What is Soul?

Soul is the experience of personal depth, of personal experience, of personal power and limitations, of personal imagination, feelings, thoughts, sensations, and intuitions. The mythical movement is in and down. It is connection with history, persons, places, objects and life enhancing processes (i.e. work, play). We have connection to our bodies but they are seen mainly as expressions of inner selves (i.e. we smile, we wear certain clothes). We may be "spiritual" but that is done because it involves a community and has a feeling of inwardness.

Contrasting Soul and Spirit
Spirit is the experience of attraction to transpersonal experience. The focus is moved away from the personal towards insights about consciousness or life itself. The mythical movement is up and away. It is movement towards divinity or the cosmos, freedom from the hold of our emotions, history, persons, places, objects, and processes which bind us to the everyday world. It is also dramatic movement away from that which holds us physically---our bodies.

Differs From Most Religious and Philosophic Views
The above definition includes no comment on the existence of the Soul as something that precedes the body or survives the body. It says nothing about whether the Soul is eternal or mortal. Nor does it comment on its origin. Instead, it stays close to how we can experience the Soul. As Thomas Moore says: "Soul is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves."

Definitions that give Soul transpersonal existence or divine origins are really definitions under the influence of Spirit. Following this Spirit laden approach moves us away from experiencing the Soul here and now, through our heart and guts. Instead, Soul is explained in terms of the past (i.e. reincarnation of the soul) and future (e.g. transmigration of the soul). That approach teaches more about Spirit than it does about Soul and moves us to a life berift of Soul.

What is Body?

Body is the experience of the senses, our relationship to space and other objects, awareness of the inner sensations within us, and a recovery of the sense of Now.
Edward Albee in his book, Desert Soliatire speaks directly to the objective Body awareness:

"For my own part I am pleased enough with surfaces. In fact they alone seem to me of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child's hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of friend or lover, the silk of a girl's thigh, the sunlight on rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind---what else is there? What else do we need."

To confront, immediately and directly if its possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities. Hard work, that's for sure...to see the world this way requires a disciplined approach."The disciplined approach begins with learning the difference between Body and Soul. For us, these two are closely mingled. We think we know our bodies but we actually use our bodies to represent Soul. The clothes we choose, the way we walk, our mannerisms are there to express us, not so much to express the body. We use dance to show our feelings, we make a fist to show our anger, we wear blue rather than brown because it makes us look slimmer so that we can be "attractive." Body is there, but it is so enmeshed with Soul it is hard to give it room to be.
Room to be comes with quieting the Soul and simplfying awareness to the Now. The Now of inner sensations. What do we sense in every area of our body? What do we sense on the skin? How do we move? How much space do we take up? Focusing inward teaches us about the Body's world of matter and energy. Do we really know the world's matter? Its hardness? Its ability to take up space? Its ability to have borders? One object's features versus another's? How well do we know our energy, the energy that arises when are emotions heat up? When our instincts become arroused? Perhaps, the largely unknown force called by some "Chi"?

For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the Earth, my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race; my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my very own self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the water.