligible being on the grounds that it is not visible and, in general, not perceptible (anyhow to humans, as Cebes adds at 79b), and that it shares its natural function with the divine, namely to rule and lead (the body in the one case, mortals in the other). There is a separate argument for the kinship of the soul with intelligible being. When the soul makes use of the senses and attends to perceptibles, “it strays and is confused and dizzy, as if it were drunk” (79c). By contrast, when it remains “itself by itself” and investigates intelligibles, its straying comes to an end, and it achieves stability and wisdom. It is not just that the soul is in one state or another depending on which kind of object it is attending to, in such a way that its state somehow corresponds to the character of the object attended to. That would not by itself show that the soul is more akin to the one domain rather than the other (this is the point of Bostock's criticism, Bostock 1986, 119). To understand the argument properly, it is crucial to note that when the soul attends to perceptibles, it is negatively affected in such a way that its functioning is at least temporarily reduced or impaired (“dizzy, as if drunk”), whereas there is no such interference when it attends to intelligibles (cf. Socrates' fear, at 99e, that by studying things by way of the senses he might blind his soul). The claim that the soul is akin to intelligible reality thus rests, at least in part, on the view that intelligible reality is especially suited to the soul, as providing it with a domain of objects in relation to which, and only in relation to which, it can function without inhibition and interference and fully in accordance with its own nature, so as to achieve its most completely developed and optimal state, wisdom.

It hardly needs pointing out, then, that the soul, as Plato conceives of it in the Phaedo , is crucially characterized by cognitive and intellectual features: it is something that reasons, more or less well depending on the extent to which it is disturbed or distracted by the body and the senses; something that regulates and controls the body and its desires and affections, “especially if it is a wise soul” (94b), presumably in a way that involves, and renders effective, judgments about what it is best to do, and how it is best to behave; and something that has, as the kind of adornment that is truly appropriate to it, virtues such as temperance, justice and courage (114e f.). However, it should be clear that the soul, as it is conceived of here, is not simply the mind, as we conceive of it. It is both broader and narrower than that. It is broader in that Plato evidently retains the traditional idea of soul as distinguishing the animate from the inanimate. Two of the four main lines of argument for the immortality of the soul rely not on cognitive or indeed specifically psychological features of the soul, but simply on the familiar connection between soul and life. According to the cyclical argument (70c-72d), being alive in general is preceded by, just as it precedes, being dead. Socrates takes this to show that a creature's death involves the continued existence of the soul in question, which persists through a period of separation from body, and then returns to animate another body in a change which is the counterpart of the previous change, dying. According to the last line of argument that Socrates offers in the Phaedo , the soul is immortal because it has life essentially, the way fire has heat essentially. It is plain that both of these arguments apply to the souls of all living things, including plants (cf. 70d, 71d). And in the final argument, Socrates explicitly appeals to the idea that it is the soul that animates the body of a living thing (105c):

What is it that, when present in a body, makes it living? — A soul.

Now, as we have seen in some detail, the Greek notion of soul included the idea of soul as animating body probably as early as the sixth century, when Thales attributed soul to magnets. Connections between the soul and morally significant characteristics such as courage, temperance and justice, and with cognitive and intellectual functions, notably with planning and practical thought, are firmly established in fifth century Greek usage. But it is obviously far from clear whether the ordinary notion of soul, as it develops from the Homeric poems down to the end of the fifth century, is a well-formed, coherent notion, one that can suitably support the very prominent role that Plato assigns to the soul, in the Phaedo as well as in other dialogues. Perhaps most pressingly, it is far from clear whether what distinguishes the animate from the inanimate is the very thing that, in the case of some animate organisms, is responsible for cognitive functions such as sense-perception and thought, and that, specifically in the case of human beings, is the bearer of moral qualities such as justice, courage and the like. The question is neither explicitly raised nor, of course, resolved in the Phaedo ; but a passage in the Republic (352d-354a), with which we will be concerned in section 3.2, suggests that Plato took the ordinary notion of soul, in all its richness and bewildering complexity, to be well-formed and coherent, and to be capable of supporting the requirements of his own theory.

Given the idea that soul is the distinguishing mark of all living things, including plants, the Greek notion of soul is, as we have seen already, broader than our concept of mind. For it is at least conceivable, and probably true as a matter of fact, that there are living (hence ensouled) organisms without minds, without, that is to say, desire and cognition by sense or intellect. (Plato appears to think that plants do have minds in this sense, because he takes them to exhibit desire and sense-perception ( Timaeus 77b), but that is presumably supposed to be a matter of empirical fact or inference, rather than simply a consequence of the fact that plants have souls.)

In another way, the conception of soul that is in evidence in the Phaedo is significantly narrower than our concept of mind, in that the soul, as conceived of in this particular dialogue, is not, in fact, responsible, or directly responsible, for all of a person's mental or psychological activities and responses, but only for a rather severely limited subset of them. Socrates attributes a large variety of mental states (etc.) not to the soul, but to the (animate) body, such as, for instance, beliefs and pleasures (83d), and desires and fears (94d). At the same time, the soul is not narrowly intellectual: it too has desires (81d), even passionate ones (such as the nonphilosophical soul's love [ erôs ] of the corporeal, 80b), and pleasures as well, such as the pleasures of learning (114e). Moreover, the soul's functions are, as we have seen already, not restricted to grasping and appreciating truth, but prominently include regulating and controlling the body and its affections (such as beliefs and pleasures, desires and fears), no doubt in light of suitable judgments, arrived at, or anyhow supported and controlled, by reasoning. The soul of the Phaedo in fact seems to be precisely what in Republic 4 is identified as just one part of the soul, namely reason, whereas the functions of the lower parts, appetite and spirit, are assigned, in the psychological framework of the Phaedo , to the animate body. And just as the functions of reason (in the Republic ) and of the soul (in the Phaedo ) are not restricted to cognition, but include desire and emotion, such as desire for and pleasure in learning, so the functions of non-rational soul (in the Republic ) and of the body (in the Phaedo ) are not restricted to desire and emotion, but include cognition, such as beliefs (presumably) about objects of desire, ‘descriptive’ or (rather) non-evaluative (“there's food over there”) as well as ( contra Lovibond 1991, 49) evaluative (“this drink is delightful”) (cf. Phaedo 83d).

One somewhat surprising, and perhaps puzzling, feature of the Phaedo framework is this. On the one hand, Socrates evidently takes the soul to be in some way responsible for the life of any living organism, and hence presumably for all the various activities (etc.) that constitute, or are crucially involved in, any organism's life. On the other hand, he also takes it that there is a restricted class of activities that the soul is responsible for in some special way , such that it is not actually the case that the soul is responsible in this special way for all of the relevant activities that living organisms engage in. Thus, given the idea that the soul is responsible, in some way or other, for all the life of any living organism, one would certainly expect it to be responsible, in some way or other, for (say) the desires, emotions and beliefs of organisms whose lives include such psychological states — and not just for some restricted subset of these desires, emotions and beliefs, but in fact for all of them. However, Socrates' attribution to the soul of all and only desires, emotions and beliefs of reason (to use the Republic framework) is actually quite compatible with the view that the soul is responsible for all the life-activities organisms engage in, including, of course, the desires (etc.) of what in the Republic framework is the non-rational soul. What Socrates needs is something that can certainly be supplied, some suitable articulation of the different ways in which the soul can be said to be responsible for relevant activities of a living organism. One such way is that to be capable of engaging in the activity in question at all, an organism has to be ensouled, perhaps ensouled in a certain way (for instance, in the way animals are rather than in the way plants are). Another (stronger) way in which the soul can be responsible for an activity is directly : rather than being the thing in virtue of which the organism can do or undergo something or other (for instance, becoming thirsty and forming the desire to drink on that basis), the soul can also perform activities in its own right (for instance, contemplating mathematical truths). So, to restate somewhat more clearly: the Phaedo 's conception of soul is narrower than our concept of mind in the following way. The range of activities (etc.) that the soul is directly responsible for, and which may be described as activities of the soul strictly speaking, is significantly narrower than the range of mental activities. It does not include all of a person's desires, nor need it include all emotional responses, or even all beliefs. One plainly could not have (for instance) ‘bodily’ desires such as hunger and thirst without being ensouled, but that does not mean that it must be the soul itself that forms or sustains such desires.

Once we properly understand the Phaedo 's theory of soul, then, we are in a position to see that it offers a psychological framework that is coherent, though far from fully articulated. But we should also note that the theory is somewhat unsatisfactory, in that it appears rather strikingly to fail to do justice to the unity of the mind. The various activities (etc.) that we characterize as mental or psychological, such as (most importantly) desire and cognition, seem to be, or manifest themselves to us as being, the activities of a single integrated subject; they do not (ordinarily) appear to belong to a plurality of distinct items that operate more or less separately from one another. When Socrates' contemplation of mathematical truths is disrupted by an intense desire for food, it does not seem to be the case that it is one thing (say, his soul) that has been doing the contemplating and another thing (say, his body) that now wants to get something to eat. It is rather that both contemplation and desire to eat seem to belong to one integrated subject, regardless of whether we wish to say that the subject in question is Socrates' mind, or whether we prefer to say that it is Socrates insofar as he has a mind (or something like that). As things are, the psychological theory of the Phaedo assigns Socrates' contemplation directly to his soul, but leaves his desire for food curiously remote from it, apparently taking ‘bodily’ desire (for instance) to be related to the soul in much the same way in which the operations involved in (say) metabolism and growth are so related. (Those too take place only because his body is ensouled.) It is plausible, though not certain, that Plato felt the force of this problem. It is, in any case, resolved by the new theory of soul that the Republic presents.

The Phaedo was also known to ancient readers as Plato's On the Soul , whereas the Republic has On Justice as an alternative ancient title. Plato, however, conceives of justice as the excellent state of the soul, and so it is not surprising that the Republic sheds a great deal of light on Plato's conception of the soul. One way in which it does so is by explicitly integrating a number of central features of the ordinary notion of soul, features which, in the Phaedo , coexist somewhat uneasily: namely, responsibility for the life of an organism (that is, in the human case, responsibility for its being and remaining alive as a human being), for cognitive and (especially) intellectual functions, and for moral virtues such as courage and justice. Towards the end of Republic 1, Socrates offers Thrasymachus an elaborate argument to the conclusion that “injustice is never more profitable than justice” (354a). If we set aside, as irrelevant to the dialectical context, the possibility that injustice and justice are equally profitable, it is clear that the conclusion here is equivalent to the position that the Republic is designed to establish, in response to Glaucon's request, at the beginning of Book 2, to be convinced by Socrates “that it is better in every way to be just than to be unjust” (357a). The argument at the end of Book 1 proceeds by attempting to prove an interim conclusion that is unnecessarily strong, namely that the just person is happy, whereas the unjust person is wretched. To establish the desired conclusion, it is enough to prove that the just person is always happier than the unjust person, which, unlike the unnecessarily strong interim conclusion, is compatible with the view that justice is not sufficient for (fully completed) happiness, since that requires suitable external circumstances in addition to justice. Nothing in Socrates' long answer to Glaucon (and Adeimantus) commits him to the view that justice is sufficient for (complete) happiness (cf. Irwin 1999). However, that view is not implied by the conception of the soul that Socrates relies on in this (Book 1) argument. Moreover, nothing in the Republic contradicts or modifies this conception of the soul (on the contrary: cf. 445a9f., 609b f.), and so there is no reason not to take it seriously as a contribution to Plato's on-going reflection on the soul, even though the argument that surrounds it is designed to support a conclusion that Socrates subsequently succeeds in avoiding.

The argument begins with the premise that things perform their function well if they have the virtue appropriate to them, and badly if they have the relevant vice (353c). It then attributes to the soul the function of “caring for things, ruling and deliberating (and all the things of this kind)”, and adds that living is also part of the function of soul (353d). This yields an interim conclusion, that a good soul cares, rules, deliberates (etc.) and lives well, whereas a bad soul does these things badly. A third premise is that justice is the virtue appropriate to the soul, injustice being its vice. Hence another interim conclusion: a just soul lives well; an unjust one, badly. But living well, says the next premise, is being happy (and living badly is being wretched). And so Socrates can draw the interim conclusion that we have encountered already, which is that the just person (the person, that is, whose soul is just) is happy, whereas the person whose soul is unjust is wretched.

We make nonsense of the argument if we suppose (with Robinson 1995, 36) that when Socrates introduces living as part of the function of soul, he has being alive in mind. The idea of being good (or bad) at being alive is, obviously, very odd, as is the idea of being alive well or badly. But there is no need to suppose that such ideas are involved here, or that Socrates passes from one sense of ‘living’ [ to zên ] to another. It is, after all, open to us to interpret what Socrates is saying in terms of a conception that integrates the things that Socrates attributes to the soul as functions, or as parts or aspects of its function, namely in terms of the conception of living a life, and not just any kind of life, but a distinctively human one. Caring for the right sorts of things in the right way, ruling or regulating oneself and (when appropriate) others, and deliberating about how to act are not just necessary, but central aspects of living a human life, and all of these things can be done well or badly. Depending on the condition of their soul, a person can be better or worse at doing these things. The just person, whose soul is in the best condition, is truly excellent at living a human life, in that they are excellent at doing the various things that are importantly involved in leading a distinctively human life. If this is along the right lines, we might be in a position to see Plato's answer to the question how it can be that one thing, the soul, accounts for the life of an organism as well as for its cognitive and intellectual functions, and is also the bearer of virtues or excellences. The answer suggested by the Book 1 argument is this. The way in which the human soul accounts for the life of a human organism is by accounting for the distinctively human life that the individual in question leads. But to account for such a life, it must also account for the cognitive and intellectual functions which guide and shape such a life. Moreover, the dramatic differences in how good people are at leading lives, and relatedly the dramatic differences in how well they exercise their cognitive and intellectual functions, are due to differences in the conditions of their souls, namely the presence or absence of the virtues of justice, wisdom, courage and temperance. This answer significantly clarifies (the relevant aspects of) the ordinary Greek notion of soul (see section 1).

The Republic also puts forward a new theory of soul, which involves the claim that the embodied human soul has (at least) three parts or aspects, namely reason, spirit and appetite. The argument for this claim is presented in Book 4, and proceeds in roughly the following way. Socrates begins by enunciating a principle to the effect that opposite actions, affections and states cannot be assigned to one thing in respect of the same part of it, in relation to the same object and at the same time. It is then agreed that desiring and being averse are opposites, and hence that desiring to do something and being averse to doing that same thing are opposites in relation to the same object. But it does frequently happen, Socrates points out and Glaucon agrees, that the soul desires to do something and at the same time is averse to doing that same thing. This happens, for instance, when a person is thirsty and on that basis wants to drink, but at the same time wishes not to drink, on the basis of some calculation or deliberation, and in fact succeeds in refraining from drinking, thirsty though they are. It follows from the premises stated that the human soul includes at least two distinct subjects, so that one opposite (the desire to drink) can be assigned to one of them and the other (the aversion to drinking) can be assigned to the other. Taking himself to have identified reason and appetite as distinct parts of the soul, Socrates draws attention to other kinds of conflict between desires, which are meant to bring to light spirit, the third part of the soul.

The Republic contains a great deal of information that we can rely on in characterizing the three parts of the soul that Socrates introduces, information that can be found not only in Book 4 itself, but also (among other places) in the catalogue of corrupt forms of city and soul in Books 8 and 9. Here is an outline of what emerges. Reason is the part of the soul that is, of its own nature, attached to knowledge and truth. It is also, however, concerned to guide and regulate the life that it is, or anyhow should be, in charge of, ideally in a way that is informed by wisdom and that takes into consideration the concerns both of each of the three parts separately and of the soul as a whole (442c); these concerns must be supposed to include a person's bodily needs, presumably via the concerns of appetite. The natural attachment of spirit is to honor and, more generally, to recognition and esteem by others (581a). As a motivating force it generally accounts for self-assertion and ambition. When its desires are frustrated, it gives rise to emotional responses such as anger and indignation, and to behavior that expresses and naturally flows from such responses. Socrates takes spirit to be a natural ally of reason, at least part of its function being to support reason in such conflicts as may arise between it and appetite (440ef, 442ab). To assign it this function is neither to say nor to imply that spirit cannot, in the case of a corrupt and de-natured soul, turn against reason, even if well brought-up individuals like Glaucon are not familiar with such corruption either in their own case or in the case of others (440b). ( Pace Robinson 1995, 45, who thinks Socrates is contradicting himself here.) Appetite is primarily concerned with food, drink and sex (439d, 580e). It gives rise to desires for these and other such things which in each case are based, simply and immediately, on the thought that obtaining the relevant object of desire is, or would be, pleasant. Socrates also calls appetite the money-loving part, because, in the case of mature human beings at least, appetite also tends to be strongly attached to money, given that it is most of all by means of money that its primary desires are fulfilled (580e-581a). The idea must be that given suitable habituation and acculturation in the context of a life lived in human society, appetite tends to become attached to money in such a way that it begins to give rise to desires for money which in each case are based, simply and immediately, on the thought that obtaining money is, or would be, pleasant; and this idea is natural and plausible enough. (Irwin 1995 & Price 1995, 57-67, offer an alternative and incompatible interpretation.)

Viewed from the perspective of the theory of soul presented in the Phaedo , the Republic theory involves not so much a division of soul as an integration into soul of mental or psychological functions that had been assigned, somewhat problematically, to the body. In both dialogues, Socrates appeals to the same Odyssey passage ( Od . 20.17-18 at Phaedo 94d, Od . 20.17 at Republic 4, 441b), in which Odysseus prevails over his own anger: in the Phaedo , to exemplify a conflict between soul and body; in the Republic , to exemplify a conflict between two parts or aspects of the soul, reason and spirit. What the Republic offers is a theory of soul which, among other things, allows attribution of (in principle) all mental or psychological functions to a single subject, the soul. The theory thus respects the unity of the mind, in a way that the Phaedo theory does not. Moreover, the Republic theory also offers an attractive and well-supported articulation of desire into different kinds, which has profound implications both for what it is to have one's soul (or mind) in optimal condition and for how it is that this condition is best brought about. (To see that Plato is acutely aware of these implications, one only needs to look at what the Republic has to say about virtue and education.) However, it may be worth insisting once more that we should not disregard the fact that the conception of the soul that features in the Republic is broader than our concept of mind, in that it continues to be part of this conception that it is soul that accounts for the life of the relevant ensouled organism. But if it is soul that accounts for the life of, say, human organisms, there must be some sense in which the human soul accounts not only for mental functions like thought and desire, but also for other vital functions such as the activities and operations of the nutritive and reproductive systems. To the extent that it leaves unclear how exactly it is that the soul is related to a broad range of activities (etc.) that are crucially involved in the lives of ensouled organisms, Plato's theory of the soul, in the Republic and beyond, remains incompletely developed. It is, of course, not surprising that the Republic does not confront the question how it is that the soul is related to life-functions that, as Aristotle recognizes ( Nicomachean Ethics 1.13, 1102b11-2), are irrelevant to the ethical and political concerns of the Republic . However, context and subject matter impose no such constraints on the ‘plausible myth’ of the Timaeus , and also that dialogue, in presenting a somewhat revised version of the Republic 's account ( Tim . 69c ff.), fails to address the question how the soul is related to non-mental vital functions.

Aristotle's theory, as it is presented primarily in the De Anima (for a complete account, see Aristotle's Psychology ), comes very close to providing a comprehensive, fully developed account of the soul in all its aspects and functions, an account that articulates the ways in which all of the vital functions of all animate organisms are related to the soul. In doing so, the theory comes very close to offering a comprehensive answer to a question that arises from the ordinary Greek notion of soul, namely how precisely it is that the soul, which is agreed to be in some way or other responsible for a variety of things living creatures (especially humans) do and experience, also is the distinguishing mark of the animate. According to Aristotle's theory, a soul is a particular kind of nature, a principle that accounts for change and rest in the particular case of living bodies, i.e. plants, nonhuman animals and human beings. The relation between soul and body, on Aristotle's view, is also an instance of the more general relation between form and matter: thus an ensouled, living body is a particular kind of in-formed matter. Slightly simplifying things by limiting ourselves to the sublunary world (cf. De Anima 2.2, 413a32; 2.3, 415a9), we can describe the theory as furnishing a unified explanatory framework within which all vital functions alike, from metabolism to reasoning, are treated as functions performed by natural organisms of suitable structure and complexity. The soul of an animate organism, in this framework, is nothing other than its system of active abilities to perform the vital functions that organisms of its kind naturally perform, so that when an organism engages in the relevant activities (e.g., nutrition, movement or thought) it does so in virtue of the system of abilities that is its soul.

