Sprit and soul

Saturday, November 28, 2015
F: 5:10 a.m. I’m ready if you’re ready, Papa – or whomever.
TGU: The redefinition you were given yesterday should clear up a few obvious problems, once you get to thinking about things.
F: I can see that. I certainly wish I had a course in directed readings, right about now.
TGU: You could do very well to read any of the sets of scriptures you have around you – the Upanishads, the Vedas, the Bible, Sufi scriptures, the Koran – anything attempting to tell humans their place in the grand scheme of things. But you must read them in a certain way if you are to have your eyes opened and your mind realigned toward the eternal. Reading them the wrong way – as law books or as science texts or as chronicles, say – may only throw one person off track one way, another another way. If a person studies scripture and emerges a sectarian, it is a sure sign that he, or she, approached it in the wrong frame of mind.
We are all holographic copies of the same divine pattern. Not similar, not related, but identical. That is the difference (in effect) between spirit and soul.
F: I have the distant glimpse of what that means and implies, but only that. I sort of sense that a part of me has grokked something, but I haven’t yet entirely gotten the word.

TGU: Go slowly. Go slowly. Only by going slowly will you be able to translate a right-brain gestalt – a grok – into a left-brain analysis – a sequential description.
F: Is that for me particularly or for people in general?
TGU: You must go more slowly to get to a particular state of suspended consideration that will overcome your mind’s tendency to paper over things in the rush forward. That is you, and that is anyone whose mind is active, questing, restless, and inclined to multi-tasking. For others, other course-corrections will apply. You’ve been told this repeatedly. Don’t forget it when a distant glimpse tempts you into excited pursuit.
F: Back to the insight. Spirit versus soul.
TGU: We haven’t left. You see how long ago this came to you.
F: You have been feeding me the essential course-correction for 20 years or so. At least since Peter Novak’s book.
TGU: Now, softly, slowly, as if you were trying to sneak up on a wild animal. Holding yourself in that state of quiet alertness. Holding your attention as quiet and steady as you can, let’s look at this.
Soul we have been describing as the particular instance of you – the circumstances shaping you—
F: I caught it. Go ahead.
TGU: Yes. You see how “slowly” helps you not go careering off in wrong directions, misled by a word or phrase?
The soul is a particular instance of you, shaped by your circumstances. The spirit is the whole you, unmodified by time and space and particular encouragement or discouragement of specific traits.
F: That is why the soul is called the breath of the eternal.
TGU: No, no, no. Be careful.
F: Yes. How did I make that particular error? It is why the spirit is called the breath of the eternal.
TGU: A difficulty is going to be, helping people see that this is not merely a playing with words or a repeating of things learned by rote. And that difficulty corresponds to the difference between an esoteric and an exoteric understanding of scripture. It is the difference between the spirit of the text that gives life and the letter that kills. It is the difference between the gaze outward, which dreams, and the gaze inward, which awakens.
Let’s go through it again.
You are a copy of the entire created reality (the 3D) and the entire uncreated reality (the non-3D). “Copy” isn’t really the right word, but the right word doesn’t exist. “Holographic copy” is slightly closer, but not enough of an improvement to use routinely. Once you have that sense of things, the word “copy” should be enough. But you aren’t a photocopy of a hologram or in any way different from the original, but it is easier to discuss for the audience in your day than previous ways which served previous ages.
Equate the word “spirit” to the unchanging unbounded reality that you sense sometimes beyond the confines of your personality and your awareness. This unchanging reality can be looked at – can be experienced – in various ways, and so [be] called God, or the gods, or the Tao, or the unchanging essence of things or even as a correlated set of mathematical equations. The way it is experiences has nothing to do with limitations inherent in the spirit; it is entirely shaped by the particular Hubble telescope being employed, and where that telescope is pointed.
Equate the word “soul” to the very subjective reality of you as you exist in the world no matter how extensive and flexible the definition. It doesn’t matter if you think man is born once, lives one life, dies once, and then either is judged and proceeds to heaven or hell, or if you think in terms of an ageless being born and dying many times in many circumstances. The point here is that all these descriptions of life – all these attempts to confine the meaning of life in some comprehensible pattern – refer to the soul and not the spirit. And that is why religions differ, and why they are the same. The differences are all relative to specific circumstances. The sameness always refers to the unchanging reality beyond and prior to circumstance.
F: It seems clear enough.
TGU: Yes, well, let it marinate, as you sometimes say. It is an important distinction, and it ties together two lines of thought that you hadn’t quite realized were left unrelated. And that’s all we intend to say about that until you have had time to let it sink in. It was only yesterday that you realized that you are literally all one; now here is a first building upon that redefinition.
F: I see. I suppose it is meaningless to ask who am I talking to?
TGU: Pretty meaningless. Daffy Duck, maybe. Richard Castle. Charlemagne. The point is – as you well know – it is misleading to attain to a false precision. The information can be judged by only one factor.
F: Yes. Does it resonate?
TGU: Handrails, remember, not law books or strait-jackets. Now that’s enough for this session. Be well and live in the new pondering for a while.
F: I shall. Thank you. (5:50 a.m.)