by Bob Olson, BestPsychicDirectory.com, BestPsychicMediums.com & AfterlifeTV.com
Ask ten people in this field their definitions of the words spirit and soul and you might get five different answers. Similar to the confusion surrounding the words spirit, angel and ghost, many people are confused by the words spirit and soul. Often times these words are even used interchangeably. But from my perspective, there is a significant difference between the two.
From my practical viewpoint, our soul is our eternal, spiritual essence that always remains in the spirit world. It is what some people call our higher self because it guides us from the spiritual realm holding the wisdom of a thousand lives or more.
Our spirit, on the other hand, is that part of our soul that inhabits our human body in order to experience a physical life. Once it’s contained within the human body, it temporarily forgets all the wisdom of the soul in order to experience life with a fresh, clean slate.
The soul, however, with its immeasurable wisdom, is forever connected to the spirit. And the connection between our spirit and our soul is found through our subconscious mind, what Carl Jung called the Superconscious. While our spirit travels to the physical plane to experience a human life, the soul guides and communicates with our spirit via intuition. The challenge of every human, therefore—without knowing it—is to honor this intuitive guidance in balance with our intellect.
Since our free will gives us the final say regarding our choices in life, our spirit’s subconscious connection to our soul is thus trumped by our ego, which is where the human challenge ultimately lies. The ego wants to believe it is separate when, in fact, we are always connected to the soul and the entire Universe.
When our human body dies, our spirit leaves our body and returns to our soul, much like a raindrop evaporates from the ground and returns to the atmosphere. It is now time for the soul—at one again with the spirit—to evaluate its human life, and then learn and grow from it.
So when I refer to the spirit, I’m really just referring to the spirit within the body that has traveled to the physical dimension for a human experience. But when I refer to the soul, I’m referring to that eternal and ever-growing spiritual being that holds the memories and wisdom of all our lives and all our experiences.
The spirit and the soul are always one, which I know can be very confusing. But think of your spirit as that part of your soul that you know as you, the individual that is living with your personality, your name and your memories from this lifetime. And your soul, then, is every personality, every name and every memory of every life you ever lived. So the you that you know as you is only a portion of your soul, but it is still at one with it, just as your soul is only a portion of the Ultimate Oneness of the Universe (God), yet your soul is still at one with It (with a capital I).
For the purposes of this book and to avoid confusion, I might use the word spirit when it would be technically more accurate to use the word soul. That’s because this book is more about where our spirit goes following the death of our human body and less about our soul that has had hundreds or thousands of human life experiences. I think it might get confusing if I avoided the word spirit just because I should more accurately be using the word soul. So I sway toward understanding the afterlife as my priority over being strict to the point of confusion with my words.
© Copyright 2011 Bob Olson, BestPsychicDirectory.com, All Rights Reserved
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