Given that the soul is, according to Aristotle's theory, a system of abilities possessed and manifested by animate bodies of suitable structure, it is clear that the soul is, according to Aristotle, not itself a body or a corporeal thing. Thus Aristotle agrees with the Phaedo 's claim that souls are very different from bodies. Moreover, Aristotle seems to think that all the abilities that are constitutive of the souls of plants, beasts and humans are such that their exercise involves and requires bodily parts and organs. This is obviously so with, for instance, the abilities for movement in respect of place (e.g., by walking or flying), and for sense-perception, which requires sense-organs. Aristotle does not, however, think that there is an organ of thought, and so he also does not think that the exercise of the ability to think involves the use of a bodily part or organ that exists specifically for this use. Nevertheless, he does seem to take the view that the activity of the human intellect always involves some activity of the perceptual apparatus, and hence requires the presence, and proper arrangement, of suitable bodily parts and organs; for he seems to think that sensory impressions [ phantasmata ] are somehow involved in every occurrent act of thought, at least as far as human beings are concerned ( De Anima 3.7, 431a14-7; 3.8, 432a7-10; cf. De Memoria 1, 449b31ff.). If so, Aristotle in fact seems to be committed to the view that, contrary to the Platonic position, even human souls are not capable of existence and (perhaps as importantly) activity apart from the body (cf. De Anima 1.1, 403a3-25, esp. 5-16).

It is noteworthy that Aristotle's theory does not mark off those vital functions that are mental by relating them to the soul in some special way that differs from and goes beyond the way in which vital functions in general are so related. It is certainly not part of Aristotle's theory that the soul is specially and directly responsible for mental functions by performing them on its own, whereas it is less directly responsible for the performance by the living organism of other vital functions such as growth. As this aspect of his theory suggests, Aristotle is confident that once one has a proper understanding of how to explain natural phenomena in general, there is no reason to suppose that mental functions like perception, desire and at least some forms of thinking cannot be explained simply by appealing to the principles in terms of which natural phenomena in general are properly understood and explained (cf. Frede 1992, 97).

It might be thought that since Aristotle's theory treats mental functions and other vital functions exactly alike, it obscures a crucial distinction. This worry, however, turns out to be unjustified. The theory treats mental and other vital functions alike only in that it views both kinds of functions as performed by natural organisms of the right kind of structure and complexity. Viewing mental and other vital functions in this way is perfectly compatible with introducing a distinction between mental and other functions if concerns of some kind or other call for such a distinction. Aristotle is perfectly capable, for instance, of setting aside non-mental vital functions as irrelevant for the purposes of practical philosophy ( NE 1.13, 1102b11-12).

5. Hellenistic Theories of Soul

Coming from the theories of Plato and Aristotle, the first thing that might strike us about the theories of soul adopted by the two dominant Hellenistic schools, Epicurus' Garden and the Stoa, is the doctrine, shared by both, that the soul is corporeal. A number of Stoic arguments for the claim that the soul is a body have come down to us (see Annas 1992, 39-41). The best one of these is that the soul is a body because (roughly) only bodies affect one another, and soul and body do affect one another, for instance in cases of bodily damage and emotion. Epicurus employs the same argument in his Letter to Herodotus , which provides an outline of his physical doctrines (Long & Sedley 1987 [in what follows L&S] 14A7). In a way that reminds one of Presocratic theories, both Epicurus and the Stoics hold that the soul is a particularly fine kind of body, diffused all the way through the perceptible (flesh-and-blood) body of the animate organism. As if echoing the view of the soul that Simmias in the Phaedo presents as the majority view, Epicurus thinks that the soul is dispersed at death along with its constituent atoms, losing the powers that it has while it is contained by the body of the organism that it ensouls (L&S 14A6). The Stoics agree that the human soul is mortal, but they also take it that it can and does survive the person's death — that is, its separation from the perceptible body. Chrysippus apparently thought that the souls of wise persons persist (as fine, imperceptible corporeal structures) all the way to the next conflagration in the cosmic cycle, whereas the souls of other people last for some time, and then get dispersed (Diogenes Laertius 7.157; cf. L&S 53W). Thus Chrysippus can accept, at least for the souls of the wise, Socrates' claim in the Phaedo that the soul is “altogether indissoluble, or nearly so ” ( Phaedo 80b), even though he plainly cannot accept all of Socrates' argument for this claim.

Epicurus is an atomist, and in accordance with his atomism he takes the soul, like everything else that there is except for the void, to be ultimately composed of atoms. Our sources are somewhat unclear as to exactly which kinds of materials he took to be involved in the composition of soul. It is very probable, though, that in addition to some relatively familiar materials — such as fire-like and wind-like stuffs, or rather the atoms making up such stuffs — the soul, on Epicurus' view, also includes, in fact as a key ingredient, atoms of a nameless kind of substance, which is responsible for sense-perception. Thus it seems that while he thought he could explain phenomena such as the heat or warmth of a living organism, as well as its movement and rest, by appealing to relatively familiar materials and their relatively familiar properties, he did feel the need to introduce a mysterious additional kind of substance so as to be able to explain sense-perception, apparently on the grounds that “sense-perception is found in none of the named elements” (L&S 14C). It is worth noting that it is specifically with regard to sense-perception that Epicurus thinks the introduction of a further, nameless kind of substance is called for, rather than, for instance, with regard to intellectual cognition. What this suggests, and what in fact we have independent reason to think, is that on Epicurus' view, once one is in a position adequately to explain sense-perception, one will then also be in a position to work out an explanation of intellectual cognition, by appropriately extending the explanation of sense-perception. Let us consider briefly how such extension might work.

Perceptual beliefs, like the belief that ‘there is a horse over there’, will be explained, in Epicurus' theory, in terms of sense-impressions and the application of concepts (‘preconceptions’; for discussion cf. Asmis 1999, 276-83), and concept-formation is in turn explained in terms of sense-impression and memory. According to Diogenes Laertius' summary (L&S 17E1-2), the Epicureans say that

preconception is, as it were, cognition or correct belief or conception or universal ‘stored notion’ (i.e. memory), of that which has frequently become evident externally: e.g. ‘such-and-such a kind of thing is a man’. For as soon as the word ‘man’ is uttered, immediately its impression also comes to mind by means of preconception, as a result of antecedent sense-perceptions.

Moreover, sense-impressions, interpreted and articulated in terms of concepts or preconceptions, yield experience concerning evident matters, which in turn forms the basis for conclusions about non-evident matters. For example, extensive experience can make clear to one not only that the human beings one has interacted with have a certain feature (say, rationality), but also (later Epicureans will say, probably somewhat developing Epicurus' position) that it is inconceivable that any human being could fail to have that feature (cf. L&S 18F4-5). And so, experience will not only make one expect, with a very great deal of confidence, that any human being one will ever encounter anywhere will be rational. Experience also, according to the Epicureans, supports the inference to, and hence justifies one in accepting, the (non-evident) conclusion that all human beings, everywhere and at all times, are rational (for detailed discussion, cf. Allen 2001, 194-241). This obviously is an extremely generous view of what experience, and ultimately sense-perception, can do! Once we recognize the enormously powerful and fundamental role Epicurus and his followers assign to sense-perception, we will not be surprised to see that they feel the need to include in the composition of the soul a very special kind of material that accounts specifically for sense-perception, but apparently do not think that, in addition to that, some further special material is needed to enable intellectual or rational activity.

In the Epicurean tradition the word ‘soul’ is sometimes used in the broad traditional way, as what animates living things (e.g., Diogenes of Oenoanda, fr. 37 Smith), but the focus of interest, so far as the soul is concerned, is very much on the mental functions of cognition, emotion and desire. A view that is common in the tradition and that very probably goes back to the founder is that the soul is a composite of two parts, one rational, the other nonrational. The rational part, which Lucretius calls mind [ animus ], is the origin of emotion and impulse, and it is also where (no doubt among other operations) concepts are applied and beliefs formed, and where evidence is assessed and inferences are made. The nonrational part of the soul, which in Lucretius is somewhat confusingly called soul [ anima ], is responsible for receiving sense-impressions, all of which are true according to Epicurus. Error arises at a later stage, when sense-impressions are interpreted by the rational part of the soul, in a way that, as we have seen, crucially involves memory. Sense-perception, conceived of simply as the reception of sense-impressions by the nonrational soul, does not involve memory (cf. L&S 16B1). Since the formation and application of concepts requires memory, sense-perception, so conceived of, does not involve conceptualization, either. The nonrational part is also responsible for transmitting impulses originating from the rational part, as well as (presumably) for a wide variety of other vital functions. (When Epicurus distinguishes between pleasures and pains of the soul and those of the body, incidentally, the distinction he has in mind must be between the rational part of the soul on the one hand and the body animated by nonrational soul, on the other.)

Stoic physics allows for three different kinds of pneuma (lit. ‘breath’), a breath-like material compound of two of the four Stoic elements, fire and air. The kinds of pneuma differ both in degree of tension that results from the expanding and contracting effects, respectively, of its two constituents, and in their consequent functionality. The lowest kind accounts for the cohesion and character of inanimate bodies (e.g., rocks); the intermediate kind, called natural pneuma , accounts for the vital functions characteristic of plant life; and the third kind is soul, which accounts for the reception and use of impressions (or representations) ( phantasiai ) and impulse ( hormê : that which generates animal movement) or, to use alternative terminology, cognition and desire. Our evidence, which unfortunately is fragmentary and often unclear, suggests strongly that according to the Stoic theory, the body of an animal (human or non-human) contains pneuma of all the three kinds, with the lowest kind responsible for the cohesion and character of parts like teeth and bones, natural pneuma in charge of metabolism, growth and the like, and finally soul accounting for distinctively mental or psychological functions, crucially cognition, by sense and (in the case of humans) intellect, and desire (cf. Long 1999, 564, for discussion and references). If this is indeed the picture that the theory presents, the soul is no longer responsible for all vital functions, and for all aspects of life, but only for specifically mental or psychological functions. (Accordingly, the Stoics depart from the Platonic and Aristotelian view that plants are ensouled organisms.) At the same time, the Stoic theory does attempt to explain non-mental vital functions as well, in terms of the activity of ‘nature’, the intermediate kind of pneuma . In severing the deeply entrenched, Greek ordinary-language connection between soul and life in all its forms, the Stoic theory is taking an enormously momentous step, one that obviously restricts rather dramatically the proper subject matter of a theory of soul. In fact it is arguable that the Stoics, in limiting the functions of soul in the way they did, played an important role in a complicated history that resulted in the Cartesian conception of mind, according to which the mind plainly is not something that animates living bodies. This narrowing of the conception of soul is one of two aspects of the Stoic theory that, for our purposes, deserve particular notice.

The second noteworthy aspect is the insistence of the Stoic theory that the mind of an adult human being is a single, partless item that is rational all the way down. According to the Stoic theory, there are eight parts of the soul, the ‘commanding faculty’ [ hêgemonikon ] or mind, the five senses, voice and (certain aspects of) reproduction. The mind, which is located at the heart, is a center that controls the other soul-parts as well as the body, and that receives and processes information supplied by the subordinate parts. The minds of non-human animals and of non-adult humans have faculties only of impression and impulse. Achieving adulthood, for humans, involves gaining assent and reason. Reason (it would seem) makes assent possible, in that it enables the subject to assent to or withhold assent from impressions, and it transforms mere impressions and mere impulses, such as other animals experience, into rational impressions and rational impulses. The rationality of an impression (for example, of a tree one sees before oneself) consists in its being articulated in terms of concepts, possession of which is constitutive of having reason; the rationality of an impulse consists in the fact that it is generated or constituted by a voluntary act of assent of the mind to a suitable practical (‘impulsive’) impression — the impression, for instance, that something within view would be nice to eat. Thus, depending on the type of impression assented to, assent generates or constitutes belief (or knowledge) concerning some matter of fact, or an impulse to act in some way or other.

It is crucially important not to misunderstand these various faculties as parts or aspects of the mind, items that operate with some degree of autonomy from one another and can therefore conflict. On the Stoic theory, the faculties of the mind are simply things the mind can do. Moreover, it is a central part of the theory that, in the case of an adult human being, there is no such thing as an impulse without an act of assent of the mind to a corresponding practical impression. In a rational subject, the faculty of impulse depends on the faculty of assent, which, like all faculties of such a subject, is a rational faculty. This theory leaves no room for the Platonic conception that the souls of adult human beings contain non-rational parts which can, and frequently do, generate impulse and behavior independently of, and even contrary to, the designs and purposes of reason. Nor, relatedly, does it leave room for the shared Platonic and Aristotelian view that desire, even in the case of adult humans, comes in three forms, two of which are such that desires of these forms do not arise from, or depend on, activities of reason. The Stoic theory has the attractive consequence that each adult person is, through their own reasoned assent, unambiguously and equally responsible for all their voluntary behavior: there are no Platonic nonrational parts, or Platonic-Aristotelian nonrational desires, that could produce actions against one's own reason's helpless protestations. However, the theory needed to be defended both against rival philosophical theories and against pre-theoretical intuitions that militate in favor of these theories. One such intuition is that passion can, and frequently does, conflict with reason. To judge from a report by Plutarch, it appears that the Stoics were able to explain away this particular intuition, and also to disarm the argument for tripartition of the soul in Republic 4, which depends on the simultaneity of a desire for and an aversion to one and the same thing. According to Plutarch (L&S 65G1),

Some people [the Stoics] say that passion is no different from reason, and that there is no dissension and conflict between the two, but a turning of the single reason in both directions, which we do not notice owing to the sharpness and speed of the change.

Introducing the idea of unnoticed oscillation of a single, partless mind is highly ingenious and must have been dialectically effective at least to some extent. However, the theory of the soul that we find in classical Stoicism appears to be committed to the view that in the case of adult humans, there simply are no motivational factors that do not depend on reason and that can significantly affect, often for the worse, how a person behaves and how their life goes. It must have been difficult to defend this view against the Platonic-Aristotelian position. And so it is not surprising that in an environment in which interest in Plato's and Aristotle's writings was on the rise again, at least one prominent Stoic philosopher, Posidonius (first century B.C.), apparently gave up at least part of the classical Stoic theory. The evidence that we have is not easy to interpret, but it very much appears that Posidonius introduced into a basically Stoic psychological framework the idea that even the minds of adult humans include, to put things cautiously, motivationally relevant forces (of two kinds) that do not depend on assent or reason at all and that are not fully subject to rational control. (For detailed discussion, cf. Cooper 1998, 77-111.)

Ancient philosophy did not, of course, end with classical Stoicism, or indeed with the Hellenistic period, and neither did ancient theorizing about the soul. The revival of interest in the works of both Plato and Aristotle beginning in the second half of the second century B.C. prominently included renewed interest in Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the soul, sparking novel theoretical developments, such as, for instance, Plotinus' argument (directed in particular against the Stoics) that the soul could not be spatially extended, since no spatially extended item could account for the unity of the subject of sense-perception (see Emilsson 1991). Christian writers such as Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa were heavily indebted to philosophical theories of soul, especially Platonic ones, but also introduced new concerns and interests of their own. Nevertheless, these and other post-classical developments in every case need to be interpreted within the framework and context furnished by the classical theories that we have been considering in some detail.

A. Ancient Texts

• Kirk, G. S., J. E. Raven & M. Schofield, (eds.), 1983, The Presocratic Philosophers , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [= KR&S ]
• Cooper, J. M. & D. S. Hutchinson, (eds.), 1997, Plato: Complete Works , Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Barnes, J., (ed.), 1984, The Complete Works of Aristotle , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Long, A. A. & D. N. Sedley, (eds.), 1987, The Hellenistic Philosophers , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [= L&S ]
• Smith, M. F., 1993, Diogenes of Oenoanda: The Epicurean Inscription , La Scuola di Epicuro , Suppl. 1, Naples: Bibliopolis.

B. Ancient Theories of Soul (General)

• Algra, K., J. Barnes, J. Mansfeld & M. Schofield, (eds.), 1999, The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Annas, J. E., 1992, Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Cooper, J. M., 1999, Reason and Emotion , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Everson, S., (ed.), 1991, Companions to Ancient Thought 2: Psychology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lorenz, H., 2006, The Brute Within , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Price, A. W., 1995, Mental Conflict , London: Routledge.

C. The Greek Notion of Soul

• Bremmer, J., 1983, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Burnet, J., 1916, “The Socratic doctrine of the soul”, Proceedings of the British Academy , 7: 235–59.
• Claus, D., 1981, Toward the Soul , New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
• Dodds, E. R., 1951, The Greeks and the Irrational , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Furley, D., 1956, “The early history of the concept of soul”, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London , No. 3: 1–18.
• Snell, B., 1975, Die Entdeckung des Geistes , Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht; translated as The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Solmsen, F., 1955, “Antecedents of Aristotle's Psychology and the Scale of Beings”, American Journal of Philology , 76: 148–64.
• Sullivan, S. D., 1988, Psychological Activity in Homer , Ottawa: Carleton University Press.

D. Presocratic Thinking about the Soul

• Barnes, J., 1982, The Presocratic Philosophers , London: Routledge.
• Huffman, C. A., 1999, “The Pythagorean Tradition”, in Long 1999: 66–87.
• –––, forthcoming, “The Pythagorean Conception of the Soul from Pythagoras to Philoloaus”, in Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy , D. Frede and B. Reis (eds.), Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
• Hussey, E., “Heraclitus”, in Long 1999: 88–112.
• Kahn, C. H., 1979, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Laks, A., 1999, “Soul, sensation, and thought”, in Long 1999: 250–70.
• Long, A. A., (ed.), 1999, The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Schofield, M., 1991, “Heraclitus’ theory of soul and its antecedents”, in Everson 1991 (Bibliography/Section B): 13–34.
• Skemp, J. B., 1947, “Plants in Plato's Timaeus ”, Classical Quarterly , 41: 53–60.

E. Plato's Theories of Soul

• Bobonich, C., 2002, Plato's Utopia Recast: His Later Ethics and Politics , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Bostock, D., 1986, Plato's Phaedo , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Cooper, J. M., 1984, “Plato's Theory of Human Motivation”, History of Philosophy Quarterly , 1: 3–21, also in Cooper 1999 (Bibliography/Section B): 118–37.
• Gill, C., 1985, “Plato and the Education of Character”, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , 67: 1–26.
• Irwin, T. H., 1995, Plato's Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1999, “ Republic 2: Questions about Justice” in Plato 2 , G. Fine (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lorenz, H., 2008, “Plato on the Soul”, in The Oxford Handbook of Plato , G. Fine (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lovibond, S., 1991, “Plato's theory of mind”, in Everson 1991 (Bibliography/Section B): 35–55.
• Robinson, T. M., 1995, Plato's Psychology , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Woods, M., 1987, “Plato's Division of the Soul”, Proceedings of the British Academy , 73: 23–47.

