The Metaphysics of the Soul
The soul is the mediator between the spirit and the world through the "subtle" bodies
Much has been said of the soul, and as I have posted previously, much confusion has arisen from romanticized notions of the “soul”. But what really is a soul, and how does it operate? In this essay we will look at the interactive character or “metaphysics” of the soul. In a subsequent essay, concentrating on a sermon by Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, I will discuss the internal NATURE or essence of the soul.
The motivating question for this exploration: How can the soul appear to be rooted in the universal and eternal Spirit and, yet, simultaneously express itself on an individual basis bound to one’s present, unique, mortal life?
I’ve meditated upon this question for decades, and I have studied under many metaphysical traditions with their notions of the soul. I spent three years in hermetics, a year and half practice and study of Kabbalah (Judaic mysticism), a year and a half in a Christian seminary, several years of Zen and Mahayana Buddhist meditation and instruction, a lifetime of mystic Christian learning, and a seven-year relationship to a fairly well-known journalist and interviewer in the field of metaphysics.
None of these sources seemed to capture the complexity and seeming contradictions of this notion of a “soul” which serves as a bridge between two radically different realms— that of “spirit” (eternal, ethereal, and universal) and that of “world” (time- and space-bound, “dense”, and individuated).
The following is my particular integrated take on what the soul may be, how it may operate, and what it may serve.
First, before proceeding, it may be helpful to observe certain patterns: So-called “lower” manifestations of spirit (for instance, the denser human body) reflect those of “higher” manifestations (our “subtle” auric, astral, and etheric bodies) all grounded in spirit. We see this in repeating patterns from small to great and from low to high, the way atoms seem to echo solar systems which themselves reflect galaxies in our physical universe, for instance.
This tendency is summarized in this maxim from the Hermetic tradition: “As above, so below.” As I have mentioned in a previous essay, the spirit differs from all created things, including the soul, in that it has an eternal, uncreated nature. From this deathless ground of spirit, springs mortal life and those entities or “bodies”, like souls, that transcend lifetimes.
Here, in brief, are the created “bodies” that act as veils or filters to the raw, uncreated spirit and as helpmates of the soul for its own development. I will discuss them in greater detail after:
The human physical body houses the five senses— smell, hearing, seeing, touch, and taste, motivated by pain and pleasure, and equipped toward survival.
The auric body (aura) generates life energy or “prana” or “chi”. Its senses include instinct and intuition, electromagnetic perception (including awareness of elementals, “ghosts”, or energy beings from lower dimensions), as well as the all-embracing energy and intelligence of Mother Nature. The auric body is equipped to the help us perceive and navigate the primal, non-material, energetic aspects of our being. The auric body can be so powerful in enlightened beings that others can physically see it as a golden halo-like light or rainbow radiance about them.
The astral body contains the subconscious and unconscious records of all experience as well as paranormal capacities like psychic ability, lucid dreaming, and remote viewing. In near death experiences and “out-of-body” experiences, consciousness travels with the astral body and can perceive conversations happening down the hall and objects outside a hospital, for instance. There are significant dangers, however, if astral experimentation is tried by the uninitiated and untrained. Abuse, misuse, or even mere naivety around astral travel, tarot cards, or Ouija boards, etc. can result in injury to the aura and entry (and even possession) by energetic entities that feed on human energy. The astral body ostensibly can stick around consciously for up to a couple weeks after our physical death, allowing us to “see” and sense those we love on earth, before traveling on.
The etheric body comprises the medium of the soul in the same way the physical body houses the person. The soul is the superconscious, individuated aspect of spirit, much like the personality is to the person on a denser, more egoic level. The soul “feels” its existence and expresses its intentions through the etheric body, which translates and descends through the other “subtle bodies”. This is why we may get a unique visionary dream that registers in the astral body and even our waking consciousness, but proceeds from the soul and the etheric body.
Each body exists as both a kind of “house” as well as sensory organ for the body above it. The five senses of the human body, for instance, smell, hearing, seeing, touch, and taste serve as a informing and feedback mechanism to the auric body or aura (life force). If we experience long-term trauma, environmental insults, or frustration in spiritual growth, communicated and reinforced through the senses of the physical human body, those experiences may imprint not only on the body as an ailment like cancer, but in the auric, astral, and ethereal realms as a disturbance or injury. The soul and its etheric body, which encompasses all the other bodies, records everything that occurs in these bodies as lasting imprints to be accessed as needed and as one is desiring and ready for this information.
