Spirit & Soul
Many spiritual teachers and materials seem to confuse the words “Spirit” and “soul” or use them interchangeably. They are very
different and it is important to know the difference in the context of spiritual growth
.
Our Spirit, as described above (points of light), is that aspect of God within us. It is a part of the totality of our being. Indeed, we were created “in God’s image” in this sense and we have every one of His/Her attributes because we are a part of God and God is a part of us. We have all of His/Her lightness, beingness, perfect love, peace, joy, compassion, harmony, and non-dualistic perception. However, our awareness of our God-self varies based on how much we have awakened to it.
Our soul, on the other hand, is the energy of our memories. It is what records and archives everything that we experience. Everything
. In every situation, in every moment
, our soul remembers what we experience, not only from our five physical senses, but also from every non-physical level of our being, including from the point of view of our perfect Spirit. So even if we can only consciously remember certain aspects of an event in our past, we have all
of the information regarding that event stored in our soul, or soul memory. It is the memory of all
of who we are, whether we are conscious of it or not.
We created the soul as a place to store the information that would help guide us back to seeing from our Spirit’s perspective. We came to the earth plane to incarnate in physical forms eons ago to experience physical life and we accomplish this, finding and creating dramas in our lives to fulfill that purpose. Most of us have incarnated thousands of times and our soul memory includes all of those lifetimes of experiences, on every level. The soul serves as a tool to
guide us to awaken to and consciously know our God-self.
On a continual basis, our Spirit within has its perspective recorded by the soul and we are generally unaware of that perspective as we go through our lives; the tangibility of our three-dimensional thinking, concept of duality, and our five senses have too great a hold on us. To adopt the perspective of our Spirit—the eyes of God—is to shed our normal dualistic thinking and see what occurs around us and to us as being perfect and in perfect harmony with all that exists. Everything has its place in the beautiful dance.
These memories of everything happening in perfect order are there in our soul alongside our more physical and sensory memories, and they are available to us to remember at any time. Obviously, we do recall our memories, but we are generally selective in what we choose to see, as our subconscious directs much of our focus. Since we often get entangled in the dramas of the situations we experience, we tend to remember not the perspective from Spirit, but rather the emotional,
mental,
and physical
sensations of those situations. And because we seem to be somewhat addicted
to experiencing those sensations, like a drug, we continually and subconsciously choose to remember similar or related soul memories, which drown out and blind us to the memories from our Spirit’s viewpoint. But all memories are there in the soul if and when we choose to see them.
The soul serves to retain the experience
of our situations so we can learn from them, but also to remind
us of our connection to the God within. As we grow spiritually, we learn to see that the dramatic physical, mental, and emotional memories of our experiences pale in comparison to seeing those same experiences from the perspective of Spirit. We begin to see everything from a higher context and thus begin to heal our misperceptions, clearing out the obstacles that obstruct our divine vision.