F. Aristotle's Theory of Soul

(cf. bibliography included in Christopher Shields's article on Aristotle's psychology)

• Frede, M., 1992, “On Aristotle's Conception of the Soul”, in Nussbaum & Rorty 1992: 93–107.
• Nussbaum, M. C. & A. O. Rorty, (eds.), 1992, Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

G. Epicurus' Theory of Soul

• Allen, J., 2001, Inference from Signs , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Annas, J., 1991, “Epicurus’ philosophy of mind”, in Everson 1991 (Bibliography/Section B): 84–101.
• –––, 1992, “The Epicureans”, in Annas 1992 (Bibliography/Section B): 123–99.
• Asmis, E., 1999, “Epicurean Epistemology”, in Algra, Barnes, Mansfeld & Schofield 1999 (Bibliography/Section B): 260–94.
• Everson, S., 1999, “Epicurus' psychology”, in Algra, Barnes, Mansfeld & Schofield 1999 (Bibliography/Section B): 542–59.
• Kerferd, G., 1971, “Epicurus' doctrine of the soul”, Phronesis , 16: 80–96.
• Konstan, D., 1973, Some Aspects of Epicurean Psychology , Leiden: Brill.
• Sedley, D. N., 1998, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

H. The Stoic Theory of Soul

• Annas, J., 1992, “The Stoics”, in Annas 1992 (Bibliography/Section B): 37–120.
• Cooper, J. M., 1998, “Posidonius on Emotions”, in The Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy , Engberg-Pedersen, T. & J. Sihvola, (eds.), Dordrecht: Kluwer, also in Cooper 1999 (Bibliography/Section B): 449–84.
• Long, A. A., 1999, “Stoic Psychology”, in K. Algra, J. Barnes, J. Mansfeld & M. Schofield 1999 (Bibliography/Section B) Cambridge: 560–84.

I. Other Ancient Theories of Soul

(cf. bibliography included in Lloyd Gerson's article on Plotinus)

• Armstrong, A. H., (ed.), 1967, The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Emilsson, E. K., 1991, “Plotinus and soul-body dualism”, in Everson 1991 (Bibliography/Section 7.2): 148–65.
• –––, 2007, Plotinus on Intellect , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

Aristotle, General Topics: psychology | Plato: ethics | Plato: ethics and politics in The Republic | Plotinus | Stoicism

Copyright © 2009 by Hendrik Lorenz < hlorenz @ princeton . edu >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Knowing Your Soul's Purpose

Do you ever wonder what you’re doing here and what your soul’s purpose is.

Posted July 31, 2019 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

• What Does "Self Help" Mean?
• Find a therapist near me

“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there the whole while, waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living."

— Joseph Campbell

Your soul’s purpose is why you’re here on this earth at this time. What you’re looking for or seeking is probably connected to your soul’s purpose. It is an aspect of your life that drives you and moves you forward.

When you know your soul’s purpose, you’re content with your life. When your life theme is right for you, you feel a sense of flow, as if you’re headed in the correct direction. Everything feels right. In his book Flow (2008), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says that when you tap into your soul’s purpose, you feel a sense of harmony.

Rather than following the path suggested by someone else, those “in the flow” appear to be living their chosen, authentic dreams . When your theme is connected to your purpose, you will feel motivated and intrinsically happy.

Some people know their soul’s purpose early in life, while others discover it later on. Sometimes a soul’s purpose emerges in response to a childhood experience, which could have been joyful or possibly related to trauma .

There are things, though, that don’t nurture or feed our soul’s purpose. We need to let go of what no longer serves us, whether they’re thoughts, activities, or behaviors. For example, If you’re feeling uncomfortable with someone, consider letting that person go. Your soul is giving you a message. Maybe this individual is taking all the joy out of your life.

In his book The Art of Healing (2013), Bernie Siegel, M.D., says that he believes our soul’s purpose is to achieve the true balance we need to use our bodies and light to become soulful in our actions. He suggests that we think of ourselves as candles, with the flames reaching for the heavens in the hope that it connects with the Divine.

He suggests thinking of the wax and wick as our bodies, which help connect and ground us. While the candle burns, the flame consumes the wax, and its quality is determined by how pure the flame is. This candle, in fact, can illuminate our world by sharing its love and light.

If you’re at a crossroads in your life, perhaps it’s time to ask yourself some sacred or awakening questions that inspire transformation. Here are a few you might ask yourself, as they might be clues to your soul’s purpose:

• What am I good at?
• What part of my day is joyful?
• What brought me joy as a child?
• What in my life no longer serves me—emotionally, physically, and spiritually?
• Are there any synchronistic events that could be a clue to my soul’s purpose?
• Have I had any accidents that served as wake-up calls for me?
• Who are my role models and icons?
• What do I often teach others?
• What are my dreams and desires?
• How do I help others transform?
• If I had one year to live, what would I do?

Finding your soul’s purpose could be viewed as an investigative journey or a scavenger hunt. If you’re a spiritual seeker, then you’re already on this path. It’s important to be self-aware and alert to all possibilities. It’s about asking questions that bring you home to the place you were meant to be. Some people know early on what their soul’s purpose is, but for others, it takes time and experimentation.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow. New York, NY: Harper.

Siegel, B. (2013). The Art of Healing. Boston, MA: New World Library.

Diana Raab, MFA, Ph.D., is an author, speaker, educator, and survivor. She’s written nine books of nonfiction and poetry, including the recent Writing for Bliss and Writing for Bliss: A Companion Journal.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Teletherapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Therapy Center NEW
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Understanding what emotional intelligence looks like and the steps needed to improve it could light a path to a more emotionally adept world.

• Coronavirus Disease 2019
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Inspiration to your inbox

• spirituality
• Law Of Attraction
• Beauty And FItness
• Better Life
• Energy Healing
• mental health
• Anger Management Tips
• relationship
• Personality
• Toxic People
• Blood Sugar
• Natural Remedies
• Pain Relief
• Weight Loss

• Science , Spirituality

Here’s What Happens to Your Soul in the Afterlife

• By Chris Butler
• Published on April 13, 2024
• Last modified March 19, 2024

Survivors of near-death experiences have reported what happened, giving scientists a good idea of what lies beyond.

What happens to our soul after death is a mystery that has captivated human thought and spirituality for millennia. Across different cultures and religions, there have been numerous interpretations and beliefs about the soul’s journey beyond the physical realm. The question of what happens in the afterlife not only considers the depths of spiritual and religious beliefs. Instead, it also intersects with modern scientific inquiry, particularly through the study of near-death experiences (NDEs).

In exploring this enigmatic journey, we tread a delicate line between the known and the unknown, the scientific and the mystical. The soul, the essence of our being, transcends the physicality of life. Many believe it will embark on a journey that continues after our earthly demise.

Religious and spiritual traditions around the world provide diverse perspectives on the afterlife. 

Complementing these spiritual perspectives, scientific studies, particularly those focusing on near-death experiences, offer a fascinating glimpse into what might happen at the threshold of life and death. Researchers have found patterns and experiences that challenge our understanding of consciousness and its ties to the physical world.  Studies have documented  experiences of individuals who, at the brink of death, have reported these vividly recalled sensations:

• Out-of-body experiences
• Traveling through tunnels
• Encountering ethereal beings
• Reviewing their lives​​​​​​.

We’ll cover more of each of those later…

For ages, the soul’s journey has been a matter of faith. However, the recollections and stories of NDE survivors appear to support the afterlife, taught by many organized religions.

Understanding Near-Death Experiences

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are intriguing phenomena that occur at the edge of life and death, offering a unique lens by which we can explore the potential journey of the soul after death. These experiences, typically happening in life-threatening situations, provide profound insights that bridge the gap between scientific inquiry and spiritual exploration.

Defining Near-Death Experiences

NDEs are complex, deeply transformative experiences that occur when an individual is close to death or in a situation where death is imminent.  Greyson  (2007) and  Blanke et al.  (2009) have contributed significantly to understanding NDEs, describing them as a set of cognitive and emotional experiences reported by individuals on the brink of death. These experiences are not mere hallucinations or dreams. Rather, they are vivid, intense, and often life-altering encounters. They also challenge our understanding of consciousness and reality.

Common Features of NDEs

One of the most striking aspects of NDEs is their common features across different cultures and individuals. These experiences, as explained to researchers , often include:

• Out-of-Body Experiences: Individuals report a sensation of separating from their physical bodies and observing themselves and their surroundings from an external vantage point.
• Traveling Through a Tunnel: Many recall moving through a dark tunnel toward a light source.
• Life Review: NDEs commonly involve a rapid, detailed review of one’s life, encompassing significant and trivial events.
• Encountering a Bright Light: Descriptions of encountering a bright, often comforting light are frequent in NDE accounts.

These features are not random occurrences. Rather, they tap into a deeper, universal aspect of human consciousness.

The Soul’s Journey in NDEs

The exploration of near-death experiences (NDEs) provides us with a multi-faceted view of what the soul might encounter in the afterlife. These experiences, as documented in various case reports, reveal a rich tapestry of emotional, cognitive, spiritual, and supernatural elements that could offer glimpses into the soul’s journey beyond life.

Categorization of NDEs

NDEs can be categorized into several distinct but interconnected experiences:

• Emotional Experiences: These include profound feelings of peace, joy, and unconditional love. Individuals often describe a sense of overwhelming compassion and a deep emotional connection with the universe.
• Cognitive Experiences: These involve heightened awareness, vivid thought processes, and sometimes a rapid review of one’s life. There is often a clarity of thought that surpasses normal experiences.
• Spiritual and Religious Experiences: These are characterized by encounters with spiritual beings or a divine presence, feelings of oneness with the universe, or experiences that align with the individual’s religious beliefs.
• Supernatural Experiences: Commonly reported are out-of-body experiences, traveling through tunnels, and metaphysical perceptions that defy the normal laws of physics.

Significance of the Most Frequent NDE Elements

Among these elements, the sensation of leaving the body is particularly significant. It symbolizes a detachment from the physical realm and a transition to a different state. This experience is often the first indication to the individual that they are undergoing something extraordinary, transcending normal conscious experience.

The experience of traveling through a tunnel toward a light often represents a journey to a different realm of existence. This element of NDEs could symbolize the soul’s transition from the physical world to an afterlife or a different plane of existence.

Implications for the Soul’s Journey in the Afterlife

These elements of NDEs provide compelling insights into what the soul might encounter after death. The emotional and cognitive experiences suggest a state of heightened consciousness and emotional fulfillment. In contrast, the spiritual and supernatural experiences hint at the possibility of an existence beyond the physical world.

The findings from a systematic analysis of NDE  case reports  reinforce that these experiences are not random or isolated incidents. Instead, they represent a consistent pattern that many individuals encounter at the brink of death. This consistency across different cultures and individuals suggests that these experiences might be fundamental aspects of the human experience of death and, potentially, the soul’s journey in the afterlife.

Those Scientific Studies Closely Match What Theologians Explain About the Soul in the Afterlife

Theological perspectives on what happens to the soul after death vary widely among religions and spiritual traditions. These beliefs provide diverse and profound insights into the nature of the soul and its journey beyond physical life.

Christianity and a Heavenly Afterlife

In Christian theology, the soul is considered immortal and is believed to face judgment after death. The outcome of this judgment leads to heaven or hell. In the traditional teachings of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths, the soul may spend some time in repentance in purgatory. Heaven is seen as a place of eternal peace and communion with God, while hell is perceived as a state of eternal separation from God and suffering.

Islam and Heaven 

Islamic teachings also emphasize the immortality of the soul and its judgment after death. The soul is believed to enter an intermediate state, known as Barzakh, until the Day of Judgment. On this day, souls are judged and sent to either Paradise (Jannah) or Hell (Jahannam), depending on their deeds in the earthly life.

Hinduism and Reincarnation in the Afterlife

Hindu beliefs about the afterlife are closely tied to karma and reincarnation. The soul, or Atman, is seen as eternal and cycles through various lives based on its karma. The ultimate goal is to achieve Moksha, a liberation from the cycle of rebirth, and unite with Brahman, the universal soul or ultimate reality.

Buddhism and Rebirth

In Buddhism, the concept of an eternal soul is not emphasized. Instead, the focus is on the cycle of rebirth driven by karma. The aim is to attain Nirvana, a state of liberation from the cycle of suffering and rebirth, achieved through spiritual practices and following the Eightfold Path.

Judaism and an Afterlife

Jewish beliefs about the afterlife are diverse and not as explicitly defined as in other religions. Generally, Judaism focuses more on life and ethical conduct during time spent on Earth than on the specifics of the afterlife. However, there is a belief  a heavenly world to come.

Sikhism teaches that the soul is part of the divine and is on a journey through various lifetimes. The goal is to merge with the divine (Waheguru) through living a righteous life, remembering God, and serving humanity.

Each theological perspective offers a unique view of the soul’s journey after death, reflecting the diverse understandings and teachings across various cultures and traditions. They provide rich spiritual contexts through which individuals interpret the meaning of life and death and the nature of the soul’s existence beyond the physical realm.

Final Thoughts on What Happens to Your Soul in the Afterlife

While NDEs occur at the brink of death, they provide valuable insights into what the soul might experience in the afterlife. NDEs’ characteristics, such as detachment from the body, moving through a tunnel, and encountering beings of light, are commonly reported across different cultures and demographics. These experiences often lead to profound changes in  individuals’ perspectives  on life and death, suggesting a deep, transformative encounter that resonates with their understanding of the soul.

The soul’s journey after death remains a mystery, one that forms a triangle between science, spirituality, and personal belief. The studies of NDEs offer a fascinating window into this journey, suggesting that our consciousness, or soul, might embark on a profound and transformative journey beyond our physical existence. As we explore and understand these experiences, we may come closer to unraveling the enigma of the soul’s journey after death.

But for now, it should comfort faithful people across many religions that science seems to concur that there is a soul journey into an afterlife.  What we may find when we get to the next step of our soul’s journey remains a mystery.

Comments & Discussions

Connect With Me

About the Author

Chris Butler

Chris is a happy dad and co-creator here at PoP. Since 2009, Chris has experienced multiple life changing positive events, released over 100 pounds, attained inner peace, created academic and professional success, and learned to see increased abundance in every area of life, while remaining grateful and joyous through the journey. Chris has transformed from rock bottom in the areas of personal health, fitness, and spirituality. He credits it all to the power of positive thoughts, words, actions and reactions.

In his spare time, Chris enjoys music, fitness, plant-based nutrition and inspiring others to take positive action steps and catch their own dreams in life. Chris also loves to spend quality time with his lovely wife Kristen and two beautiful daughters.

Related Articles

12 Traits of a Woman You Will Never Forget

10 Reasons Attractive People Stay Single

20 Signs of Microcheating to Never Ignore

Why You Keep Attracting Toxic People (and How to Fix It)

Should You Gargle With Warm Salt Water Every Morning? Here’s Why Doctors Say Yes

Science Explains the Link Between Stress and Wrinkles

Dermatologists Explain the Causes of Toenail Infections (and How to Fix It)

20 Phrases Never to Say to a Sensitive Man

10 Things That Cause Self-Hatred (and How to Fix It)

The community, our free community of positively powerful superfans.

Join our free community of superfans today and get access to courses, affirmations, accountability, and so much more… plus meet other like-minded positive people committed to living the power of positivity. Over the years, we’ve brought 50+ million people together through the Power of Positivity … this free community is an evolution of our journey so far, empowering you to take control, live your best life, and have fun while doing so.

Rise and Shine On! Master Your Day with the Ultimate Positive Morning Guide + Checklist

Stay connected with, every day is a day to shine. shine on.

This site is not intended to provide, and does not constitute, medical, health, legal, financial or other professional advice. This site is for entertainment purposes only. Our editors handpick the products that we feature. We may earn commission from the links on this page.

All rights Reserved. All trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners.

Please see our Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | About | Cookie Policy | Editorial Policy | Contact | Accessibility |  [cookie_settings] | Disclaimer

• Copyright Power of Positivity 2024
• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Accessibility

Quote Remedy — Positive Energy+

The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries

Bill plotkin.

520 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2021

About the author

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think? Rate this book Write a Review

Friends & Following

Community reviews.

Join the discussion

Can't find what you're looking for.

Nine Parts of the Human Soul According to the Ancient Egyptians

• Read Later  

The idea of the human soul has fascinated humankind for thousands of years. Cultures around the world have sought to explain the soul or spirit in a wide and fascinating variety of ways.

The soul is often an important aspect of religion and is closely tied to the afterlife , reincarnation , and spiritual realms . This means the concept of the soul is integral to many belief systems and that in many cases the descriptions and explanations of the soul are lengthy and complex.

For the religious and non-religious alike the soul remains a symbol of self, and the idea of wagering or losing one’s soul has been used as a plotline in stories such as Faustus for generations. In some cultures, such as head-hunting tribes in Indonesia, taking the part of the body believed to house the soul from an enemy is the greatest prize – simultaneously denying their foe the chance to move on to an afterlife and stealing the power of the soul to strengthen their own tribe or family.

Ancient Egyptians had their own complex ideas about what makes up the human soul, and their beliefs involved dividing the soul into nine parts: Khat, Ba, Ren, Ka, Shuyet, Jb, Akh, Sahu, and Sechem.

Eight of these were immortal and passed into the afterlife and the ninth was the physical body which was left behind. The parts all had their own unique functions, and by analyzing these it is possible to understand more about what the ancient Egyptians believed.

Khat or Kha – The Body

Ancient Egyptians believed the physical form itself was a part of the human soul and called this element the Khat or Kha. It was the vessel inhabited by the rest of the soul on Earth . This is part of the reason mummification became so important to ancient Egyptians – preserving the physical body was actually preserving an important part of the soul.

After a person had died, offerings would still be made to the soul at their physical body because it was believed the rest of their soul could supernaturally absorb the benefits and nutrients from the offerings. The body was a link to the essence of the person who had once inhabited it – a concept which is seen in many other interpretations of the soul.

Ba – The Personality

The Ba is perhaps the closest the ancient Egyptians had to the modern ideas about the soul. It made up all the elements of a person that made them unique.

Taking the form of a bird with a human head, the Ba was the way the soul could move between the mortal realm and the spiritual one. The Egyptians believed the Ba still traveled between both realms occasionally while a person was still alive, but that the journey the Ba made between worlds increased significantly after death.

Ba, part of the human soul, in a facsimile of a vignette from the Book of the Dead. (A. Parrot / Public Domain )

The Ba would visit the gods and the spiritual realm , but it was this part of the soul which would also frequent the places a person loved when they were still alive, maintaining a link between the parts of the soul which dwelled among the stars and the Khat and other elements of the soul which had remained on Earth.

The idea that the Ba would spend time in places a person loved during life is also similar to some modern ideas about ghosts and spirits lingering at a place once loved by a particular person when they were alive. The Ba was also believed to be connected physically to the body and it would remain with the Khat when it was not visiting other physical places or communing with the gods .

Ren – The True Name

Ancient Egyptians were given a name at birth which was kept secret to everyone but the gods. This name was considered an extremely important and powerful part of the soul with the ability to destroy a person and their soul permanently.

Throughout life, an individual was known only by a nickname so that no one would be able to learn their true Ren and gain the powers it contained, or the chance and knowledge needed to destroy it.

As long as the Ren still existed, a soul had the power to keep on surviving. As long as embalming was correctly completed and mummification was successful, the Ren meant a person and their soul would exist for eternity.

• Stairway to Heaven: Ancient Concepts About Heaven and the Afterlife
• Why No Nose? The Ancient Breath of Life and Remarkably Powerful ‘Living Statues’
• Did the Ancient Egyptians know the Distance between the Inner Planets?

As long as the Ren existed, the human soul survived. (Jacktandy000 / CC BY-SA 4.0 )

A series of texts beginning around 350 AD called the Book of Breathings compiled the names of ancient Egyptians and wrote them down physically to try and ensure they survived. The power of the name was acknowledged by the creation of the cartouche – a special way of writing a name inside a protective magical barrier – which was used around royal names.

Just as preserving the name, the Ren was crucial to preserve the soul. Destroying the Ren was a way of making sure a soul was destroyed forever. This is part of the reason some names of hated figures such as Akhenaten were ritually and destructively removed from monuments and texts after their death.

Ka – The Vital Essence

The Ka was the vital essence of a person which distinguished between life and death. The Egyptians believed that either the fertility goddess Heqet or the goddess of childbirth Meskhenet breathed the Ka into a body at the time of birth. The Ka is what made the new infant truly alive.

They believed the Ka was sustained throughout life through food and drink. They believed the Ka still needed nourishment after death, which is the reason food and drink would be presented to the Khat. They did not think the Ka still needed to eat the food physically, but thought the nutrients were absorbed by the Ka in a supernatural manner after death.