Thus, it is helpful to conceive of our total human “being-ness” as a nested set of spheres, starting in the most dense and short-lived (i.e. the human body) and expanding outward, with the larger, longer-lasting, more inclusive auric, astral, and etheric spheres/realms containing and governing the spheres underneath them (like Matryoshka dolls), yet with all bodies suffused by and emerging from spirit.
These realms act and interact simultaneously, thus creating confusion for our poor, box-oriented analytical minds. Hence, I recommend you tap into your more inclusive intuitive mind as you read further. It is so easy to confuse the term “spiritual” with quasi-spiritual dimensions, precisely because auric, astral, and etheric dimensions are non-material, and humans are primitive when it comes to distinguishing “subtle realms” (due to an almost non-existent spiritual education in Western cultures specifically). That which is closer to spirit can FEEL transcendent, even when a particular non-material realm may have its own unique governing laws, character, and nature.
These quasi-spiritual realms, energy fields, or dimensions of human existence work together to support soul development as intelligent “subtle bodies” of energy around us, equipping us for our journey through a metaphysical universe. In general, they serve as step-down electrical transformers, transmitting and matching the overpowering energy and creative will of the “most high” spiritual realms, to something we can handle at our level.
The soul development purpose of uncomfortable experiences (“the path of the moon”) is not to sadistically cause us pain or frighten us (any more than touching a hot stove and feeling pain is meant to “punish” us). And, let us not forget joy, love, and beauty (“the path of the sun”) which gives us peak experiences and draws us forward, rather than pushing us onward like the path of the moon. Painful feedback is meant to help us be honest with the limits of our present reality and growth and open to the larger and higher realities, healing energies, and intelligence above us. In religious circles, this is called accepting grace.
Mystics call these “bodies” or dimensions “veils” (i.e. filters), which both reveal and obscure the truer Light or larger spiritual Reality in tune with our maturity levels. This is a compassionate exercise, meant to prevent overwhelm or injury on our spiritual journey. Everything is oriented toward healthy, developmentally appropriate soul growth, greater spiritual intimacy, and ultimately greater knowledge of Love.
The human phyical body
It is said that “the (human) body is the temple of the soul.” Or more accurately that the human body houses the spirit:
Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?— 1 Corinthians 6:19
I believe this statement is true. However, I also believe there is an important distinction missing here: The soul itself is a kind of “body”— it is the body, and temple, of a larger spirit. It serves as a mediator and a medium through which the eternal and universal Spirit refracts and disperses itself. The soul contains the individuated human spirit (small “s”) in the same way the a waterfall is composed of droplets. These droplets form, as some Buddhists say, from an undifferentiated stream as water plunges over a precipice, cascade individually, and join into the stream again as droplets fully descend. I will discuss this more below in my description of the subtle “etheric body” that composes the soul.
The aura or auric body
How is it that we can discern people who are palpably sunny and radiant, not just by personality, but by “feel?” How is it that we can pick up on people that always seem to walk with an invisible gray cloud above their heads? This is the sensing of aura, an emanation from the character of a being that signals the non-material qualities of that being. Animals are very attuned to the aura, emotionally sensitive animals like dogs and horses in particular. We pick up on people’s so-called “vibes” as if we have a radar for creepiness, innocence, pessimism, and optimism. We do actually possess that radar in the language and senses of the auric body. We often override those auric senses or rationalize them away much to our disadvantage.
Our auric ignorance owes to the concentrated disenchantment and psycho-spiritual dumbing down that has taken place in modern societies which have transposed their “worship” and outsourced their judgement to spiritless technologies like AI (artificial intelligence). These so-called modern technologies lack even basic sensitivity or know-how toward spiritual phenomena, causing their adherents to dismiss spiritual or quasi-spiritual phenomena as “pseudoscience. However, the auric body is not simply theoretical. Kirlian photography can capture it and to a certain degree measure it. Biological organisms actually produce measurable light! These rays of light are called biophotons.
