Blurts & Spasms

In answer to Quora question: "What exactly are souls?"

Thank you for the A2A.

My personal belief is that the soul is a cohesive, embodied, active intersection of our most fundamental dimensions of being. Those dimensions include manifest Divinity, spiritual consciousness and shared spiritual understanding, transpersonal experience, transcendent non-egoic Self, and unmanifest Divinity. The soul is where the finite, fleeting and conditional intersects with the Infinite, Constant and Absolute - a bridge between existence and non-existence, past and future, perfect unity and incompleteness, emptiness and suchness, manifest and unmanifest, self and other. This intersection is dynamic and exists outside of time and space (or it could be described as between things - interstitial), but its operation produces a field of energy that can be perceived and experienced in this physical life; an aspect of this is often interpreted as Light of a particular quality and intensity. How is this possible? I believe it is because our soul's field permeates and influences all other dimensions of being (somatic, perceptual, intellectual, emotional, relational and so on) and indeed the operations of those dimensions can influence our soul's Light - its field's energies, intensities, patterns, propagation and frequencies - as well. In terms of identity, the more we identify with soul, the less we identify with ego and its myriad personas; in fact I would say that to live our soul is to become unmitigated agape, and consequently to experience each moment in full unity with all that is seen and unseen. Does the soul persist - beyond death, into multiple lives, etc.? The soul field's patterns almost certainly persist to influence new iterations and interactions beyond the grave, but what about the soul field itself? I'm not sure, especially since my conception of soul is actively generated (spontaneously and continually) by the intersections I've described. In other words, something persists for a time - and perhaps a discussion of "spirit" would be helpful here - and something persists eternally in the oceans of being and non-being, but the the more highly energized aspects of soul that seem individuated from that ocean are, I suspect, more temporary and fleeting.

At the same time, all of these words I've written fall short of peak experiences - those aha moment that are our personal apprehension of soul - but perhaps they point in a useful direction.

I hope this was helpful.