A kind of offering tray called a Soul House which was made of clay shaped into a house was developed to present the Ka with offerings. Some surviving examples even have clay models of food in them, and they have been used as a way of determining what an average house would have looked like in ancient Egypt.

A Soul House.. (Geni / CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Some people believe Soul Houses were even intended as a physical place for the Ka to reside, though there is no evidence of this, and it is more likely they were simply an elaborate way of presenting offerings of food and drink to the deceased.

Shuyet – The Shadow

Ancient Egyptians believed the shadow was actually a part of a person’s soul. It was ever present, and they believed it contained a part of what makes each individual unique.

As in many other cultures, the Egyptians also believed the shadow was linked in some way to death. The Shuyet was believed to be a servant to Anubis , the Egyptian god of death and the afterlife . Physical depictions of the Shuyet were of a human figure shaded entirely black.

Anubis was the ancient Egyptian god associated with mummification and burial rituals, here he attends to a mummy. (Jeff Dahl / Public Domain )

Some people had a ‘Shadow Box’ among their funerary items so that the Shuyet had a place to inhabit. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead the soul is described as leaving the tomb of the deceased during the day in the form of a shadow. This Shuyet is considered only a shadow of the person it represents and not a major or destructive manifestation of the deceased in the physical realm.

Jb – The Heart

Just as many people still believe today, the Ancient Egyptians saw the heart as the home of human emotion. It was also considered the center of thought, will, and intention. This meant the Jb (heart) was a very important part of the soul for them, and the word appears in many sayings and expressions in ancient Egyptian writings. While English expressions often refer to the heart as a metaphor, in ancient Egyptians sayings, mentioning the heart is referring to the physical heart.

As an element of the soul, the Jb was the part a person used to gain access to the afterlife. The heart would be weighed on a scale against a feather – the feather of truth – and if the heart weighed more than the feather, a person was denied access to the afterlife and their heart was eaten by a demon called Ammit who was described as a fearsome lion-hippo-crocodile hybrid.

Weighing of the heart, the Jb of the human soul. (ISa1 / Public Domain )

To preserve and protect the Jb the heart would be specially embalmed, and then placed with the rest of the body along with a heart scarab which was a magical amulet intended to prevent the heart giving away too much information about a person and jeopardizing their success in passing the weighing of the heart.

Akh or Ikhu – The Immortal Self

The Akh was a magical combination of the elements Ba and Ka which represented the enlightened immortal being after death. This magical unification of Ba and Ka would only be possible if the correct funerary rites were performed after death.

The Akh did not stay with the Khat as many other elements of the soul did, it lived among the stars with the gods, though it did return to the body on occasion if necessary. It was a representation of the intellect, will, and intentions of a person.

The Akh was also the aspect of the soul which could reconnect through loved ones by appearing to them in their dreams.

Sahu – The Judge and Spiritual Body

The Sahu was actually a further aspect of the Akh. As soon as a soul had been deemed worthy of entering the afterlife, the Sahu would separate from all other forms of the soul. Much like some modern ideas about ghosts, the Sahu was said to haunt those who had wronged a person in life and protect those who the soul had loved. Just as the Akh could appear in a person’s dreams, the Sahu could appear to a person.

• Hidden Beliefs Covered by the Church? Resurrection and Reincarnation in Early Christianity
• Science Versus Religion on Our Ancient Origins: What if They’re Both Wrong?
• Religion Isn’t The Enemy of Science: It’s Been Inspiring Scientists for Centuries

Ancient Egypt literature included hauntings by the Sahu, the ‘ghost’ part of the human soul. (SteinsplitterBot / Public Domain )

It was often considered a vengeful spirit and could be blamed for any ill fortunes. There is even an example from the Middle Kingdom of a letter left by a widower in the tomb of his late wife begging her Sahu to stop haunting him.

Sechem or Sekhem – Life Energy

The Sekhem was another element of the Akh. Not much is known about the Sekhem, but it was considered a kind of life energy of the soul. The Sekhem was present in the afterlife after judgement had been passed and the soul was considered worthy.

In the Book of the Dead the Sekhem is described as a power and the place in which the gods Horus and Osiris live in the underworld.

Sheet from a Book of the Dead. (Alonso de Mendoza / Public Domain )

The Sekhem may also have been used to control the physical surroundings and outcomes of a person and their actions. Like the Akh, the Sekhem did not reside with the Khat and the physical body, but among the stars with the gods and goddesses.

The Complexity of the Soul

The way ancient Egyptians divided the soul is indicative of how important it was to them. It was clearly something which had been thought about in a tremendous amount of detail, and it was the crux of their beliefs about the afterlife and how a person could reach it.

Their beliefs about the soul also dictated the way they treated a body after death. Mummification, an iconic part of ancient Egyptian culture , was a result of their beliefs about the Khat and other parts of the soul needing a place to live.

The nine aspects of the soul have influenced many other parts of Egyptian culture too. From the violent removal of names to destroy the Ren to the creation of texts such as the Book of the Dead , the soul was pivotal to much of the culture and society of ancient Egypt.

Without this complicated belief system many of the artifacts which have become iconic and world-renowned elements of ancient Egyptian culture would not have been developed, and the fascinating world which has captured many a modern imagination may have left very different treasures behind.

Top image: Egyptian mummy. Credit: markrhhiggins / Adobe Stock

By Sarah P Young

DeVille, E. 2018. According to Ancient Egypt, There Are 9 Parts Of The Human Soul . Awareness Act. [Online] Available at: https://awarenessact.com/according-to-ancient-egypt-there-are-9-parts-of-the-human-soul/ DeVille, E. 2018. The 9 Parts Of The Soul: An Understanding Of The Human Soul According To The Ancient Egyptians . Awareness Act. [Online] Available at: https://awarenessact.com/the-9-parts-of-the-soul-an-understanding-of-the-human-soul-according-to-the-ancient-egyptians/ Egyptology Online. 2001. the concept of the afterlife . [Online] Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20080421124839/https://www.egyptologyonline.com/the_afterlife.htm Ivan. Date Unknown. These are the 9 parts of the human soul according to Ancient Egypt . Ancient Code. [Online] Available at: https://www.ancient-code.com/these-are-the-nine-parts-of-the-human-soul-according-to-ancient-egypt/

so if I get a gold or silver cartouche made with my name on it, I get to live forever?

okay maybe not in this body but on some immortal plane, I can cope with that, sign me up

Sarah P Young is undertaking her masters in archaeology, specializing in early human behavior and in particular evidence of interaction between humans and Neanderthals. She hopes to continue her studies further and complete a doctorate.

Related Articles on Ancient-Origins

• Main Center
• Find a Center
• Meet Pujya Deepakbhai

• path to happiness
• spiritual science
• what is a soul
• the journey of soul
• What is the Journey of Soul?

The Purpose of Life Is Nothing but Development Only through the Journey of Soul!

The Soul with the coverings of karma on it is called a living being. On its journey, the living being undergoes several stages of development and as karmas get shed, the being progresses spiritually on the path of evolution. The Soul, by its very nature, is moving towards ultimate liberation (moksha), as long as there is no interference along the way.

However, interference is usually there. Thus, The Soul’s journey towards liberation is not that straightforward. Thus, it naturally passes through different life forms. There are three divisions for the development of Soul for liberation in this world, which are as follows:

1. The life-form that has no identity. It’s awaiting an entry into the worldly life.

Before a living being enters into the worldly cycle, there is a stage wherein there is total covering on the Soul. In this stage, the Soul is not spoilt nor is it destroyed. The Soul is there, but it is totally covered (with dense layers of coverings over it). So, not a single ray of light of knowledge of Soul is able to come out. They are called ‘Nigod’. There are infinite Souls in this stage; they are fully covered. Not a single sense has been developed in these living beings as yet, and therefore, they are in a dormant stage.

2. The life-form that has identity. It has entered the worldly life.

When one Soul from this world attains liberation, one Soul from the Nigod enters the worldly cycle. Only a little covering from over the Soul of the Nigod gets removed, from where little light of Soul comes out. Thus, one sense is developed. With this, the particular living being begins its journey in this world, and gradually develops from one-sensed to two-sensed, three-sensed, four sensed, five-sensed and then comes into human life-form where his mind, intellect, ego gets developed. These beings are in bondage. At every stage, the living beings go through enormous suffering due to the load of coverings. These coverings on the Soul keep reducing, as their development progresses naturally. When in human form, one creates new causes with the help of mind, intellect, and ego. Based on these causes, the living being reincarnates in either celestial, human, animal, or hell realm. In each life, the being then suffers the effects of the causes made. Ultimately, when one gets Self-Realization , the worldly development completes there; new karmas stop being charged. When all the old karmas discharge without any interference, one attains total liberation!

3. The third is the ultimate liberation of the Soul. It has left the mortal world.

These are the liberated Souls. They have already reached the stage of ultimate salvation; and therefore, they do not come back in this world. They are free from all the worldly bondages.

The Journey of Soul: Who Manages It?

There are six eternal elements in this world; they are everlasting. When these elements revolve around each other, their phases occur automatically.

The Soul is one of the six elements. Soul is nothing but Absolute knowledge! The other elements, too, are powerful (in terms of their respective attributes), but they do not have any (attribute of) knowledge or understanding. When the element of matter and the element of Soul come together, the different phases of the Soul occur automatically. For example, a Soul takes up a human form (its phase) automatically.

Just like when Sun, Moon, and Earth revolve around each other, phases of the Moon are what we can see – the first day of the Moon, the second day of the Moon, the third day of the Moon, and so on. However, they are all temporary but the Moon is not temporary; likewise, human beings, deities, animals, insects are all phases of the Soul, which are temporary. Nevertheless, the Soul is not temporary.

We are a Pure Soul. However, the Soul cannot be seen. What we are seeing are the phases. Due to the ignorance of the Soul, we think, “I am this phase (human), I am John, I am brother, I am doctor, and so on.” Innumerable such wrong beliefs are formed based on which the worldly interactions start. The belief of “I am John” coupled with another wrong belief of “I did this” results in charging of karma . All this takes place automatically during the journey of Soul.

Let’s understand from the conversation below:

Dadashri: These are all circumstances that the Soul has come across! For instance, you and I are sitting here right now. We go out and if suddenly a dense fog comes up, then you and I would not be able to see each other, isn’t that possible?

Questioner: Yes.

Dadashri: So, it is due to the fog that the seeing got stopped. Similarly, this Soul has been shrouded by the fog of circumstances; so many circumstances arise! This fog has infinite kinds of layers (coverings of karma) as compared to the atmospheric fog. These coverings are so grave that they do not allow you to realize that ‘I am Soul’. The Soul has not come nor has it ever gone. The Soul (Atma) itself is God (Parmatma)! Yet, these coverings do not allow one to realize one’s Self. Incredible! And this is what Gnani has seen; the One who has got liberated, has seen it.

Questioner: Who created the Soul?

Dadashri: No one has created it. If it was created, then it would have an end. The Soul is something that is constantly there; it is an eternal element. It has never had a beginning. No one has made it. If it did have a creator, then even the creator would come to an end, as would his creation.

Questioner: Why does a thing like Soul come into existence?

Dadashri: It has not come into existence or anything like that. In this world, there are six eternal elements and these elements are constantly undergoing changes. And it is because of these changes that you see all phases. People consider the phase as: ‘This is my form.’ The phases are temporary, whereas the elements are permanent. Therefore, the Self (Soul) does not have to come into creation.

Questioner: So only the Soul has to go to moksha; to other elements it does not matter?

Dadashri: The Soul is in the state of liberation only, but the pressure of the other elements has come onto it. If it is released from amidst those elements, liberation happens. The Self is in the state of liberation only. But owing to ignorance, one continues to believe, ‘I am this, I am this,’ and therefore one keeps getting trapped in wrong beliefs! And through Self-Realization, one is freed.

The Stages of Development on the Path of Evolution

The Soul is in its pure state throughout all time periods (past, present, and future). However, because of layers of coverings, its reality is obstructed from coming into your vision. Once it comes into your vision, the vision is purified after which it can never become impure. Nevertheless, the Soul has always maintained its state of detachment and purity throughout these phases and time periods in each birth. Even now, our Soul is pure. Everyone’s Soul is pure, but because the external form (phase) has come about, it is in that form that your wrong belief has arisen. Thus, although the journey of Soul includes many phases, the Soul as an element remains pure.

The Soul has infinite knowledge, but it has always been covered with karmas. As and when some layer(s) of ignorance (the different wrong beliefs) break, that much Knowledge of the Soul gets manifested (in worldly life)!

For instance, if you place a 1000-Watt bulb inside a pot and seal it completely, then not a single ray of light will come out of the pot. Now, if you make one hole in the pot, one ray of light will come out. In the same way, the light of the Soul comes out through one sense and it takes the phase of a one-sense creature. When another hole is formed, it takes the phase of a two-sense creature. Inside, the Soul is complete; its light (knowledge) is full. However, there are so many coverings on it that the light does not come out.

In a nutshell, this is how the journey of Soul happens:

• A living being in a total dormant stage where there is no knowledge or vision at all, then, 
• A living being developing from one-sensed to five-sensed being and then finally evolving into a human form, and then into
• A Self-Realized living being finally attaining ultimate liberation 

To Him we bow in eternal reverence, Who kindled in us Pure Light; Every Soul is a temple now, where the bells chime, Jai Satchitanand

Q. What is the Meaning of Soul?

A. By not being able to comprehend this subtlest and the most profound element in the universe, which... Read More

Q. Does Soul Exist?

A. Is there something truly known as Soul? Does Soul exist in reality? The answer is, YES! If you see... Read More

Q. Where Does the Soul Go Immediately after Death?

A. As soon as the Soul leaves the body, the body is declared dead. So, where does the Soul go... Read More

Q. My Search for Soul in the Body Is Unsuccessful. Where Should I Exactly Look for It?

A. People have been searching Soul but it is yet not found. As they try to do so on their own, their... Read More

Q. What Is the Soul Made of? What Are the Characteristics of Soul?

A. Once a person knows the Soul, there’s nothing more, that one needs to know! After knowing the Soul,... Read More

Q. What Does a Soul Look Like?

A. To identify Soul, it is obvious to know about its appearance. So, what does a Soul look like? Well,... Read More

Q. How Do I Awaken My Soul?

A. Many people aim for spiritual awakening due to which they look for how to awaken my Soul. So, how... Read More

Q. Why Is It Important to Awaken Spiritually?

A. To awaken spiritually means to recognize your true Self, the Soul. The Soul is said to have... Read More

Q. Is My Soul a Part of God (Parmatma)?

A. “My Soul is a part of God or Parmatma” - Here, assuming I (Self) means Atma (Soul), it is an... Read More

• What is the Meaning of Soul?
• Does Soul Exist?
• Where Does the Soul Go Immediately after Death?
• My Search for Soul in the Body Is Unsuccessful. Where Should I Exactly Look for It?
• What Is the Soul Made of? What Are the Characteristics of Soul?
• What Does a Soul Look Like?
• How Do I Awaken My Soul?
• Why Is It Important to Awaken Spiritually?
• Is My Soul a Part of God (Parmatma)?

subscribe your email for our latest news and events

Quick Links

• Spiritual Songs
• Social Media Wall
• Press Release
• Official Social Media Accounts

Other Websites

• Online Store
• Website for youth
• Kids Website
• Non-Sectarian Temple
• 24x7 Web TV
• 24x7 Web Radio
• Website for Followers
• Simandhar City Arrival Information

(Note: Close to 21 printed pages)

Unveiling the Mystery of the Human Soul

In light of so many misconceptions about the human soul, the Lord reveals to me some of the mysteries of the human soul from the Christian perspective different from other religions. Human soul is the most personal of human existence different from human spirit. Both the human spirit and soul are separate entities although they work in closer association together. Many people including those working in the ministry for the Lord know that human soul is the seat of human motivation, emotions, reactions, perception, and cognition. It is the decision-making location of human existence. People usually refer to this as the invisible heart because the human soul is located at the center of the physical body around the location of the physical heart. The soul is the person inside every human being on earth. The anatomy and functioning of the human soul in connection to other human interactions remain very oblivious to many people because of the enormous complexity. This article based on what the Holy Spirit revealed to me will unveil the mystery in the complexities of human soul interactions with the human spirit and the Holy Spirit. Many times people will use the human soul and spirit interchangeably. They are different, even though they interact with each other intimately. Christians who do not understand both the physical and spiritual journey of the soul are easily victimized everyday by soul manipulators or predators.

Anatomy of the Human Soul

Human existence functions in seven different dimensions, the physical body; the memory of the physical body; the invisible human soul; the physical component of human soul around the heart area; the physical component of human cognition in the brain; the human spirit; and the Holy Spirit (for Christians who have received the baptism of the Holy Spirit). These dimensions interact with each other and sometimes overlapping each other while they both have their distinctive functions in a living human being. Simplifying these divisions is to imply that man is made primarily of the body, soul, and the spirit. Each of these components have sub-divisions, more will be discussed on this later.

The only unique and living entity to every person born on earth is the human soul. Everybody has one human soul. Human soul is immortal. The soul is the "person" inside every human being. Without the soul a human being has no existence. No two human souls are the same. The uniqueness of each individual soul is part of the ingenious power of God’s creation that no human being is able to completely understand no matter how hard we try. The part that will face judgment is the human soul. That is why the Bible says, " The soul that sins shall die " (Ezekiel 18:20) It did not say the spirit shall die, but the soul. The human soul is also referred to as the human heart. This is because the location of human soul in the physical body is closer to the location of the human heart. When God created the soul, the soul is given a human spirit. The human spirit is an encasement the human soul lives inside. Both the soul and the human spirit are living bodies attached with energies. The human spirit is also the locomotive vehicle the soul travels in the invisible world. Most people who travel in the spirit realm will notice that it appears they are traveling in an invisible vehicle. That invisible vehicle is the human spirit with which our soul travels in the universe and spirit realm. Anybody can travel in the spirit body into the invisible realm. However, there is danger traveling in the invisible highway unguarded. The human spirit also represents human soul on earth during spirit-to-spirit interactions. The human spirit knows the human soul very well in intimate association. They both work together as a team for good, or partners in crime. Inside the human soul is the decision making center of all humans on earth. Human soul tends to control the human spirit while the human spirit controls the human body. Human spirit is the one that gives human body the energy of life. When the human spirit leaves the body, the human body dies. Human spirit can also act independently by bypassing the physical component of human soul in the brain. Interactions can therefore take place in the spirit realm with other people without the cognitive awareness of human brain. Besides the verbal, or other forms of physical communication, there is also a communication that goes on in the spirit realm between people. People will be surprised that we sometimes communicate spirit to spirit more than we do through physical process most people are used to.

" Bless the Lord O my soul and all that is within me, bless his Holy name " (Psalm 103:1).

" My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoice in my savior " (St. Luke 1:46).

