Soul

Steiner says that man has three levels of being the physical body, the soul, and the spirit. The physical body is permanently under process of change. Its keynote is impermanence, and between its birth and its death stretches a continuous process of change.

This personal consciousness that exists in the body becomes absent in the body at death, and undeveloped or unformulated at birth, is the soul, our individual awareness. Just as the body feeds upon matter in the form of food, and thus gradually builds up a defined physical body, so the soul feeds upon the sense impressions and experiences gained through the body. With them it builds up a defined ‘body’ of perception or self-awareness. We often think of this as our ‘self’ or personality. The sense impressions are in themselves impermanent. As soon as the smell of cooking bread is removed, the impression has gone. But the soul faculty of memory gives a certain permanency to one’s physical existence.

See: Rudolph Steiner.

Cayce stated that, “The soul began with the first expression of free will made of its power, through the force of mind. The first thought which it generated of itself, the first diversion of mind force from its normal path, was the beginning of the soul.” Before we became beings with self awareness, we were all the time directed by the guidance of instincts. When we lost our instinctive guidance by thinking and willing ourselves, it was what is depicted in Genesis as the Fall from the Garden of Eden/Heaven. At first human beings had a balance between their instinctive wisdom and guidance and their own personal desires. But most of us lost he link with divine guidance – the instincts – and suffer an enormous feelings of emotional pain, loneliness, aggression, greed and ignorance of their true nature and are lost.

The soul is not eternal as some writer’s state, which is the Spirit. As I repeat often, “A single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. We all started from the original one cell, and we, you and I, are the result of gathered experience.

No plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories, education and programming you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, your soul, but beneath that is a very ancient self.

I believe from my experiences that the human personality, that is developed each time in the new brain’s memories, is treasured in the huge memory of Life itself as separate individuals. But I see them as past dwelling places the spirit has experienced as it moves from life to life in its quest for union with Life/God.

“(At present man is in a state of great spiritual darkness – the darkness which precedes dawn. He has carried his scepticism to the point where it is forcing him to conclusions he knows intuitively are wrong. At the same time he has carried his investigation of natural phenomena to the point where it is disproving all it seemed to prove in the beginning. Free will is finding that all roads lead finally to the same destination. Science, theology; and philosophy, having no desire to join forces, are approaching a point of merger. Scepticism faces destruction by its own hand.)” Edgar Cayce