The Soul
May 2015
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I should probably start with first things first. If I’m going to talk about tracking the soul, I should probably define – at least briefly – what I mean by soul. This is a obviously a huge topic. Actually, I wrote another book about this – before Tracking the Soul – called The Seven Gates of Soul, in which I elaborated a 6000-year history of what we have collectively understand the word “soul” to mean. For purposes of this blog series, I will just briefly suggest a working definition to get us started. I don’t claim to have the definitive word on the subject, and you may or may not agree with me. That is ok.
But as I have come to view things, at this stage in my journey, I am now defining the soul as what happens when God, Spirit, the Great Mystery, the Life Force, or whatever else you want to call it, enters a physical body for the duration of a human life. If you ask me what do I think happens to the soul after death, I would respond in the same way as the Zen monk, Gudo. When asked “where does the soul go after death,” he replied, “I don’t know. Ask me again when I’m dead.” Despite all that has been written about life after death lately, I still think death is a Great Mystery, and I remain an agnostic in my speculations about it.
Meanwhile, I do want to talk about what happens to the soul in this life – which is where the value of tracking the soul comes into play. Although we are conditioned to think of soul and Spirit as synonymous, I make a distinction, which I feel is necessary and important. Spirit is the beginning and the end of the soul’s journey. Spirit is not going anywhere, cannot get lost, and does not need to be tracked. Soul can most definitely have a relationship to Spirit, and this is part of what we can track when we track the soul, but it is the soul we are tracking and not Spirit.
Spirit is eternal; soul is a temporary amalgamation of Spirit and matter. Spirit is unchangeable; soul evolves in its relationship to Spirit and to itself, which is a reflection of Spirit. Spirit permeates this entire manifest creation; soul belongs specifically to you. This life that you are living is the soul’s journey, and it is your opportunity to grow in your relationship to Spirit, to yourself and to everything and everyone around you.
The next post in this series is Astrology as a Tracking Device.
To read more blog posts, go here.