John Van Auken
A.R.E. Instructor

Spirit is the life force, while the soul is our individualized being with unique memories, thoughts, desires, fears, and hopes. The soul is an individual that may grow to be one with or separate from the source of its life. The spirit is the impelling influence of the one creative source within which our souls were initially conceived and presently exist.

Our souls have an innate longing to unite with the source of our souls’ life. They seek the home or place of the Creator, the Creative Forces in infinity. In comparison, our spirit is the motivative influence to live. It is within us from the moment of our spiritual conception. We may think of these as the spirit of life and the soul as the being living life. The spirit is that portion of the Creation that gives expression to all and animates all. The soul is part of the original Universal Consciousness; it has consciousness. Simply put, the spirit is the life force, and the soul is an individual expression within that life force.

There is a vast difference between spiritual and soul forces. Spirit forces animate all life. Spirit is life-giving and life-producing. The spiritual element is the vitality that produces the motive forces that drive a soul. Spiritual forces are the life, the reproductive principle, while souls are the development principle. Spirit is, while souls grow.

Our highest purpose for existence drives this motivation: to know our true selves, to be our true selves, and yet one with Creation and Universal Consciousness out of which we emanate and within which we exist.

Seeing us as souls rather than earthly persons cautions us not to put our earthly lives first, for we must live with ourselves for a long while because our souls are immortal. We must become acquainted with our soul selves and our relationship to the Creative Forces. We should become acquainted with our more eternal selves. Our bodies will eventually die, but our souls will live on and on, so it is best to become familiar with that portion of ourselves now.

The ancient Egyptians saw us as star beings, aku, celestial souls temporarily sojourning in this physical world. They saw our deepest motivation to be more connected to our souls’ journey and purposes than anything earthly. In this intentional incarnation, our souls are given opportunities to show ourselves to be not only worthy of but companionable to the Creative Forces and Universal Consciousness. Now, we are talking about being companions to the Creator or Creative Forces of the entire universe—and we don’t want to be dull, boring companions, so we should be up and doing, growing to become all we were meant to be.

Our souls have levels of consciousness and dimensions of awareness. Out here, we use our recently socialized conscious mind, which works well in physical reality. Our so-called subconscious is beyond our outer mind and is the beginning of our soul’s conscious level. It manifests itself through intuition and dreams. Our soul’s mind has many dimensions, which may be reached through visions, intuition, and deep meditation. Beyond our soul’s mind is our original connection to the Universal Consciousness. This is known as our superconscious levels of awareness. This is where individuality and universality merge. At this level, we are one with the Universal Consciousness.

Despite the conditions of our mind and body and situations today, we may raise within ourselves a oneness with the spiritual forces, and these may revivify, regenerate, and arouse health and happiness even under adverse conditions in materiality.

We might ask why our souls are here in this world and so very much a part of this world. The answer is that this was not the initial intention. The original intention was to be able to partake of the physical, three-dimensional reality but not be a part of it. So, how do we fix that problem? The more and more we feed upon those infinite sources from which we emanate, the more our bodies and minds regain that awareness of our soul source, our innate connection to the creative forces, our Creator. This is soul growth driven by its original purpose for existence.

With us today is the connection to the Divine within us, that Life Force. It will require such an attitude, purpose, and hope within us—and in our relationships with others—that each cell of our bodies and thoughts of our minds be tuned to the Life Source.  There may be the renewing and revivifying of our souls’ relationships to Creative Forces and Universal Consciousness.

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