Where the soul is mentioned, we can replace it with the heart which represents the real person besides the spirit body. Human heart has two components, the visible around the location of the physical heart and the invisible, inside the human soul. The spirit body is an encasement. Jesus wants us to pray inside the spirit, not necessarily inside human spirit, but inside the Holy Spirit that attaches to human spirit encasement. More will be discussed about this later

Functioning of the Holy Spirit

When we receive the Holy Spirit, he takes a dwelling in a location of the human spirit. Imagine the human spirit is like a giant bus. Once the Holy Spirit takes position, man goes through the struggle of surrendering to God. The surrender is complete when we offer our soul completely to God. In such a process, we intentionally open the intimate door of our soul to receive and commune with the Spirit of God. At the moment of surrender, the Holy Spirit deactivates a control component of human soul over the human spirit. Subsequently, the Holy Spirit takes over the operational control over human soul. In this process, the Holy Spirit will deactivate the demonic component of human soul, and place it under arrest. Dying in the flesh, is keeping the soul under the control of the Holy Spirit shedding demonic desires of the flesh. The Holy Spirit becomes the guardian of human soul both in the physical and spirit realm. This is done by human choice. There are many people with indwelling of the Holy Spirit who refuse to let the Holy Spirit take control of their soul. Therefore the Holy Spirit remains in their spirit as a resident alien. He will only function in us to the level we allow him. The Eternal Spirit does not completely deactivate the human spirit because he allows for human freedom of choice. From time to time, the human spirit influenced by the human soul will interfere with the functional control of the Holy Spirit. Through this process, we can quench the Holy Spirit as against the will of God. When people receive new anointing, it is like receiving a new ministering Spirit that stays on the outside and helps to guide a believer in God’s direction in joint action with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Functions of Human Spirit and Human Soul

The principal function of the human spirit is to serve the human soul. The human spirit keeps alive the human flesh because it possesses the energy of life. When the Holy Spirit takes over the functions of the human spirit, he controls both the human spirit and the human soul especially at the level of his desires. This is the key function in the operation of the Holy Spirit inside every believer. Very importantly, the devil’s seduction in the Garden of Eden contaminated the human soul at the level of human desires. The soul seduction took place by human choice; therefore the deactivation of the demonic virus must take place by human choice. This is why the entire gospel of predestination is absolute nonsense! God cannot create a soul to destroy that soul in hell. God is not a wicked being as man is, but a very loving God. Our human choice is the one that leads us to hell, not because we are preordained to die in hell. How many human fathers will be happy to see their children suffer in hell? How then do we think God is pleased to see his children go to hell when God is love? It is inconceivable that a loving God will design a destiny of intentional hell for some people. If the gospel of preordination is correct, why should we need Jesus? If some people are destined to go to hell and others are destined to go to Heaven, then we do not need a savior.

Holy Spirit Deactivates Demonic Virus

The entire purpose of life’s journey on earth is a process to gradually free man from the demonic oppression of the devil with the help of the Holy Spirit. Jesus came to rescue man from the tricks the devil played on man in the Garden of Eden. Jesus therefore came to enlighten man about the devil’s plot; desires and intentions. He came to free man from the shackles of sins imposed by the devil through repentance, forgiveness, and the offering of the gift of eternal salvation. Ultimately, Jesus returns man back to the paradise lost to the devil. He took the dominion from the devil, and gave it back to man, and never to be lost again. This is the story of redemption through Jesus. Jesus therefore gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit to guide man along the journey of life to attain spiritual intimacy with God.

The Holy Spirit comes like a computer anti virus to deactivate, or block the operations of the demonic virus inside every man born on earth. Every man born of a woman with human blood is cursed. Only Jesus removes the curse from humanity if we accept him. If you refuse Jesus, then you wear the curse all your life and you remain cursed. Eventually you will perish in hell. If you receive Jesus, then you wear Jesus all the rest of your life. You will pass from death to life. " Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believe in him who sent me has everlasting life, and shall not come to judgment, but passed from death to life " (St. John 5:24).

When the Holy Spirit completely takes control, he will then en-clothe the human soul as the human soul sits inside the human spirit. Every human soul without the Holy Spirit’s garment is a naked soul that lives in darkness. After total surrender to God, the human spirit cannot communicate the human soul without first coming through the Holy Spirit. Man also has the right to peel back the encasement of the Holy Spirit and get into trouble at will. This happens all the time with some preachers leading to scandals as they feast in the sewer of human lustful and illicit desires. Every Christian is vulnerable not preachers alone.

As the human soul resides inside human spirit encased inside the Holy Spirit, similarly the human spirit lives inside human body. If a believer refuses to surrender, the Holy Spirit will remain indwelling, but just takes up a residential location inside human spirit. As a result, the Holy Spirit’s power to control the human soul diminishes. The Holy Spirit will therefore function in a believer as a believer allows the Holy Spirit to take control of his soul. The functioning of the Holy Spirit in a believer is therefore by human choice just like the human choice to sin. If a person has not received the Holy Spirit, it opens the door for the demonic spirit to enter and take up location inside human spirit. However, the permission for the demonic spirit to come inside human spirit is usually given by the human soul that resides inside human spirit. Human soul has a control over the opening and closing of human spirit doors. However, once the Holy Spirit takes up residence inside human spirit, the demonic spirit cannot come inside. The Holy Spirit blocks the door of human spirit and will not allow the demonic spirit to enter. Both the demonic spirit and the Holy Spirit can never reside together inside the spirit of a believer. The Spirit of God will not strive with the spirit of the devil in anybody. Once the demonic spirit is cast out of a person, the Holy Spirit will then come inside, takes up residence, and shut the door of human spirit. Once the Holy Spirit takes a dwelling place inside human spirit, no spirit can chase the Holy Spirit away. However, the functionality of the Holy Spirit can be restricted by human desire inside human soul.

Some Christians may be gifted with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and wonderful operations of the eternal Spirit, yet the demonic spirits are oppressing them. This happens because outside the human spirit are spirit locations like seats outside the walls of a bus. Demonic spirits can hang to a person by riding on these outside seats, and interfering with a person’s daily activities. It is not unusual for a Christian to be hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit in one hand, and that of the demon in the other hand. The decision outcome is based on human choice. Once a Christian recognizes that the demon is riding on the outside of his bus, he can immediately take control by casting the demonic entities out and praying for the ministering Spirits to take positions. This is one of the easiest prayers to rebuke the enemy. Jesus has given us power to rebuke the enemy (St. Luke 10:19). At the time we break off the demonic entities from outside the bus of human spirit, we must immediately pray that the ministering Spirits takes up residence in those locations. We do not leave those location seats empty. Dislodging the demonic spirits from those outside human spirit seats prevents us from clearly hearing the voices of the enemy of God. It leads to the enlargement of the Holy Spirit within.

Jesus Differentiates the Soul and Spirit Bodies

The human soul is different from the human spirit. This differentiation of the soul and the human spirit was clearly stated by the Bible and confirmed by Jesus. " John the Baptist will come in the Spirit and power of Elijah " (St. Luke 1:17). Jesus confirmed that statement in response to the question about Elijah coming back by saying, " Elijah already came " (St. Matthew 17:11-12). He was referring to John the Baptist. However, when they asked John was he Elijah? He denied it (St. John 1:19-27). People who read these two accounts of the New Testament that appear contradictory will wonder why John the Baptist contradicted Jesus. There is no contradiction. Jesus statement opens the door for a better understanding of the human soul and human spirit. Theologians cannot understand this using human knowledge. Understanding comes from the Holy Spirit. John the Baptist came in the spirit and power of Elijah. He did not come in the soul of Elijah. John the Baptist came in his own soul unique to him. However, John then came riding in the spirit bus of Elijah which also included the associative spiritual power. The only thing unique to John was his soul. The spirit was only a vehicle he was riding. And that spirit has associated power like a spiritual mantle given to a person. This is like some people coming to church in a Ford car, and others coming in a Chevrolet car. Jesus therefore identified the car John was riding, but John did not know that car. Jesus knew because he was the one who provided the spirit car for John as his forerunner in the first place.

The same way John was given the mantle of Elijah, Elisha also received the same mantle. Similarly, other prophets and evangelists have transferred their mantles to their servants, friends, or children after their departure from this world. God defines the operation of the mantle in a given person. In most of the cases, not all the aspects of the mantle will manifest on the receiver. The operation of the mantle is therefore selective. In many cases subsequent people who wear a mantle will know some events that happened in the life of the previous user of the mantle. The mantle carries a memory bank just like the human body, human spirit, and the human soul. God’s messengers may or may not have access to such store of information inside the spirit vehicle they are residing. There are always some similarities or mirror reflections in the life of the current user of the mantle as compared to the previous user of the mantle. The revelation of comparing the lives of John the Baptist and that of Prophet Elijah constitute a perfect example. Comparing the life of Jesus and his disciples is another example. A very good example is to compare the life of Jesus and his journey on earth to that of Moses in the wilderness of which both of them were shepherds. Jesus is more of a spiritual shepherd while Moses was primarily a physical shepherd. Jesus leads us on a spiritual journey to God while Moses led the children of Israel on a physical journey to the Promise Land.

To complicate this matter more is to look at the lives of the elects. These are special souls God created for special assignments on earth. Some of them could have served God in spirit dimension before being allowed to come on earth in a body. They might have served the Lord as ministering Spirits in Spirit dimension of God. When they were ready to come on earth, God gave them a spirit body constituting an already made mantle used by another messenger. Although their souls are unique to them, but their spirits are not. Their spirits are vehicle of transportation and other functions. The non-elects have regular human spirit without a mantle. People can receive the Holy Spirit without a mantle. All those who received the mantles are called to the kingdom ministry to serve God for special assignments. Every body has an assignment; some are designed for higher level of special assignments. The elects therefore have possible access to the knowledge of their past missions for God, and the memory of the mantle they are given. God can also send pre-existing souls to earth for special assignments. These messengers are called the elect because of their high caliber special assignments for God similar to the two witnesses in the Book of Revelation.

Active Interactions of Human Soul

There is a complexity of interactions between the soul, the human spirit, and the human body. This is an over simplification of human existence which is more complex. All these three components of human existence are all alive while interacting with each other. For example, the Holy Spirit receives communication from the Spirit realm of God. The Holy Spirit communicates that message to the human spirit, and the human spirit in turn passes the information to human soul leading to human perception in cognitive awareness. If a person has completely surrendered his soul to God, the Holy Spirit can bypass the human spirit and communicates the human soul spirit body directly. Similarly, the Holy Spirit can communicate the human spirit without the awareness of the human soul’s consciousness in the brain. Subliminal messages can be passed on to human spirit coming through the physical windows (eye, ear, or nose gates) of human souls without cognitive recognition. This is part of the principles of hypnosis and advertisements. However the demonic spirit can never enter human soul except when given permission by the opening of the window of human soul. Now, people may not know that they are opening the windows of their soul (heart) in wrong places, and closing it in the right places. Some Christians will close the windows of their soul during church services, and open the window to be seduced by financial scammers. Spirit attachment to outside locations of human spirit can take place without permission. This is why Jesus asked us to remain in constant prayer to fight off the enemy.

There is a visible and an invisible component of human soul. The invisible component of human soul comes from God. This is the real human being. The visible component of human soul is inside the human body. When the invisible enters the visible human body at birth, the invisible attaches to the visible component of human body. At such time, the human spirit enters the fetus. Nobody knows the time this takes place in the womb of a pregnant woman except God. When death occurs, the invisible part of the human soul that attaches to the physical soul component in the body with a silver cord breaks off. This death process frees the human soul encased inside the human spirit to leave the dying physical body. In most cases, the invisible component of the human soul leaves before the completion of the physical death of the body. The human body cannot die with the soul trapped inside. If this happens, the spirit will fire up the body, and the body will come back alive again. The human spirit is the one that carries the energy of human life and existence. Without the human spirit to give life to the body, the body dies.

Guard Your Soul with the Holy Spirit

From time to time, the human soul can come out of human body and travel into the invisible world using the human spirit as the locomotive vehicle. Human soul travels in a special class encased inside human spirit like riding on a life airplane. Human soul cannot travel by itself because he does not know the direction in the invisible world of the universe. He also lacks the functioning tools of the spirit like the propellant energy of movement. How many human brains know the direction to Heaven? None! With all our astronomic and astro-physics knowledge, we still do not know the direction to Heaven. But, our invisible pilot; the Holy Spirit knows. As the human spirit travels, it is accompanied and protected by the Holy Spirit. The visible part inside the brain can malfunction while the invisible part is functioning well.

When a blind man had a near death experience, despite he was physically blind, but he was able to see in the spirit realm. This happens because even though his physical eyes were malfunctioning, his spirit eyes were functioning okay. While out of his body, with his spirit eyes, he was able to see things in the physical his physical eyes were unable to see. When he came back into his body, the blind man was describing to nurses and doctors what he saw during his out of body experience he could otherwise not see with his physical eyes. The nurses and doctors were amazed!

The Holy Spirit is the guardian of our soul while in the physical and the invisible world. He performs many functions to keep the soul alive. He is a comforter. Those people in the New Age who refuse to acknowledge the power of the Holy Spirit will continue to suffer from depression, anxiety and fear. They will never have peace! If they accept and acknowledge the functioning power of the Holy Spirit, he will flood their soul with love, peace, joy and serenity. The greatest sin of the New Age people is to give God’s glory to creations. Jesus, please help these blasphemers! God is angry with anybody who dared to share his glory with another. He is a jealous God, who refuses to share his glory with idols! Anybody who worships creation is worshipping idols!

Some people have traveled unguarded by the Holy Spirit and ended up dying in their sleep because they become preys to spirit predators. They may encounter some vicious spirit entities who seized their souls while unguarded by the Holy Spirit. You do not want to go into the spirit realm unprotected by the Holy Spirit. Do so at your own risk! This is the primary reason why Yoga and hypnosis are both dangerous exercises. When the human spirit encounters hostile spirit entities in the spirit realm, the Holy Spirit serves as the soul protector. No spirit entities have ever snatched the human soul from the protective hand of the Holy Spirit while awake or while in a sleep. If necessary, the Holy Spirit can call for air strikes, warrior angels will respond immediately, and the legion of demons will disappear. Just like we have sea pirates, the same way there are spirit pirates. When they capture a human soul, they will turn the soul to be their slave in the spirit realm. They therefore capture human soul for demonic activities. This is part of the evil of witchcraft. Consequently, it is very important for Christians to surrender themselves to the Holy Spirit and let him lead the way and guard their souls. If you have ever fallen in love, you know how to open the window of your soul to your lover, and you can do the same with the Holy Spirit.

A Love Affair as a Soul Exchange

When we fall in emotional love with somebody, we exchange soul parts. A part of a man’s soul breaks off to tie with a part of the woman’s soul and vice versa. Once we exchange soul components, the feeling of love is said to be mutual. At that moment the marriage of the soul has taken place. If the marriage did not take part inside human soul with each person opening his or her soul windows, the marriage will not last. The exchange of wedding rings on the wedding day is the symbolism of the exchange of soul components. Jesus himself said, when a man and a woman unite in marriage, they become one in Christ (St. Matthew 19:5). So, a part of her enters into his soul to keep, and a part of him enters into her soul to keep. This completes the soul ties in a marriage relationship. Soul exchange usually happens prior to the wedding day. Physical intimacy is a physical expression of soul exchange between two lovers. Couples can love each other so much that they can be distance apart and can sense danger around their spouses, or even have conversations in the spirit. There have been reports where a wife or husband traveled in the spirit to see what the spouse was doing while the bodies physically remained apart. This type of movement of human spirit in the spirit realm is called parallel travel in out of body experience compared to longitudinal travel into the presence of God carried by the Holy Spirit called ascension.

A marriage is more than the exchange of vows and rings; it is an exchange of souls as well. However, there is a danger if one person opens and the other refuses to open his or her soul window in mutual exchange. For example if she loves him more than he cares while they are still dating, she will exchange a larger part of her soul component to express her passion for him. By nature, women are very vulnerable in this exchange. When we exchange soul components, we receive each other’s soul by opening the windows of our souls to let the other one inside us. When this happens, the woman may be in danger of her heart being broken because he can get up and leave because his soul is not fully committed to the relationship. She is therefore advised to pull back and give him chance to commit his soul before she goes any farther in the relationship. Otherwise, her heart is going to be broken as he walks away.

The first person that talked about soul transfer was Jesus Christ when he said, " At that day, you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you " (St. John 14:20). This is a perfect illustration of soul ties as Jesus described it in the Spirit realm. The same thing happens in emotional realm when we fall in love and receive the other person’s soul component. Jesus does not receive all of human spirit; he does not need to. He only receives a purified component of human soul to reside inside him. The human spirit carries a lot of junk attached to it. Jesus does not need all that junk in him. The purified human soul minus the devil’s contamination is that part that exist in Jesus to represent each individual person. In another scripture, Jesus said those who are married become one in him, confirming two united souls residing inside Jesus.

The way we treat the person we love is based on how we treat the soul component of the person we receive in our heart. If we really love the person, we will cherish the new soul we receive while nurturing it. We then start to learn not only to intensely love the other person, but also to embrace the person’s individuality including their faults. Along the way, we may stop caring for the person, we then stop nurturing the other person’s soul within us as we start falling out of love. The first sign of danger in a relationship is "the stop caring behavior" if any of the spouse may be distracted by another person.

One of the most interesting behaviors about soul component is what happens when people break up, in a romantic relationship. The other person keeps the soul component he received from her, and may sometimes use it as a tool for manipulation. This can go either way with both male and female manipulating each other’s partner after a break up. When people break up, a person may feel empty because they have lost a part of their soul to the other person. The lost part does not make us feel inadequate because Christ is the only one who can complete us. If you feel empty after the death of a loved one or after your lover left, accept Jesus into you heart, or enlarge him and the Holy Spirit within you, and he will fill you up replacing the lost part of you. Without Jesus, you can never be whole again. This is what many people are always searching for, the lost part of their soul. We therefore search for lovers to complete us. But it never works because man is imperfect. If we place the love of any human being above that of Jesus, we will suffer greatly. Continuous suffering after divorce is due to some people placing their ex-lover above the nurturing of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, Christians will suffer greatly after emotional trauma until they use Jesus to replace their loss, or apply Jesus to the bleeding heart. Jesus is a soul healer! Therefore, it is unnecessary to go after an ex-lover in a ritual to untie the soul ties of a previous relationship. Once you enter the presence of Jesus in the Spirit ascension, he breaks off all these other unhealthy soul ties, and removes the emotional pain associated with the past painful experiences. A married person dealing with an ex-lover is cruising in dangerous waters because there is still an open door of the soul allowing physical intimacy that can happen spontaneously. Such a person still dealing or communicating with ex-lover is sailing in dangerous waters filled with sharks.

The greatest fight is never about material things in a divorce, as it is about being compensated for the soul component lost to the other person when they were in love. If either the husband or wife has an extramarital affair, the fight is usually not about the act or betrayal even though these can be part of it. The greatest fight is about the strange soul your partner receives from the other person during intimacy. Now, you have to deal with your spouse’s soul component wondering what to do with it, whether to love, forgive, or kill it. Then you still have to deal with the soul component of the other woman especially the flash backs during intimate moment with your husband. Women tend to handle this better than men due to cultural reasons. Men do not handle this romantic assault well. A husband may respond to his wife’s extramarital affair as a form of a spiritual assault bruising his ego inside his soul. In some situations, wife’s affairs may lead to violence because the man feels degraded by another man.

Handling marital challenges such as extra-marital affairs is one of the reasons for Christians to walk in the Spirit of God. This is not to condone extra-marital affairs that may be inevitable in some relationships. But the ability to handle such a challenge in a marriage depends on both partner’s spiritual walk with the Lord. Every affair should not end in a divorce regardless to who was involved. People who resort to physical violence in response to an affair show lack of maturity. If you really love a person who cheated on you, the worst thing your heart wants to do is to destroy your spouse. When true loves hurts, but can also forgive. When selfish love hurts, also wants to destroy. All humans are cheaters before God. That’s why we are called the adulterous generation. Did God destroy us when we are caught in spiritual affairs with other gods? If you develop an insatiable desire to punish your spouse after an affair, you do not truly love your spouse. Wickedness does not define love, but selfishness. True love will absorb the shock of extramarital affairs, heal the wounds, and put the house back together again. Human selfishness leads to hate, anger, and sometimes violence after an extramarital affair come to light.

There was a story where the wife of a successful businessman confessed to an affair before the minister during a counseling session. The pastor was shocked what the husband did in response to the wife’s confession. The wife believed it was safer for her to confess the affairs during the counseling session in order to keep her marriage. At the same time, she wanted to be protected from a husband that may respond with physical violence. She believed the pastor would intervene. After she made the confession with tearful eyes, the husband got up from the sofa, went before his wife and slowly pulled her up hugging and kissing her. With tears down his cheeks, he was asking for her forgiveness. He told her it was his fault for neglecting her because he had been working too hard. The husband was asking his wife for forgiveness and telling her it was not her fault that he carried the entire guilt and responsibility for her affairs. The pastor himself started to weep telling the couple that he had never seen such a display of love, ever in his life. Then, the pastor turned to the wife and said, "If you ever leave you husband, you will never find true love like this again!"

Selfishness of Human Soul

The worst thing a Christian can do is to spend too much time in the flesh stirring the pot of human soul. This is how many Christian leaders go astray by spending too much time in the flesh. As long as you spend endless time in the flesh, compared to spending time in the Spirit of God as Jesus commanded us, the lust of the flesh will govern your desires. Whatever you feed inside human soul will grow, and whatever you starve will die. Inside the human soul resides all kinds of selfishness, evil, arrogance, pride, hate prejudice, and all other behavior very offensive to God. This was not the way God created man. But the soul contamination of the devil inside every human being in the Garden of Eden makes us vulnerable to the deception of the devil.

Human flesh is designed to serve the desires of the human soul. The human flesh and soul are each different, and can operate from different planes, but they are enablers and co-conspirators in crime. Human soul wants to feel good because it uses the flesh to feel good. Fleshly desires are from inside human soul. The human soul is the most selfish part of human existence, caring only for itself. When the soul wants to feel good, it will drive the flesh to pleasure itself. By so doing, the soul will derive satisfaction when the flesh is pleased through sensory stimulation. But the soul never have enough pleasure driving people to endless desires to please the flesh, even to the point of damaging the physical body. Drug addiction is a typical example of the soul wanting to be pleasured by binging in the flesh at the expense of damaging the physical body. The soul desires can drive the flesh as the flesh can drive the soul desires as allowed by the human spirit. As long as the body continues to respond to the desires of the soul, the body becomes a slave to soul desires. This is how people become addicted to obsessive behaviors. Take the case of an anorexic person dying of malnutrition and looking like a bag of bones. The soul is so selfish and does not care what happens to the physical body. Even as the body begins to break down, the soul is still insisting on being satisfied even to the point of death of the physical body. In the quest for obsessive behavior, the soul can actually kill the physical body if not placed under check. Brain damage begins to occur in anybody when the body becomes a slave to the illicit desires of the human soul. Consequently, the human soul therefore captures and enslaves the human body, even to the point of death.

All these fleshly desires directed by the soul can be abolished as soon as we allow the Holy Spirit to enlarge in us. When the Holy Spirit is embraced to filled us up, he wrapped our soul in his Spirit body. This is what Jesus meant when he said we should abide in him and we should worship the Father in Spirit. Many of us Christians are used to worshipping God in the flesh and we wonder why nothing is happening. It is like a person standing in front of his house in St. Louis and calling out to his son in Chicago. How can he hear him? Jesus said, " Abide in me " (St. John 15:7) meaning, instead of abiding in the flesh, let the Holy Spirit wrap himself around your soul. Instead of constantly willing to do the desires of the flesh, you will be led to do the desires of the Spirit of God. Such a point in your spiritual walk is a point of total surrender to the Lord. At this point, the Holy Spirit will be your constant reminder. He will prepare you for events to come, and comfort you even while in the midst of a storm. Human soul encased inside the Holy Spirit offers ALL the solutions to our life problems. You will have a direct access to the radio frequency of Heaven while the voice of the devil will be blotted out. Those who live in the flesh hear the louder voice of the devil compared to those who live in the Spirit hear the louder voice of Jesus.

The best way to keep preachers or those working in the ministry away from sin is for them to walk more in the Spirit of God than in the flesh. The more time they spend in the Spirit of God, the less they are under the grip of the soul desires expressed through the flesh. Reading the Bible during daily devotion, meditation on the word of God, and spending some quality time with God in prayer and fasting will keep us in the Spirit and away from the lust of the fleshly desires of the soul. Allow the Holy Spirit to be the guardian of your soul. Jesus said, " That which is born of the Spirit is spirit and that which is born of the flesh is flesh " (St. John 3:6). We cannot merge the Spirit of God and soul desires together because they are very contradictory and separate. The flesh wants to satisfy the desires of the soul energized by human spirit while the Holy Spirit in us wants to satisfy the desires of God. Oil and water cannot mix.

Soul Memory Storage and Transfer

The way the human spirit carries and retains the memory of life events from human soul is the same way the human flesh carries the memory of some life events. Evidence from medical science indicated when an organ was transplanted from one person to another; the physical organ appeared to carry memory from the donor that would eventually influence the behavior of the recipient. Dr. Danny Penman published an article online titled, Can We Really Transplant a Human Soul , in April 9, 2008. In that article he cited a series of incidents when organ was transplanted to another patient and the subsequent event that took place of which originated from the donor. In one case, he discussed Sonny Graham, a 69-year-old man living in Georgia, who shot himself without any history of depression. However, before the incident, he had received a heart transplant from a man who committed suicide the same way. When the recipient met the wife of the donor, he instantly fell in love with her, and they got married. Later, Graham committed suicide the same way the woman’s previous husband committed suicide.

This situation and many others discussed in this article is nothing new. From the Christian point, Bible supports the understanding that we can transfer soul from one person to another in intimate encounter especially between husband and wife as discussed previously. In case of organ transplantation, it is not the flesh. We eat animal organs all the time, as we do not act like animals. Some people even eat raw fish and they do not feel like they want to go swimming. When a live human organ is transplanted, it carries both the life form and the memory of the donor. If the organ dies, the memory dies. The recipient of the organ can access the memory of the donor just like people can access the memory of the human spirit they are encased. As discussed previously, the real human being is the soul not the spirit. The human spirit is a vehicle and a house that encased the soul which another person could have previous used just like the case of John the Baptist and Elijah.

Many people got very confused about soul-to-soul interaction because they believe in spontaneous reincarnation. There is nothing called spontaneous reincarnation as depicted by the New Age; otherwise human existence will be out of control. The New Age people are very confused about the truth. Many celebrities who are in the New Age movement do not have inner joy or peace. Why? They do not have Jesus. If they have Jesus, they do not embrace the Holy Spirit. Sadly many of them suffer from spontaneous depression, mood swings, and lack of joy, and peace is alien to them. All the money, the awards, and possessions failed to deliver eternal joy and peace which can ONLY be attained from Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.

Jesus Retains the Purest Bloodline

God reserves the right to send his messengers to this world for certain missions to be accomplished. All of them are given mantles by God for the purpose of their mission. Inside the mantle is the spirit that accompanies the person to this world. However, the soul that comes inside that spirit is a very unique human being as I mentioned earlier. Now, God also has the right to send anybody to this earth as he sent Jesus. For most people, their souls are unique, their human spirit may not be. In a similar manner, the Holy Spirit is not unique to any individual person. The Holy Spirit is the Eternal Spirit of God that comes to represent God in us. He only speaks the voice of God by speaking to human spirit, not to human soul, in a spirit-to-spirit communication. The human spirit will then relay the information to soul component of human spirit. The awareness of the human soul relates the information to human cognition in human brain of the flesh component. As a rule the Holy Spirit does not communicates the human physical brain, or human cognition in the physical realm. The mystery of God is hidden inside the Holy Spirit as Jesus taught us. This is how we perceive the messages from God. There is a complexity to this relay of information between the Holy Spirit and the human soul through the human spirit.

Very importantly, it is vital to know that man has two soul components; the invisible spirit attached, and the visible in human physical body. The Holy Spirit can communicate directly to the spirit component of human soul, but can never communicate with the cognitive component of human soul inside human body. Man cognitive process can never decipher the mystery of God without the help of the Holy Spirit. The wisdom of God comes primarily from the Holy Spirit. This is separate from human knowledge. Many preachers who are preaching through human cognition may be misleading people compared to preachers preaching directly from the heart of the Holy Spirit. The human soul component in the brain, and the Holy Spirit are not on the same frequency wavelength of communication. Besides, the human soul in the flesh was infected with the demon’s virus. Consequently, the Holy Spirit communicates the human spirit. And the human spirit relays information to human soul. God made human spirit in perfection. The devil polluted the physical soul component in the blood by a demonic virus. The curse of the human soul comes from the bloodline called the generational curse. If the human bloodline is removed man is born in perfection. This was exactly the way Jesus was born without the biological bloodline of a sinful man. If Jesus were born through the human blood, he would not be a perfect Lamb of God. Human blood is impure to purify the mercy seat in Heaven; only the blood of Jesus will suffice. The blood of God the Father runs in Jesus veins. Praise God! That was why he was a perfect sacrifice for the sins of the world.

Can the soul survive by itself without the human spirit? The answer is "No." If the soul can survive by itself, why do we need the human spirit? As the physical body cannot survive without the human spirit, same way the soul cannot survive without the human spirit either. Both the soul and the human spirit are intimately connected from the beginning. Jesus answered that question to his disciples when he said, " Without me, you can do nothing " (St. John 15:5). Jesus was saying that without his Spirit, his disciples could not do anything. The human soul cannot function effectively without the human spirit who supplies the spirit nutrition including the energy to survive. The human spirit keeps both the human body and soul alive. However, the Holy Spirit keeps us alive in Christ. When people die, they are not unconscious. They are alive in Jesus. Death to those who believe in Jesus is like undressing of the human body from the human soul. The human spirit being accompanied by the Holy Spirit takes the human soul home to God in glorious jubilation. An unbeliever in Christ on the other hand faces great anxiety and torment from the beginning of death process to crossing over to Hades where the great soul agony begins. There is staggering difference between the soul operation of a believer and a non-believer. A believer in Christ operates from both the human spirit and the Holy Spirit. A non-believer operates only from the human spirit and he is unable to please God. You can only please God in the Spirit of the holiness of God. In Heaven, the human soul can exist by itself because the Spirit of God will fully replace the human spirit and all its functions. They need no light in Heaven because the Son of God is the light. " There shall be no light there. They need no lamp nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light " (Rev. 22:5).

The Inner Man and the Human Soul

In many places in the Bible there are references to the inner man. Some people confuse the inner man with the human spirit. The human spirit as described above, is the house the soul lives inside. The inner man is the same thing as the human soul which people refer to as the human heart. There is no inner existence of every human being than the human soul. The human spirit clothes the human soul. On accepting and surrendering to God, the Holy Spirit encloses the human soul inside the human spirit. This was why Paul said, " Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outer man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day " (II Corinthians 4:16).

St. Paul was saying that the physical body would eventually decay and die. But the inner man who is the human soul will continue to be renewed day by day through the power, manifestations, and the anointing of the Holy Spirit. The human body is mortal, but both the human spirit and the soul are immortal. While the inner man is the human soul, the outer man is the human flesh. In some situations, people have referred to the outer man as the human spirit which encases the human soul. The inner man can only refer to one entity of our existence; the human soul. The outer man may reference either the human spirit, or the human body. The concept of the inner man is made clearer by Jesus when he said, " But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God " (St. John 3:21). Jesus was telling the people that he was dwelling in the Spirit of God the Father while doing the work that the Father sent him. Similarly Jesus told his disciples, " Abide in me " (St. John 15:4). Jesus was not talking about the existence of human spirit inside him because he knows the nature of men. He was asking the human soul of believers to reside in him minus the demonic component. He welcomes only the part that the Holy Spirit has purified. This is another way to purify the human soul through residence inside Jesus.

Each person should decide where he or she is dragging the soul after death. Either live with God by accepting Jesus, or choose to live with the devil joining hands with his cronies to receive eternal damnation and agonizing pain. Jesus is God’s plan of salvation. Make your choice! Do not allow your ignorance to lead you to making regrettable error of life. Accept Jesus and your eternal salvation is guaranteed. Refuse him, and your eternal damnation is guaranteed! You have to make a choice! This life is not forever!

Stop Fearing the Devil! He is not As Powerful as God

Sadly today, many preachers love to preach about the power of the devil. This sermon has been over-preached, some people started to fear the devil. In our present entertainment culture, the devil is being worshipped, glamorized and glorified. The Devil’s glamour is being accentuated with many movies about vampires, music dedicated to the devil and occult. We wonder why our children are not listening to us anymore. One youth pastor one time dismissed the impact of demonic influences in video games. When the issue was brought to my attention, I responded that such a youth teacher should not be teaching children inside the church. She was yet to learn about the invisible world of God. Many people walk in the flesh. They refused to walk in the Spirit of God because of the restrictions the Holy Spirit may place on their lives. They therefore respond to spiritual problems with human knowledge. One of the greatest problem we are experiencing in the church today is the lack of awareness of the enormous spiritual problems haunting both children and adults within Christianity. Many are unable to explain the supernatural world of God. If we are willing to preach so much about the devil, why are we not preaching more about the functioning power of the Holy Spirit? Some of the Christian preachers know how to scare people about the power of the devil while dismissing the working hand of the Holy Spirit. No wonder many people are worshipping the devil in the entertainment industry because we have given them the impression that the devil is more powerful than God. Although this is not the impression they wanted to teach to people, but talking only about the power of the devil is enough to scare people after watching some of those crazy vampire movies. We should be teaching people that if the devil appears to be powerful, God is more powerful as manifested by the Holy Spirit. One Chicago pastor wrote a book about the serpent in the Garden of Eden. He forgot that God was the first visitor to both Adam and Eve before the devil showed his ugly face, and deceived Eve.

The way to experience the power of the Holy Spirit is to allow the Holy Spirit to wrap his hands around our soul. Many people preaching the devil themselves do not walk in the Spirit of God despite they are Christian preachers. Jesus never preached the devil. He made references to the devil. He even said he had nothing in common with the ruler of this world while referring to the devil. Why then do we spend so much time preaching about the devil to the exclusion of the mighty power of the Holy Spirit? In this way we leave many Christians scared and confused! Even in some Christian denominations, they are preaching that the Holy Spirit manifestations are no longer functional today. How ignorant and stupid? Jesus said, " I will never leave you nor forsake you" (Hebrew 13:5). "I will send you another comforter " (St. John 14:16). So, what happened to the comforter that was supposed to abide with us forever? Did he die or disappeared? The most important message a pastor can preach to his members is not the prosperity gospel that "God wants to bless you" nonsense. God blessed everybody on earth in different ways. We do not have to send a large sum of money to a preacher to receive our blessings. Our actions in walking closer to the Lord will ignite a breakthrough for the Gates of Heaven to open up and deliver what has been allocated to us from the foundation of this world. The most important gospel is the power of walking in the Spirit of God closer to Jesus leading to wearing his garment. Once we have entered into this presence in the spirit realm, ALL problems are solved because the Holy Spirit becomes the guardian of our souls while we are inside Jesus. The Holy Spirit leads our human soul through the spirit to serve God’s purpose. The way a shepherd carries a lamb is the same way Jesus carries every believer in him.

Learn to Guard the Gates of Your Soul

Opening and closing the gates of our soul are based on what appeals to us in the physical world. The deceptions of the devil using physical things of the world require us to be on guard all the time. The devil deceived Eve in the Garden of Eden this way. Take for example falling in love. Many people become attracted to the opposite sex due to physical attraction, money, power or fame. We are easily seduced by these physical things and never learn to know the real person living inside the body. Bad relationship did not start by accident, but because we fail to know the real person who is the soul that lives inside that spirit encased in that body. We must therefore be very careful where we open the window of our soul allowing ourselves to be seduced by things, or evil spirits leading eventually to enslavement and sometimes to tragedies. Many people who fall in love blindly also crash blindly.

The best way to guard the window of your soul is to allow the Holy Spirit to enshroud your soul within your human spirit. Once you go through the process of hearing, receiving, accepting, believing, and living the word of God, it becomes easier to go through a process of surrender to the Lord. The process of surrendering to the Holy Spirit will ignite the process of spiritual ascension. At the peak of spiritual ascension, we not only allow the Holy Spirit to direct our paths, but also have cultivated an intimate relationship with Christ. The Holy Spirit continues to remain the guardian of our soul. This does not mean we are perfect, but the Holy Spirit will help to fight off demonic seductions, and alerts us of danger just like a computer anti virus. Spiritual alarm will go off each time we encounter a spiritual seduction. Today, many people do not have an idea how they are being seduced by demonic influences in music and entertainment, especially in horror movies.

One time, I was working with a lady who told me she was a white witch. She also told me a white witch could turn to a black witch any time. She asked if she could combine power with me. A spiritual alarm went off in my head. I responded with one word, "No!" I have never known a place where the spirit of the devil and that of the Holy Spirit work together as a team. Evidently, she had sensed the Spirit of God in me. She was not interested in the Holy Spirit, she just wanted to tap into the power of God through me. I refused and would not allow this. This is part of the agenda of the New Age movement. They want to tap into and use the power of God without giving God the credit. Instead, they want to give God’s credit to creations. Giving God’s credit to creation is like sticking fingers of insult directly in the eyes of God. How blasphemous? I have seen some situations when witches have seduced some pastors and tapping into their power and using it for demonic influences in a form of idolatry. It does not matter how attractive she may be, she may be carrying the omen of the devil. Watch out pastors! This was what happened when Balaam was asked to go and curse the children of Israel. The king wanted to tap into the power God gave Balaam, and use it to do evil things (Number 22:1-35).

Similarly, an evildoer can physically seduce a spiritually powerful person, and use his body for her pleasure while draining his spiritual power to do evil. While the seduction is taking place, the spiritual power of the preacher starts to diminish. Later when the woman gets through with him, there will be nothing left in a man after she gets through draining him. The preacher who thinks he was enjoying such intimate pleasure later find out that he has been drained of his energy. He becomes powerless because he allows the evil person to suck the power out of him. This is the principle of female demonic seduction many preachers are yet to learn in the Western World. Because she is the most attractive woman you have ever seen does not mean she comes with good intentions. It does not matter how good she looks in front and behind shaking like a piece of jell-o. Watch out preachers! The devil sometimes puts on one of the most beautiful outfits God ever created. Please notice the danger sign! The same beautiful chamber she uses to seduce and please her man, she will use the same thing to snatch you, snap you into two, and destroy your ministry, blaming you later. She will bring you down to shame and your entire building will collapse into rubbles. Some men are now doing the same thing against women in power and those that are rich. These are young men who act like vultures, using the older women’s vulnerable needs for passion to seduce them into submission. She would therefore exchange the loss of her dignity for the romantic love that never lasted with a younger man. He comes in, connects with her soul, feed like a wild animal, tear up the house, and walk away leaving her broken hearted. This is why Jesus asks us to watch and pray because ambush hides the evil one, especially the good-looking ones carrying the intentions of the devil.

Guard your Soul in Preparation for Sunday Service

One of the most important thing a pastor can do starting Saturday, or beginning from Friday is to start soul cleansing in preparation for Sunday service. If a pastor is not spiritually prepared for service, he will be ineffective in reaching the people. We all spend more time in the flesh than we should. We should be spending more time in the Spirit of God. Going from the physical realm into spiritual realm of God is not as difficult as coming down from the Spirit realm of God because of the grip of the Holy Spirit. An uninformed preacher will go into worship in physical realm and makes a fool of himself while he is driven not by the Holy Spirit, but by his own emotions. As a worship leader, the pastor has to establish at atmosphere to allow the Holy Spirit to flourish in the house of God. This is one of the most important things the pastor has to do every Sunday. Without establishing such an atmosphere for the Holy Spirit, the service is a waste of time. Members will therefore not be inspired to attend church services on Sundays. The preacher must therefore be able to tune to the members and use their responses as a gauge of his performance. Pastors who refuse to walk in the Spirit of God may be doing a lot of damage to the spiritual life of his members.

Some church members will come with demonic spirits hanging on the outside of their human spirits. Others may come with perverted spirits hanging around them. Worship service will not thrive if these demons are not rebuked and banned from the location of service. They will hinder the spiritual atmosphere and prevent the establishment of worship in the Spirit of God. Bringing Heaven down during worship is one of the essentials of Christian worship. Like in the Old Testament, the Lord holds the ministers responsible for establishing an atmosphere conducive to worship in the Spirit of God. That was why God instructed Moses to prepare the children of Israel to meet him on top of the mountain. God gave Moses specific instructions about purification (Exodus 19:10-15). The Holy Spirit refuses to function in an atmosphere of chaos, fighting, pride and arrogance, and other negative behaviors, mostly driven by human flesh. A preacher who places himself as the center of worship will quench the Holy Spirit, chase away church members who remained uninspired, while the Holy Spirit steps back. No human being is in charge of the church except Jesus through the Holy Spirit. For a service to flourish in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit must be allowed to bring in the presence of God. A pastor who does not know how to do this should learn or not be leading church services.

