In resonance with the monks walking, with those inspired to walk with them or line the streets, this old document seems in vibrational alignment with humanity’s growing desire to join together for instead of against. We are joining, walking, crying for the Good: warmheartedness, peace, integrity, and shared well-being.

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The Soul is the many and the one. The Soul is consciousness, one consciousness that pervades all of cosmos. Soul is the essence of a bug, the radiance from the Sun, and that which stirs in all that lives. Soul is the pervasive central factor that sees, knows, and is.

As Soul begins to touch and permeate the daily mind, a person begins to experience the many as one and the one as many. We begin to have the experiential sense that me and you and the separateness these identifications imply are word traps; equally, that one’s experience of any and everything is this moment’s gift -a breathing and letting go. Consciousness is this experience of itself in whatever moment. This personal and unique experience is, at the same time, universal and reveals that a leaf and not the whole tree, a bird in the sky is not the sky, and that a warm breeze is not the Sun. The moment is an experience of consciousness but is not consciousness.

The majesty of the Soul is that it is the Oneness in the Many. Soul is the Knower, that which Understands, and that which is Uninvolved yet within. The Soul is so great as to be a state of Bliss, Equanimity, Poise, and Power. Soul is also the source of these.  Spirit is more and transcendent to Soul’s inclusivity and full majesty. Spirit is the source, like the moisture in the air is the source of rain or snow. Spirit is a supernal lawful flow, a Spark that will display as Life.

All who tread the Path eventually begin to turn and face the qualities of the persona and how personal force has conditioned all sense of what is real and unreal, right and wrong, painful or pleasurable. The conditioning personality rubric has determined direction, largely through desire and aversion. An aspiring person begins to realize that there is not only something untrue with this view but also with the eyes that see it, the choices that made it, and the thoughts that display and reify in the mind.

Are there different levels of experiencing Soul? It is reasonable that the “level” has much more to do with one’s own apparatus than to verticality or horizontality ascribed to the Soul. One might open and it be a method using the thoughts of vertical or inner, etc, but the Soul has not moved; nor has the person. Softening and opening is happening. As we soften and open to the Wholeness within, thought-forms that the mind has used to make sense and rationalize its reality are realized as limitations to one’s own innate Oneness, and what can be experienced and thereby Known. One realizes that Soul, in its own right and majesty, is unlike anything that the personality thinks it understands or thinks it knows. Soul is the radiant heart of Being.

• from March 2002