Our soul – likened here last week to a giant sail – is not the only occupant of our ‘interior’. At the fundamental level of our consciousness is a foundation of Being which is perfect and full of loving and potential…

‘It’ only needs a Soul for its completeness.

Normally thought of as part of the soul, this layer of our true Self has been more accurately described as our Essence. It is the ‘ground’ from which the soul – in our metaphor the ‘sail’ and collector of our life’s experiences – extends into the world of matter.

There is much confusion about the soul because, though it is always present to ‘us’, it’s seldom seen because it is always there. To untangle this and achieve a degree of real seeing, we need to know what to look for.

Pure awareness is our essential nature and the foundation of everything else – including the essence and soul. It is not a result of brain or even mind activity. It is part of the ‘is-ness’ of our deepest nature. Awareness is our basic being – though there’s nothing basic about this primordial capability of being human.

The destiny of the human essence is to ‘work in the world’. To achieve this it must learn and interact with the ways of the world. This requires a mind and body, but first, it must extend itself towards the world of matter in the form of a soul.

As we discussed last week, the soul – this sail or movie screen – is malleable. It absorbs impressions, giving us memory and the benefit of experience – understanding and wisdom. But experience can also be negative and hurtful. Repeated woundings to the sensitive soul become conditioning, which limits the expansion of the soul’s consciousness.

We can liken our Essence to the main body of the boat: the hull and the strong mast. Its nature is perfect. Its role is to pass to the developing soul the pattern of its impeccable nature (the heading for the boat), so that nature can be manifest in the world of the individual. The essence cannot do this by itself. It needs the soul and its body to be the vehicle for the passing of personal insight and light into that human being’s existence – and hence to be shared by others.

In this way, matter is spiritualised, and ‘the creation is fully entered into’.

The balance of positive and negative impressions, stored in the malleable structure, become hardened into patterns recognised by modern psychology – though the latter’s concern is usually the stability of the character or ego.

At a relatively young age, the person feels themselves to be a character possessed of certain crystallised traits. This is the personality, which gradually ‘sets’ to become the identity of the person and this is the core energy pattern of its outer being.

The identity strives to protect the soul from being further harmed by conditioning. But the price of that is a much more rigid set of responses to life as the identity becomes fixed and armoured.

From then on, life is a balancing act between the ‘faces’ of being open to the new (and therefore potentially hurtful) and being protected from changes by the identity’s hardening. We all recognise this pattern, which develops with age. The problem is that spiritual development – conscious movement towards our essence – is dependent upon us being open…

This is one of the many examples of paradox in spiritual work.

It is for this reason that Schools of the Soul – like the Silent Eye – use carefully developed methods that facilitate the relaxation of this life-tension. They do this by making visible the power locked up in the identity of the person – their ego or personality.

All good teaching is a journey. In our case, that journey is a three year intellectual and emotional voyage in which we meet and interact with certain strong fictional characters, each of which typify one of the energy blocks we are likely to have in varying degrees.

These energy blocks stop us receiving the impressions of the Essence, which is the dominant light in our lives – and the route to reunion of body, soul and spirt (essence).

The soul has properties. Aliveness is one of the key essential aspects of Soul. Aliveness is what is seen as immediately missing when we consider a newly deceased body. The ‘coldness’ and lack of an ‘animation’ are felt by all yet are impossible to define beyond a holistic word like ‘aliveness’, itself. This is typical of the properties of the soul, and demonstrates the level at which our search needs to be undertaken.

The best secrets are, in the words of the mysteries, ‘hidden in plain sight’.

Another property of the soul is growth. That sense of vital expansion is one of the fundamental experiences of life – as with ‘being alive’. In both cases, their ‘ever-presence’ and familiarity result in them being effectively hidden. We need to be shown that they are not the kind of properties we thought; that their origin is not of the body and brain. They are the fundamental building blocks of what came before.

Of course, such properties work though the body – all these layers of the human are interwoven – but they do not originate there. This is ancient spiritual knowledge. For example, the Sufis assign a separate ‘energy body’ to each of the above properties of the soul. Growth is living energy in itself, and the Sufis assign it to the animal body. Aliveness is a a living energy too, and assigned to the plant, or vegetable body.

In the next post, we will consider more aspects of the soul and the part they are capable of playing in our return journey…

Other Parts of this series:

Part One: The Human Hologram

Part Two: The look of Love

Part Three: The Fall

Part Four: The Edge of the Known

Part Five: The Giant Sail

©Copyright Stephen Tanham

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.

The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.

Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.