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What is Soul?
The Story
The soul is the bridge that connects the personality with Spirit. Spirit (or the godhead, Creator, the Tao, etc.) is the primordial Ground of All Being. The closest we can come to it is in experiences of Cosmic Consciousness. This unified and indivisible Source cast forth sparks from Itself, so that the One became the Many. The human soul is like one of these sparks, that knows itself to be divine, yet also separate from the One. Although timeless itself, the soul proceeds on a great journey into time and space: what has been called the Arc of Involution, descending into many cycles of incarnation or what is called in the East ‘the wheel of death and rebirth.’ As it becomes more and more identified with the physical, etheric, and astral planes of existence, it forgets its divine origins altogether. When it has travelled on this Arc to the furthest point of separation, there comes a turning-point, when the soul begins its long return journey along the Arc of Evolution, eventually finding its way home again to the Source.
The soul within each of us might be compared to the bulb or rhizome of a plant. It is the stable, undying essence of the plant that lives underground. It puts down roots and sends up green shoots which grow upwards towards the sun in springtime. Leaves unfurl, flowers blossom, fruit and seeds set. When autumn comes, the plant dies and decays, returning to the soil as recyclable dead matter, and when winter comes, the ground appears bare. Yet the rhizome is still underneath the soil, and has grown in size with the nutrients it has received from the plant during the year.
The part of us we call the ‘soul’ is the hidden bulb or rhizome, which cyclically puts forth a new aspect of itself into the world of appearances. Each lifetime is a new ‘season of the soul’ wherein a new person comes into being, grows, reaches fullness, maturity and old age, then eventually dies. Just as the rhizome grows larger from its seasonal growth, so does the soul expand in consciousness with every lifetime on the physical plane. In fact, each lifetime has been designed in order to maximize the soul’s growth, evolution and maturity. Eventually, the soul will have evolved to the point when it no longer needs to incarnate in a human body. It is well on the way to the ‘Great Return’ to the divine Source from which it came and to which it will return, now fully conscious and Self-knowing.
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Copyright Mara Freeman,
2007