A pastor must enter the sanctuary before anybody enters, or before service to cast out all demonic spirits from the house of God. He must ban any bad spirit from entering the sanctuary with worshippers. He must position through prayer request Cherubim with the flaming sword of fire to stand at all the doors where people enter for worship. Subsequently, he will order the ministering Spirits to take position and request worshipping angels and the Holy Spirit to come and worship with the congregation. A minister must prepare himself both spiritually and physically according to Psalm 24 for the worship of God. The worst thing a pastor can do is to come into the sanctuary of God with anger, pride, or immediately following an intimate encounter with a woman, drinking, or on drugs. This type of attitude and physical conditions will destroy the atmosphere of spiritual worship. Most of the worshippers are very tuned to the spirit condition of their pastor. If he is not in the Spirit realm of God, the members can easily sense the lack of the presence of God during service. Such members will not be inspired but be disenchanted leaving the church with empty pews.

Guarding the Outside Windows of Your Soul

The same way we guard the inside gateway of our soul, the same way we guard the outside windows of our soul or spirit. The human spirit encased the human soul. Outside the human spirits are seats like a bus with seats outside as mentioned before. Negative human spirits including demons can hang to a person taking position outside the bus. Through these seats they can easily gain access to human soul component of his spirit thereby influencing human mind. This is an area many people including Christians do not understand because they do not know how to walk in the Spirit of God. These outside seats of human spirit are the original location of the Holy Spirit because he became indwelling. If you are already indwelling with the Holy Spirit, bad or perverted human spirits can still hang on to you, taking positions at these outside locations and do a lot of havocs in your life.

Take the case of a married man whose wife continues to have an affair despite the husband’s warning and asking her to stop. The husband called the Christian counseling program telling the counselors he is a very good Christian who loved his four children despite his wife’s continuous affair. The husband started to weep on the telephone and the Christian television counselors were very sympathetic to him. When the call was about to end, one of the counselors asked the man about his relationship with his parents. What he said was a bomb that threw more meaning into what was happening with his wife. The caller told the story of how he witnesses another man coming to the house while his father was at work and had sex with his mother. He said he would pretend to sleep as the mother’s affair went on with her lover. That explained what was happening between the caller and his wife. Negative, perverted, or immoral human spirit (not demon) can travel through the bloodline (generational curse) and also attached to the human spirit by sitting in the outside location gaining access to human soul. The husband inadvertently received the receptive spirit of adultery from his father because he witnessed the affairs of his mother. That spirit of adultery hanged on to him outside his human spirit. When the adulterous spirit in the wife recognizes the receptive spirit in her husband, it became easier for the wife to start and continued her affair. Sadly to say, the husband was indirectly responsible for the continuing affair of the wife because he carried the spirit of affair from his mother and that of receptive affair from his father. He therefore found himself stuck and unable to act because the battle was warfare within his own spirit causing pain within his soul. The wife was only acting out in the physical the spirits that the husband had accepted and was nurturing when he himself was not even having an affair. Similarly, a daughter who never drank in her life became attracted to an alcoholic man because she previously lived in a house where her father was an alcoholic. She was attracted to an alcoholic man because she carried the receptive spirit of alcoholics which could easily be recognized as a magnet to an alcoholic man. In the same way, a young man lived with a drug-addicted mother. He hated to see his mother drinking herself crazy and using drug till she passed out. As soon as he grew up, he started doing exactly the same thing his mother was doing despite he resented his mother for her drug binge. The spirit that we allow to hang around us is the spirit that influences our soul desires, our behavior, and the ones we accept from others. The husband was not weeping, not so much because his wife was having affairs. How many husband weep when they find out their wives were having affair? The husband was weeping because he was under the oppressive spirit of adultery, and he felt stuck.

The explanation for these spirits interaction is very complex, but the treatment and the preventions are much easier to explain and attain. Although we love our parents, we find it very difficult not to embrace the perverted human spirit that drives them. So many people do not know how to love a person and rebuke the spirit of perversion that is driving them. Inadvertently, we ended up opening the window of our hearts to love our parents at the same time embrace the spirit of perversion that plagued them. Sometimes we may not engage in such a behavior, but a person with whom we have intimate relationship can easily be magnetized to that spirit hanging around us. The point being, many of what we play out in the physical already took place in the spirit realm. The spirit attractions that go both ways, and the intercourse already took place in the spirit realm before being played out in the physical. Anytime a person carries a perverted spirit attachment from family or friends, the carrier becomes a target of spirit predators who will take advantage of such receptive spirit. The same way perverted human spirit from our parents can hang to our spirit body, the same way perverted spirit from friends and even strangers can hang to our human spirit body and do havocs. Sustained addictive behavior is not due to lack of human control, as we want to believe. Addictive behavior is sustained because of the spirit of addiction that continues to ignite fire of desire in an individual person. This is why it was so easy for a person to be instantly delivered from drug addiction following the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Once we rebuke and chase addictive spirit away, the victim is set free.

There are seven ways to prevent spirit attachment from influencing our behavior. First, believe that your soul is a different component from your spirit and you have control over your mind. You can instruct your human spirit. What you do not believe can victimize you. Many have been victimized by events in the spirit because they do not believe in the spirit world while they are being subjected to its manipulations. Second, do not allow negative spirit to find refuge around you. If either of your parents had been in intimate relationship with a perverted spirit of drug, alcohol, hate anger, adultery, you MUST rebuke those spirits so they would not build a dwelling place around you. If you do not rebuke them, they will hang around you and even influence the behavior of your spouse and loved ones, including that of your children. This is very critical after your parents have died. The perverted spirits will drop off from them and be attached to any of the children that may be receptive. Third, you must pray daily to detach any negative spirits from you, your spouse and your children. Your house should not create an open door for either demons or negative spirits. Get objects, movies, music, or entertainment that can open the doorway to negative spirits out of your house. Never place the ashes of any loved ones in your house. Get them out! Fourth, after daily prayer to break off negative spirits, pray to position ministering Spirits to be attached to those outside locations. If you constantly pray and believe in the power of prayer, negative spirits will not find a refuge around you, or your dwelling place, and angels will encamp around you for protection. Fifth, place Holy arts like crosses in front of your house, living room, and family room. Do not place objects or arts from another country in your house or as a necklace that might have been used in the shrine of idols. As soon as you feel any negative spirit entering your house immediately rebuke that spirit and chase him away from your house. Christ has given you that power to trample over scorpions, serpent, and over all powers of the enemy. Do not be afraid to command the negative spirit to leave. The best Psalm to read while chasing away demons and negative spirits is Psalm 91. Six, learn to walk in the Spirit most of the time and spend less time in the flesh. Read your Bible daily, mediate on the Word of God; pray as many times daily and fast when you can, at least once a week. Listen to more Christian music and less of secular music. The more you spend more time in the flesh the more you leave your human soul and spirit body unguarded. Seven, your best prevention is the sustaining protection when you enter into the presence of God. Once you gain access to the Holy of the Holiest, the Lord will protect you and your loved ones from negative spirits. Even if your spouse dared to cheat on you, the Lord will help you resolve the issue as the Spirit will direct you. At times, there may be a resolution of the issues of adultery as the offending spouse comes to repentance. Other times, the Lord may direct the victimized spouse to another person breaking of the marriage if the offending spouse refuses to change. Consequently after the marriage breakup, the negative spirit abides and continues to torment the offending spouse that refuses to repent. Negative spirit goes where a person is receptive to his demonic intentions.

Unguarded Soul Reveals the Demon Within

If a person refuses to allow the Holy Spirit to guard his soul, the behavior response to challenges in life reveals the control of the demon inside the human heart (soul). Jesus said, " From out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witnesses. These are the things that defile a man " (St. Matthew 15:19-20). People tend to forget about the virus of the demon impregnated inside everybody born of a woman. Jesus remains an exception because of his bloodline came from God the Father. Human refusal to let the Holy Spirit deactivate the demonic virus inside human soul leads to the manifestation of pathological behaviors seen even among Christians. As long as we are in the flesh, we are susceptible to the manipulation of the enemy if we allow him. People who are small-minded are the same ones who spend their valuable time trying to bad-mouth others. The way we treat others is the same value we place on ourselves. Small-minded people try to pull down tall buildings.

When a person’s heart (soul) is unguarded by the Holy Spirit, that person tends to respond to life challenges with very exaggerated human negative emotions. Sadly the devil loves to use these people as play-toys because the devil loves to ride on negative human emotions. After doing this for a while enmeshed in their sorrow over simple misfortune, they love to ride on negative emotions fed by negative energy. They may fight you if you tell them to learn to control negative reactions to their challenges. Like a gossipers who derive joy from delivering bad news about other people, these people ride on negative energy of the devil. The way a Christian handles challenges in life defines the person’s spiritual journey and closeness to Christ in the spirit. Studies have shown that Christians handle bad health news and surgery better than non-Christians without faith in Christ.

Overview: The Journey of Human Soul

The best way to keep you happy and fulfilled is to continue to think about positive things. Avoid continuous conversation with people who are very negative. Shorten the duration of conversations with them. They will drain positive energies from your soul. They will also create an omen of very negative energies around you thereby attracting negative spirits. Demons are not the only ones tormenting people. Human perverted spirits can do you as much havocs as the demonic spirits. Spend less time with people who thrive on negative energies. They always find faults with everything and everybody. They are poisons to your soul. If you give them chance, they will drain all your positive energies from your soul. These are the people you want to avoid in the morning before starting your work. You have control over your decision-making mechanisms inside your soul. Do not allow anybody to hold your soul as a slave to anybody’s desire; either husband, wife, friend or coworkers. God forbid do not surrender your soul to the devil by opening doors of illicit social activities. Your fleshly desires can hold you as a hostage just as the demons can hold you as a hostage. Surrender to Jesus through the Holy Spirit and you will remain free. If you fall by the wayside doing what you do not have any business doing, confess it to the Lord and pray that the Holy Spirit will guide you away from your fleshly obsession. The most miserable people I know are those who binge and dwell in the atmosphere of negative energy. They are cursing themselves and making their own life miserable without realizing it.

Moreover, remember that you are made of body (physical), soul (mind), and spirit. The center of control resides inside the human soul. These three components of human existence work in close proximity. Your choices determine your life’s journey. You are more likely to make many mistakes if you allow your fleshly desires to drive you. Many life mistakes can be avoided if you allow the Holy Spirit to lead you through your life’s journey. Constantly seeking the presence of God will grant you eternal joy, love and peace.

Lastly, your life’s journey is meant for soul purification to regain paradise lost to the devil because God who created you want you back home with him. No matter what you achieve in life, if you fail to accomplish the most important purpose engineered by God, that life is a total failure. A person’s life through this world is meant with the help of the Holy Spirit to deactivate the infected virus of the devil impregnated into every person born of a woman. Learn to know who God is. He is not the philosophy, psychology, or sociology being preached by some preachers for their own personal gains. Spirituality without God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit is a religion of blasphemy. True spirituality cannot exist outside God. He is the one who created you in his own image. Obey his commandments. Live a life to give glory and honor to God by accepting Eternal Father’s plan of salvation. His purpose is to reconcile you back to himself through Jesus. All he asked you to do is to come back home to him.

Part of the mystery of man’s existence is the presence of every human being in the Garden of Eden. God is not busy creating new souls. All souls were created from the beginning of time, just like a human female is born with all the eggs she needs to make babies in her lifetime. This was why the sin of Adam became a curse to all men because those souls were already created at the time God created Adam and Even from the foundations of the world. Otherwise, why should we be guilty of the sins of both Adam and Eve? The most important essence of life is to purify human soul from the original sin of disobedience by saying "Yes" to God and "No" to the devil. This was what the Holy Spirit explained to me about the true essence of life. God sent Jesus to help us achieve that purpose as we journey through this life. Those who rejected Jesus are doomed! When Jesus left, he sent the Holy Spirit as our guiding counselor. Without Jesus man is blind, no philosophy can set him free except through Jesus. Mary Magdalene was weeping at the tomb of Jesus. She was yet to learn the truth about the words Jesus taught them about his life, death, and resurrection. Mary was blinded by her painful passion at the graveside, and she failed to recognize the very person she was searching for standing before her. This is the same way the world was blind before Jesus arrive and today many are still blind because they refused to accept God’s gift of eternal salvation. Jesus opened Mary’s eyes so she could see beyond her tears and painful passion. When her eyes opened, she recognized Jesus. Mary’s heart was filled with joy. If anybody refuses to recognize Jesus, such blindness will lead to eternal damnation. Those who choose to see through Jesus have eternal life as the peace of God invades their souls.

By Yinka Vidal, author, Closer Walk With Jesus

• Calendar of Events

Knowledge and Knowing

Bridging scientific exploration and experiential discovery to better understand a timeless truth — that humanity is deeply interconnected.

• Noetic Sciences
• Our Origins
• Board of Directors
• Speakers Bureau
• Collaborators

Exploring Our Interconnected Universe

Through intensive research and groundbreaking experimentation, we explore the interconnection between personal, inner spaces and the “outer space” of our shared reality.

• Science Overview
• Guiding Hypothesis
• IONS Discovery Lab
• Scientists & Fellows
• Experiments
• Publications
• Participate in Research
• Selected Psi Papers
• Research FAQs

Find Your Spark

Deepening the way we understand ourselves, our world, and our purpose, wherever we are on our path.

• Experiential Programs
• Events Calendar
• Free Live Webinars
• Share Your Experience
• Community Group Network
• 2024 Conference
• Past Conferences
• 2017 Conference
• 2019 Conference
• EarthRise Retreat Center

Resources, media, information, and tools you can use to enhance your understanding, expand your mind, and feed your soul.

• Blog & News
• Media for Members
• Science of Channeling
• NextGen Awards
• Spontaneous Remission Bibliography
• Future of Meditation Project
• Subtle Energy Healing Resource
• Consciousness Transformation Model

With your support, IONS is able to continue its pioneering role in unlocking the deepest mysteries of human consciousness.

• Ways to Give
• Giving Circle
• Planned Giving
• Impact Funders
• Annual Reports
• Make a Gift

The Journey of Soul Initiation: Q & A with Bill Plotkin

February 5, 2021, engagement team, tell us about the title of your book the journey of soul initiation ..

Perhaps the most fundamental crisis in the world today is a psychological and spiritual one: the loss of meaning or purpose. All other major crises in our world today — social and racial injustice, environmental pollution, mass extinction, psychopathology, family dysfunctions, political dysfunctions, climate disruption, war — grow out of this bedrock existential loss: so many people experiencing their lives as empty, or suspecting human life, more generally, to be meaningless.

Join us for a free webinar! ConnectIONS Live

The Journey of Soul Initiation

presented by Bill Plotkin

Friday, February 19, 2021 11:00 am – 12:15pm (Pacific)

The world is not well tended or engaged by people who don’t know what they are for, who don’t know why they were born, or by people whose socioeconomic circumstances don’t permit the luxury of a purpose beyond survival. And the world is not well led by people whose foremost motivation is to reap the shallow rewards of material wealth or self-aggrandizement. Many people are searching for meaning but too many are looking in the wrong places.

One of the seemingly radical propositions in this book is simply a version of a conviction that is foundational and transparently obvious in most indigenous traditions, which is to say in the cultures of the people from whom each of us are descended: This is the recognition that the deepest and most fulfilling meaning in life comes from discovering the unique individual place we were born to take in the greater Earth community, and then embodying that place as our gift to others and to the world.

The Journey of Soul Initiation is the spiritual adventure by which we discover our singular place in the greater web of life, the song that only we can sing in the grand symphony of diverse species and habitats. Imagine a world in which everyone’s primary loyalty is pledged not to the abstract idea of a nation, a religion, or a corporation but to the land, to one’s place of primary belonging in a particular watershed, in a life-supporting relationship with all the beings that make that place home. This book gathers together the most important things I’ve learned during my forty years of designing and guiding a contemporary, Western approach to adult initiation, a spiritual adventure that has disappeared from most cultures and religions and yet is as old as humanity. In addition to presenting a new map of the descent to soul, the book features a collection of extraordinary stories of modern people who have undergone the joys and hazards of the journey of soul initiation — including W. B. Yeats, Carl Jung, Joanna Macy, and many of the people I’ve had the honor to guide.

The subtitle of the book is “A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries.” Why is your book written primarily for them?

The journey of soul initiation, when successfully navigated, results in true adults, initiated adults, people able to fashion deeply fulfilling lives as visionary artisans of cultural renaissance. What the world most needs now are such visionaries, people who have discovered what they were born to do in this world and for this world. But a truly adult way of contributing to our shared world can never be defined in terms of social roles, jobs, careers, or vocations. Rather, it must be understood in terms of the unique psycho ecological role one was born to fulfill. Initiated adults — visionaries — are and will be the most effective leaders and shapers of a future world that is not only life-sustaining but life- enhancing . To be and act as such a visionary is to be someone capable of consciously cooperating with evolution — not someone who merely figures out something they believe will support evolution but rather someone who has discovered their destined role in the unfolding and enhancing of life. To live such a life in these times is always and necessarily subversive to the cultural structures of our current life-destroying societies. Consequently, such a visionary, an evolutionary, always ends up being a revolutionary as well — whether intended or not. This book was written for those who yearn to take their place as culture interrupters and as shapers of a life enhancing future.

What is the Descent to Soul and what is its relationship to the Journey of Soul Initiation (JoSI)?

The Descent to Soul is the central experiential component of the JoSI. The JoSI always includes at least one Descent and often incorporates several. On a Descent, you plunge into (or are abducted by) the underworld, are shorn of your former identity and story, and, with luck, glimpse something of your unique place or purpose in the world. A Descent is not a short or easy excursion; it generally takes place over a period of several weeks or months. Each Descent has five phases. This book describes in detail each of the five phases, illuminated by many stories from contemporary people. The central phase of the Descent is what I call Soul Encounter, when we receive a vision or revelation of our unique place in the greater Earth community. The full sequence is: Preparation, Dissolution, Soul Encounter, Metamorphosis, and Enactment. The JoSI, in contrast to the Descent, is a longer process that takes a person from the end of psychological adolescence, through a liminal initiation stage that typically lasts several years, and culminates in the major life passage I call Soul Initiation, which marks the beginning of true adulthood.

As an analogy, you liken the Descent to Soul to what happens for a caterpillar in a cocoon or chrysalis. Why?

A Descent to Soul, especially our first, radically changes the kind of human we are — analogous to the change from a caterpillar to a butterfly or moth.

This isn’t a change from one phase or period of psychological adolescence to another. It’s not a shift, that is, from one job, marriage or partnership, spiritual discipline, social network, or address to another. It is, rather, a transformation from a person whose primary identity is experienced and expressed in terms of a career, relationship, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, sport, and/or hobby, or a member of a particular religion, neighborhood, or social network — to a person whose primary identity is experienced and expressed ecologically in terms of a unique place in the greater web of life.

After your first Descent, you no longer understand yourself primarily by way of any social, vocational, or religious affiliations but rather in terms of what you were born to bring to this world. Such a radical shift in consciousness is analogous to the transformation that takes place for a caterpillar in a cocoon or a chrysalis: from an earth-crawler to a winged flyer.

For humans, this is the shift from psychological adolescence to true adulthood, a passage that has become rare in the world today. For the caterpillar, the phases of this transformation include the near complete dissolution of the caterpillar body and then the reconfiguration of the recyclable elements of that body into a wholly different creature. I find the cocoon analogy so helpful because the phases of the Descent map easily onto the phases of the caterpillar’s transformation into a butterfly or moth — and in a way that illuminates and clarifies the nature of the Descent. I also appreciate the cocoon analogy because my own first soul encounter showed me that my place in the Earth community is to support others to weave cocoons of transformation for themselves. This is literally what I was told in that moment of soul encounter.

