So far, we’ve looked at the development of the self – the ego-personality. We’ve seen how our ‘being’ arrives, entirely whole but naked to this world, at birth. It then begins to develop a protective shell as it finds its place in a world that is not entirely comforting.

We moved on to consider the layers of perception, and how there is a fundamental awareness at the heart of everything we are. That awareness is the most alive part of us. The mind – the thinking machine – is built to equip the soul with the power of concepts with which we can separate out and handle the world of the separated object.

Beneath the conceptual awareness of mind, at the level of the soul, there lies our original ‘knowing’ of unfiltered experience – a tapestry of the universe revealing itself …. here, where the observer is apparently separated. At this level of perception, we have no awareness of objects, just differentiated ‘patterns’ in the whole. We see differences, but have not conceptualised them into objects like ‘cars’ or ‘chairs’.

What, then, is the soul? It’s one of the most used words in all of philosophical thought, but seldom defined. It carries the idea of an ‘essential me’, yet perhaps not that of the egoic self, the personality – would we consider the weak or greedy parts of our behaviour to belong to our soul, too?

That can be a sobering thought… But one whose meaning we have to chase, for internal division of ideation or purpose will not serve us well in this most important of journeys.

Is there a relationship between the earthly personality and the ‘refined’ soul? Can we reconcile the mental and reason-based human mentality with the eternal and essential Self (Being) experienced as the soul?

To begin this, we need to extract the most beautiful conceptions of the soul laid down by those who have touched their own inner experience beyond the egoic self; a place reached when we quieten the chattering of the personality so that the inner presence of the spiritual may be felt.

Imagine the largest of sails on an elegant boat – our boat. In your mind, let this be the home of all your experience.

At the heart of our personal development is how we come to know things, and whether there is anything in our field of constantly-changing perception that we don’t know. This will require that we revisit the concept of the ‘known’.

We begin our consideration of this here.

To know is to find a trusted familiarity with an object of consciousness. Can we dig deeper into this feeling. Isn’t the core of this a ‘oneness’ with what we are perceiving.

Later, we will define this more deeply and say that to know is to find a trusted familiarity all of consciousness. In doing so, we will leave out the idea of an object, because this separates us from experience, and leaves us always on the ‘mind-side’ of the perception field. Who wants to be separated from a constantly opening flower of creation, drinking in its being via a poorer mechanism of rational thought, logic and memory?

The soul is our organ of experience. Like that towering sail above us, it responds to everything we experience. Years of conditioning in ‘logic’ have restricted the value we attribute to the power of this all-encompassing awareness, but that can be undone, slowly and safely.

Every experience we have – both the taking in of the presence of what can be experience and our reaction to it – is a part of this single organ of experience. Our giant sail not only flutters in the slightest of breezes, but it powers the direction and pace of our movement through the ocean of life. The mast connects both the tiny breeze and the hurricane with the depths of the boat – our inner being.

Do we really have a body? Most certainly. But our field of experience – our soul – is much larger than the body. The most vivid of impressions – really signals – come from the body, and so we have come to associate our ‘selves’ with this. But the body is made from the organic stuff of the world, and not the finer essential material of the vast sail – which stretches far above into the blue sky.

We will have much more to say about this very special ‘sail’, and its relationship to our true Self.

The soul needs the mind to work with the world. But the soul sees what is…

This consideration throws up a paradox… and we will investigate this apparent duality in the next post – Part Six.

Parts of this series:

This is Part Five: The Giant Sail

This is Part Four: The edge of the known.

Part One: The Human Hologram

Part Two: The look of Love

Part Three: The Fall

Part Four: The Edge of the Known

©Stephen Tanham 2023

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.

http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog