My eyes opened and this is what I saw. You can in yourself be anything you desire. You create yourself from a point. You define your own existence. A soul defines itself. What words cannot define, they can characterize, so that the truth may be recognized as it is encountered. The existence of a soul is absolute, at once all and nothing. The qualities of a soul are both infinite and eternal. A soul is not a question, nor is a soul an answer. A soul is a statement. A soul is an expression, a unique, individual creation.
While I gazed in wonder, I realized that even before a soul embraces the awareness of other souls, the darkness of a soul embraces the light of other souls, filling the emptiness of its existence with the certainty of others, both as a foundation for its own reality, and a medium for the realization of its self. A soul dreams its dreams, innocent of consequence, immune to concern, often unaware of those who chance to share its dream. But already it is evolving. Its attention expands to encompass a growing understanding of its condition, and its will develops as it struggles to grasp the essence of its awareness.
Then I looked upon myself and had to see that in adopting a design, a soul is often faced with a limitation that arguably compromises or violates its integrity. If, within a given archetype, a design employs mutually exclusive characteristics, a soul, which by its intrinsic nature encompasses the gamut of mutually exclusive characteristics, can be stifled by the emphasis of its adopted design. Confounded by an exclusive emphasis, a soul is often compelled to find expression elsewhere. The diafracture of a soul can result in the functional and dysfunctional aspecting of a soul. The fact that such a situation can occur is not in itself damning or flawed, but a certain sophistication is needed to distinguish between a functional and a dysfunctional emphasis.
I looked upon my life and considered what was there to see. As the soul evolves, it creates. Constantly grasping existence anew and refining its understanding, recreating its universe. The power of its dreaming creating dreams. And in its dreams, it begins to experience moments of clarity. The questions and answers that it eternally weaves suddenly resolve and it awakens to a world. There was so much wonder in that. One soul can give birth to all souls, for that which can conceive of itself, can conceive of others, and in conceiving of others, can conceive of others that can conceive of themselves, and those that can conceive of themselves and each other can conceive of that which can conceive of itself.
So I understood, that one soul, dreaming of many, makes an invitation. The souls, dreaming of themselves, realizing the same truth, making the same invitation, are revealed to each other. Thus souls born dreaming alone, become souls dreaming alone together.
It took so little effort to put this epiphany to words, but the longer I looked at it, I realized that so much of it was beyond words. So much will ever be beyond words, and perhaps that is why the relationship between the body and the spirit is easier to describe than the relationship of mind and soul. Like the soul, a mind is a possession of itself, but unlike the soul, the mind is vulnerable. In a way, mind is a soul’s way of transcending itself. A soul can touch, and can be touched, only through its mind. The mind exists at a crucial threshold, as a premier interface between the individual and the infinite. Where every soul is a thing of innate perfection, each mind is a unique work of art. A mind is a soul’s way of representing itself.
At the same time, I could not help but notice that a mind is also a soul’s way of influencing itself. The power of a mind is derived of itself, in the expression of its soul. Mind is key to existence. The function of mind, to make dreams into reality, is demonstrated in our own realization of each other. The ambition or promise of mind, to realize the ideal, is demonstrated in our insistence on finding meaning in what we experience. In the world, the mind — not the body — is the seat of the soul. The mind is so central to existence that people are often blind to it, though nothing within it is ever hidden from the soul. If the soul could be said to be the light of our awareness, then the mind is the lens through which that light is focused.
It is a lens shaped by the soul, as much as by experience. It is intimately personal, yet exposed to everything. A possession of itself, a mind is also an object, a thing that can be grasped, manipulated, probed, and even possessed by, or shared, with another. I know that seems to imply telepathy, but even if there is something to that implication, there is reason enough for us to find it unsupportable. No intimacy can compare to what the mind can invite, and that is what makes telepathy, or any true example of what we would think of as psychic potential particularly difficult and dangerous for us to accept. Even without telepathy, we have enough ways to know each others’ minds. Even without other psychic abilities, we are capable of realizing that in order for the mind to influence reality, it must open itself, and become vulnerable. Only a strong, stable, healthy mind could bear to be so naked to reality. Only an open mind can touch naked reality.
Or maybe I should say, only a closed mind can avoid it. That is sort of the paradox of the position we find ourselves in. It is not our minds that define the limits of our grasp of reality, but the manner in which we perceive it. We give precedence to the senses of our body, as if the fact that our minds truly make sense of what we perceive means that the mind itself has no means of perception. And yet, all that we can ever truly know, we know only in the mind. Our connection to the physical universe we perceive as containing us lies solely in the information our minds derive from our perception of the world. The world we exist in is contained in that information, as much as that information is contained in the structure of the world, so the world we experience is really just an idea of the world. What that information really is or what it represents we are unable to know, because it can only be observed indirectly—if at all.
Our senses provide a very limited perspective. Our physical senses only provide the mechanism for transforming electrical and chemical impulses into information, perception itself is rooted in them and thus in the body, but only in the full focus of consciousness is perception truly realized, and only the mind perceives meaning and purpose. If you take the mind out of the process, information ceases to be a meaningful concept. Even limiting the mind to the function of processing information, storing and correlating data, the mind becomes distinct from the brain and nervous system by virtue of perceiving information. That transition to an information state crosses the same boundary between that which is purely physical in nature to that which is mental, or psychic or spiritual in nature. If one must look for a reason to accept these diverse terms, a justification for a soul as well as a mind, all I can offer is the common observation that what ultimately distinguishes one of us from another is the possession of our own awareness. That awareness is not always conscious and focused and it is not always neatly confined to the bounds of our own minds or even the bounds of our bodies or the world those bodies exist in. Also, while the minds provide that awareness with structure, the awareness is not passive. Awareness penetrates and pervades us, active and impulsive, persistent and pensive, focused in both understanding and intent.
It has taken me a long time to find the words to capture what I glimpsed, and that was neither the first nor the last glimpse I’ve had. I am sorry to say that these words only offer a glimpse of what I saw. If I thought I would live a long and productive life, I still do not think I could do more than scratch the surface of all that I have seen. In the life I have, I have barely made a scratch.