While your book is about the individual journey of soul initiation, you also suggest that humanity as a whole is also in the midst of an initiatory journey. What do you mean?

Along with all other species, we’re still very much on an evolutionary adventure. Perhaps a new human species is in the process of emerging, but the new wrinkle is not in our visible anatomy but an alteration in our mode of consciousness. Geneen Marie Haugen proposes that at the heart of this shift in human consciousness is our expanded and amplified capacity for imagination. Earth may be trying to imagine her own future through soul-initiated humans. We might suppose she is supporting us to evolve in order to help herself evolve. Soul-initiated imagineers might serve as Earth’s faculty of forward-seeing imagination, people who see the possibilities that their unique eco-niche enables them to see. But these future possibilities are not conceived by human egos. Rather, Earth herself conceives them, and soul-initiated egos serve as her midwives, her way of giving birth to and manifesting these possibilities. The ultimate meanings are not synthesized by human egos but discovered by them. This is a symbiosis between humanity and Earth that deeply serves the health and evolution of both. As a species, we are now in a Cocoon. What is possible now in our emerging future is a soul revolution for both humanity and Earth, the opportunity for humanity to discover and embody our unique ecological niche on Earth and for Earth to more fully realize her destiny in the Cosmos. Our previous human revolutions — including the agricultural, scientific, industrial, and digital — were necessary earlier steps, steps that make possible a soul revolution but in no way guarantee it. Only if we wake up in time will it come to pass. All initiation journeys are dangerous opportunities.

Would you like to go deeper? Join us for a free live webinar with Bill Plotkin on February 19th !

Author Bill Plotkin shares insights from his new book about The Journey of Soul Initiation — the spiritual adventure by which we discover our singular place in the greater web of life.

About Bill Plotkin

Recent Posts

Join our global community.

Receive curated mind-bending, heart-enlivening content. We’ll never share your email address and you can unsubscribe any time.

Creator Hub

Festival of Ridvan

• Ridvan celebrates Baha’u’llah’s time in 1863 in the garden of Ridvan in Baghdad when He publicly declared His station as a Manifestation of God. The Ridvan Festival is 12 days long and is also the time of year when Baha’is elect their governing bodies.

Join activities, celebrations, study groups, spiritual empowerment and education programs for young people, and more.

Baha’i beliefs address essential spiritual themes for humanity’s collective and individual advancement. Learn more about these and more.

The Journey of the Soul: An Illustrated Reflection

“One body, two souls!” a friend exclaimed when he saw me during my pregnancy. Shoghi Effendi explains that the soul or spirit of a human being is associated with the body at the moment of conception. The soul is a mystery, an intangible, untouchable and yet essential part of who we are. Abdu’l-Baha explains,

The essence of the human soul is clarified from material substances and purified from the embodiment of physical things. It is exclusively luminous; it has no body; it is a dazzling pencil of light; it is a celestial orb of brightness. 1

I was in a coffee shop when I found out I was pregnant and began reflecting on the transformation that was taking place , as well as this notion of the soul. Describing this discovery, I wrote: 

In the café, no one looked at me. No one noticed the glassy-eyed woman clutching her tote bag, wondering what to do next. I went outside. I sat on a bench. I snuck another peek at the test. Maybe I had read it wrong. But I hadn’t. I stared ahead. Then that means, then that means, then that means, then that means it’s happened. That spirit, that soul is here. My God, you are here. Within your tiniest human form, a collection of cells, all your genetic information. Love.  You have a heartbeat of your own and it comes from God. This miraculous dividing of cells, your two-chamber heart, all of these are wonders of God but your greatest, most powerful gift is your soul. We have been travelling together for some time. You have wanted to come here and be with us. This place you are travelling to is temporary you know, your true home is that divine world you’ve so recently come from. How I wish you could tell us of that place! This grey morning in early November, I pray for us and remember and connect with other friends who have passed on to that other world. I am right in between these worlds. Your grandmother and great grandmother… perhaps you’ve already met. 

Baha’u’llah writes, “The world beyond is as different from this world as this world is different from that of the child while still in the womb of its mother.” 2 I began thinking about the world of the womb, the first world the soul passes through. There are endless apps that help you track your baby growing from the size of a blueberry to a watermelon and all the incredible developments that accompany this. This was my baby’s main “job” in the womb, to prepare physically for the world he was entering. Abdu’l-Baha explains that,

In the beginning of his human life man was embryonic in the world of the matrix. There he received capacity and endowment for the reality of human existence. The forces and powers necessary for this world were bestowed upon him in that limited condition. In this world he needed eyes; he received them potentially in the other. He needed ears; he obtained them there in readiness and preparation for his new existence. 3

This led me to think about what my job is in this world and for what’s to come.

Abdu’l-Baha continues in this vein:

Therefore in this world he must prepare himself for the life beyond. That which he needs in the world of the Kingdom must be obtained here. Just as he prepared himself in the world of the matrix by acquiring forces necessary in this sphere of existence, so likewise the indispensable forces of the divine existence must be potentially attained in this world. 4

This brought up many questions and parallels in thinking about the journey of the soul through the worlds of God. Many times, I’ve thought of the next world as being distant from me but Baha’u’llah describes that God is “closer to man than his life-vein.” 5 Abdu’l-Baha explains “There is no doubt that the forces of the higher worlds interplay with the forces of this plane.” 6 I wondered about the parallel with pregnancy, how close and present our baby was to us and yet, he didn’t know it! I wrote,

You coming into this world, will it be a death of sorts for you? Coming out of the world of the womb? Will it feel terrifying or wondrous? How can you know what lies ahead as those contractions begin rushing you out of your cozy home? We all face this at the end of our lives. This death and rebirth into a new form. We, who are on the outside, already here, see you growing, you are so present to us. People buy you tiny shoes and clothes in preparation for your arrival. Every morning your father and I are surprised to see a stroller we inherited from a friend, sitting in the living room. But you couldn’t possibly know all these details. You hear sounds and taste flavours of our world but it’s all muffled. A sudden interruption of your sleep when my alarm clock goes off. A rush of energy when I drink cold water or sweet coffee.

The reality of our baby entering this world hit us when we first heard the heartbeat. I wrote,

In a busy life, other than the daily hard work of cultivating spiritual awareness, there are only infrequent moments in this world of being where we have the opportunity to reach through the veil and hear or see fragments, filaments of other worlds. First, the cold gel on my low belly, then the strange sound of nothingness, a kind of biological radio static looking for the station…and then there you are my love, your heart beating so strong and quick. A powerful heart, my love. And I’m floating now. You’re magic.

This moment felt like a gift, to be permitted to hear a presence so close to us and yet, in another world. It made me wonder if we are similarly, so close, perhaps even within the world to come. In The Hidden Words , Baha’u’llah seems to point in this direction, exhorting us to open our eyes to this other world:

O MAN OF TWO VISIONS! Close one eye and open the other. Close one to the world and all that is therein, and open the other to the hallowed beauty of the Beloved. 7

• Abdu’l-Baha, Star of the West , Volume 8, p. 38 [ ↩ ]
• Baha’u’llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah [ ↩ ]
• Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace [ ↩ ]
• Ibid. [ ↩ ]
• Abdu’l-Baha, Paris Talks [ ↩ ]
• Baha’u’llah, The Hidden Words , from the Persian, #12 [ ↩ ]

Esther Maloney

Related content.

Baha’i Holy Day & All Occasions E-Cards by Maya Jaros

10 Nooses in the Night

Master Gardener – A Poem About an Iranian Baha’i who Immigrated to New York

The Universe Within – An Artistic Exploration Inspired by the Baha’i Writings

My Thoughts on How Architecture Evokes the Mystical

NineteenMonths.com – A Treasury of Photography Inspired by the Baha’i Calendar

The Young Writers’ Endeavour – A Baha’i-Inspired Online Workshop for Junior Youth & Youth

“It is a story” – Poem from the Film Glimpses of a Hundred Years of Endeavour

Discussion 10 comments.

As a new-born grandfather of 7 days, this heartfelt passage of insight warmed my soul, smiled my face, and reflected the birth of our first grandchild. Thank you for adding depth and clarity to an already miraculous gift in our lives.

Jim Schwartz (January 1, 2017 at 8:16 PM)

A beautiful story Esther. Thank you for sharing with me.

Dennis Frere-Smith (January 1, 2017 at 5:18 AM)

Thank you for the comment Dennis, I’m glad you enjoyed it!

Esther Maloney (January 1, 2017 at 1:22 AM)

Heartwarming.

Criselda R. Figuerres (January 1, 2017 at 2:06 PM)

Congratulations Jim on the birth of your grandchild and thank you for your comment. It’s beautiful to think of birth as a gift in this way.

Esther Maloney (January 1, 2017 at 3:04 PM)

I love this!

Barbara Crissinger (January 1, 2017 at 5:40 PM)

This is how I have always felt was true. I hope it is!

Barbara Crissinger (January 1, 2017 at 5:41 PM)

Thanks Barbara for your comment, I hope so too!

Esther Maloney (January 1, 2017 at 1:25 AM)

Shoghi Effendi says: “With regard to the soul of man: According to the Baha’i teachings, the human soul starts with the formation of the human embryo and continues to develop and pass through…..” I was interested in this terminology and in my research, discovered that “Embryo” is usually defined as from 2 or 4 weeks through to week 8, after which it is defined as a “fetus.” This makes me feel better because I was always troubled by thinking of all those fertilized eggs at conception that are sitting in petri dishes in freezers in fertility clinics just to be thrown into the garbage when they are not needed any longer. Also, the IUD as a form of birth control changes the lining of the uterus to prevent implantation “should fertilization occur.” I was always trouble by thinking of all those fertilized eggs at conception that are not implanted in the uterus, that are then released from the woman’s body. I know this is a clinical attitude and not a spiritual attitude, however, it’s a relief to me to realize that fertilized eggs are not necessarily embryos when they are thrown away or are released from the woman’s body when an IUD is used. Thank you for this post.

Beth Blake (March 3, 2021 at 7:14 PM)

What a great post ! And the wonderful artwork ,really ,really nice. Thank You !

Cindy McFadzen (January 1, 2023 at 8:26 AM)

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

• Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

YOUR EMAIL WILL NOT BE PUBLISHED REQUIRED FIELDS ARE MARKED *

" * " indicates required fields

or Internationally

Horizons is an online magazine of news, stories and reflections from around individuals, communities and Baha’i institutions around Australia

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of country throughout Australia.

We recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their cultures; and to elders both past and present.

Baha’i Blog is a non-profit independent initiative

The views expressed in our content reflect individual perspectives and do not represent authoritative views of the Baha’i Faith.

• About Baha'i Blog
• Send Feedback
• Join our Creators

Visit the site of the Australian Baha’i Community and the Baha’i Faith Worldwide

14 episodes

The Quantum Awakening Podcast explores conscious evolution, human transformation, DNA upgrades, and the fusion of science and spirituality. Dynamic hosts, Sharon Milne Barbour and Amanda Bowden, leaders of knowledge on this journey. Sharon brings spiritual insight and celestial race knowledge , while Amanda channels wisdom from Ben and The 12, and focuses on science, psychology, as both focus on mind-body-soul connections. Join us in ascending to higher perspectives and navigating life's path with fluidity.

Quantum Awakening - Exploring Conscious Evolution Amanda Bowden and Sharon Milne Barbour

• MAR 16, 2024

QTH - Ancient Egypt

Following on from the QTH of a time line from Amanda's past life during the 16th century.... this bonus episode of Sharon and her new guide Mary, continues the theme of Quantum Trance Healing within the Trance State of Bing to bring a fresh perspective around the ancient Egyptian times, and goes into detail around some of the very first beings to be on earth at that time AND BEFORE! Explaining how through our history the ancient celestial beings such as the Anunnaki, The Rays and other celestial beings were misconceived as "Gods" due to their natural abilities to manifest. Describing their physical appearances never before heard until now. Details such as the Rays not actually having feathers but hair instead. The God known in ancient Egyptian history and taught through out main stream history's Mary speaks of is Anuket from the Sati Egyptian time line. What we now know as, Anunnaki. There is sooo much more intriguing information around this time line and how Amanda and other humans experienced it from their point of view but also a unique look at how the higher self plays a part also. This Bonus episode also delves into possible time line events that may take place over the next 30-40 years. Grab a cuppa and come and have a catchup up with Amanda and Sharon for a mind blowing bonus episode. Thanks for listening and you can get in touch with Amanda and Sharon on the details below; Sharon - https://www.bengalrose.co.uk/ Find my products, books, CD's and digital items https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/BengalroseHealing Work with me - https://www.bengalrose.co.uk/courses/ Creator Founder of One Spiritual Movement©️ https://onespiritualmovement.com/ [email protected] Amanda - https://amandabowden.co.uk/ [email protected] Creator of Master Miracle Manifester®️ and founder of Pheonix Academy - Spirology®️ Copywrite 2024©️

• MAR 9, 2024

Quantum Trance Healing - Bonus Episode

We decided to add a bonus episode to season 2 of the podcast as we were to excited and wanted to release this as soon as it was recorded on this podcast AND One Spiritual Movements "Lets Talk" videos. Quantum Trance Healing®️ is the result of Sharon and her new guide... Mary who is a multi-transitional being who resides in the 10th dimension of consciousness. Mary is a highly evolved higher self of a well known and renowned past hypnotherapist who has reincarnated as a child prodigy currently in Pakistan. This podcast episode picks up where the YouTube video "Quantum Trance Healing - with Sharon's trance guide John" on the One Spiritual Movement channel. Amanda had the opportunity to ask a question around her personal spiritual path and her higher self Ray who is an Avian Phoenix Blue Ray to gain more clarity where the conversation with Mary had left off from the YouTube video. As Sharon was in a Trance State Of Being, her new guide Mary was able to connect with Amanda's subconscious and travel back in time to a 16th century past life using the Quantum Trance Healing®️ technique to help with current time and day healing. Mary also gave specific details around this past life to be able to research as it turned out that the past life was as a human experience as Saint Teresa and connected soo many dots for Amanda in her life time now.... including possibilities around the reasons behind a back injury where her guides came in and done healing.... AND a possibility of where a cycle had started that can be stopped in the current now time. This is too good to miss as it's a unique opportunity to be the first to listen and watch this episode on YouTube to get a real life sense of what Quantum Trance Healing looks and sounds like. Come and grab a cuppa... relax... make some time for yourself and come and connect with Amanda and Sharon on this NEW and exciting journey! Want to learn more and connect with Sharon and Amanda? Details below: Sharon - https://www.bengalrose.co.uk/ Find my products, books, CD's and digital items https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/BengalroseHealing Work with me - https://www.bengalrose.co.uk/courses/ Creator Founder of One Spiritual Movement©️ https://onespiritualmovement.com/ [email protected] Amanda - https://amandabowden.co.uk/ [email protected] Creator of Master Miracle Manifester®️ and founder of Pheonix Academy - Spirology©️ Copywrite 2024©️

• FEB 3, 2024

What is Trance and Channelling?

Hey guys and welcome to the last episode of season 1 and boy and you in for a treat! Grab yourself a cuppa and a catch up with Sharon and Amanda as Sharon's guide John who is part of the Salcariton Alliance who are helping humanity on our ascension path. John comes through Sharon as she sits in a trance state, fully trusting and allowing her guide's consciousness to speak through her voice box as an energy source. John is Sharon's guide who will be with her for the rest of her life and is a highly ascended celestial light being and works with Sharon on her Trance Communicator journey and soo much more! Sharon and Amanda talk about their experiences and knowledge around Trance and channelling from their unique perspectives. Amanda is known for channelling Ben and The 12 - The Council Of Light and her higher self Ray, who is a Lemurian Avian Phoenix Blue ray. We hope you've enjoyed our first ever podcast season Quantum Awakening - Exploring Conscious Evolution and we look forward to releasing season 2. Bye for now 🙋‍♀️ Want to learn more and connect with Sharon and Amanda? Details below: Sharon - https://www.bengalrose.co.uk/ Find my products, books, CD's and digital items https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/BengalroseHealing Work with me - https://www.bengalrose.co.uk/courses/ Creator Founder of One Spiritual Movement©️ https://onespiritualmovement.com/ [email protected] Amanda - https://amandabowden.co.uk/ [email protected] Creator of Master Miracle Manifester®️ and founder of Pheonix Academy - Spirology©️ Copywrite 2024©️

Soul Connection & Higher Self

We're so excited to be back with a second season of Quantum Awakening - Exploring Conscious Evolution kicking off with Soul Connection & Higher Self! This has to be one of our favourite topics because we were able to collaborate our knowledge and experience together, to create this unique podcast episode AND bring a greater understanding of the connections of our soul and higher self as one and the same. Whether you're driving to work or taking time out for yourself to learn something new? Come and join us for our cuppa and catch up as we take you on a journey that will unleash you on your own journey of self development and the re-discovery of your authentic self... the TRUE you and what possibly awaits for you along your own life's path. Want to learn more and connect with Sharon and Amanda? Details below: Sharon - https://www.bengalrose.co.uk/ Find my products, books, CD's and digital items https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/BengalroseHealing Work with me - https://www.bengalrose.co.uk/courses/ Creator Founder of One Spiritual Movement©️ https://onespiritualmovement.com/ [email protected] Amanda - https://amandabowden.co.uk/ [email protected] Creator of Master Miracle Manifester®️ and founder of Pheonix Academy - Spirology©️

Star Children

This episode was birthed from the last episode in our 1st podcast series of Quantum Awakening - Exploring Conscious Evolution. The idea came off the back of Sharon's guide John whilst she was in trance as I asked (Amanda) had the opportunity to ask John the question of how we can best nurture our Star Children. If you've followed us for long enough or your further down your ascension on your life's path, then Star Child will resonate with you as you're aware that your child has chosen you on a soul level to be their parent or carer. On the other hand... it maybe you who is aware that you are a Star Seed or Elevated Starseed because we are all Starseed's but not everyone is spiritually awake or may not have hit the activation point yet.... It maybe that you're aware that being an Elevated Starseed may possible mean being neurodiverse. A 3D vs 5D awareness of who you are on your Conscious Evolution path. It maybe that you have no idea and you're curious to learn? Either way... you'll LOVE this episode as it's such an eye opener as we share what we currently know. As always.... take what resonates with you and discern for yourself and we hope you enjoy the episode and appreciate your support 😊 Want to learn more and connect with Sharon and Amanda? Details below: Sharon - https://www.bengalrose.co.uk/ Find my products, books, CD's and digital items https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/BengalroseHealing Work with me - https://www.bengalrose.co.uk/courses/ Creator Founder of One Spiritual Movement©️ https://onespiritualmovement.com/ [email protected] Amanda - https://amandabowden.co.uk/ [email protected] Creator of Master Miracle Manifester®️ and founder of Pheonix Academy - Spirology©️

Cycle Breakers

Please take your time with this one as it may have triggers or activate awareness to process within. Have you ever heard of the term Cycle Breakers? No doubt you have if you're following us or maybe you're just curious to know how we see it, how we've experienced it and what our knowledge is around this subject? On this episode we go deeper into what a Cycle Breaker is and how to notice and become aware if you believe you are one and you have a sense of KNOWING that you're here to make a positive impact to our world and EVERY system there is within it. From being the Cycle Breaker within your family generation and being the leader for positive change... To those of us who with many types of careers who have a different perspective on the world and the natural gifts you have to offer.... Sit back and switch off from the outside world... take some time out for yourself and relax as we delve deep into Cycle Breakers. As always... take what resonates and discern for yourself. Want to learn more and connect with Sharon and Amanda? Details below: Sharon - https://www.bengalrose.co.uk/ Find my products, books, CD's and digital items https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/BengalroseHealing Work with me - https://www.bengalrose.co.uk/courses/ Creator Founder of One Spiritual Movement©️ https://onespiritualmovement.com/ [email protected] Amanda - https://amandabowden.co.uk/ [email protected] Creator of Master Miracle Manifester®️ and founder of Pheonix Academy - Spirology©️

• © Amanda Bowden and Sharon Milne Barbour

Top Podcasts In Education