Noted biochemist and plant physiologist, Rupert Sheldrake, has developed a whole field of study around the auric body dealing with its communication and memory termed morphic resonance and morphic fields. If one takes the implications of this science, research, and theory seriously, it is possible that we could could contact anyone on the globe through an interface of our “morphogenetic fields” and possibly access information from all of human history simply by tapping into the records and information encoded in our shared DNA.
This auric sensitivity in the form of felt intuition and “sixth sense” is not really spiritual per se but a primal precursor to spiritual capability which serves as the sense organ for the astral body and its psychic and interpretive abilities (clairvoyance, clairaudience, and clairsentience, etc.). The auric body must be developed and tuned, much like the physical body, in order to have stable and healthy mental and emotional functioning.
The astral body
The astral body is the seat of thought and emotion. All the we feel emotionally and all that we think mentally affects the astral body, is stored in the astral body, and ultimately comprises the astral body. This spiritual notion of “karma” probably involves the accumulation of the weight of our traumas, evils, good deeds, vices, virtues, loves, hates, gentleness, and violence toward ourselves and others in the astral body. Analogous to physical obesity, if we have accumulated an excess of ill thinking, feeling, or behavior, we have to work it off or find a way toward some kind of forgiveness to re-establish health.
The astral body is also the medium of the unconscious (both collective unconscious and individual subconscious) where deeper-cycled archetypes reside and re-emerge throughout our lives and throughout human history to, again, instruct our souls toward intimacy with Spirit and, conversely, manifest the consequences of removal from or remoteness from spirit. In each choice we make, whether it is a refusal to “love our enemies,” for instance, or under-appreciate the miracle of pain-in-the-neck adolescent children, we lower or raise ourselves and become more metaphysically healthy or unhealthy, depending upon those choices. Again, accumulated spiritual consequence or karma.
If we are decadent, arrogant, or disrespectful of the gravity of our deeds, we can entertain or allow demonic powers and principalities into our astral field that can blow out, taint, or drain auric life “glow” and filter down to the physical body as disease or dysfunction. We can also invite in angelic energies to inform and uplift us in the form of prayer, meditation, contemplation, appreciation, gratitude, silence, and reflection.
The etheric body
“You are not a drop in the ocean; you are the ocean in a drop.”— Rumi, 13th century Sufi poet
We speak of “ascension” to greater and greater unity with the divine. The soul is basically the etherealized entity undergoing this development and ascension, the body or “record” of the soul-droplet’s spiritual development. Does the soul, then, last forever? So many people talk of an “eternal soul.” I think it is unlikely that the soul itself, the house of spirit, lasts forever, versus the spirit which dwells in the soul. The individual human spirit and the larger universal Spirit do both, I believe, last forever. The soul will outlast the entire age of the universe, but the soul is a body or vehicle created for a purpose, and like all created things (let us be reminded) must end, especially those that have completed their purpose, even if this ending only occurs after a nearly infinite span of time. .
Does the soul last from lifetime to lifetime? Yes, of course. The soul is the epigenetic recorder of things like karma and life experience across lifetimes in a similar way in which our own physical, mental, and emotional experiences register in our DNA. Are you saying we human beings reincarnate? Yes, that is one possible option that the soul can “choose” in conversation with the spirit. I do not think it is the only possibility (i.e. a “heaven” of higher realms free from pain and strife is also an option).
Reincarnation is widely understood and accepted by most religions throughout the ages, including early Christianity, before some of them became institutionalized and a new high-stakes “one-life-and-done” theology arose and stimulated allegiance to the church through a cultivated fear of death. In my opinion, this move was spiritually regressive. No compassionate God expects a one-and-done human life to be the end-all-be-all of spiritual enlightenment, much less salvation, when it can so easily and arbitrarily be plagued with trauma and unequal opportunity .
The soul “inhabits” (or is constituted by) what some esoteric traditions call an “etheric” body. This is a subtle body that houses and hosts the human spirit. It is the seat of transcendent consciousness. It is the place where the goodness of deep and abiding peace is experienced as well as agape or unconditioned, universal love. It is ultimately free of earthly concerns and experiences, even those, like karma, that seem to transcend lifetimes, but retains an imprint or soul memory of all experiences produced by the denser and younger human, auric and astral bodies.
According to some sages, the soul can ascend and eventually be absorbed upward in union with God or recycled downward, through a spiral of poor decision making and alienation from source spirit toward a “lake of fire,” which compassionately and pragmatically burns out and reconditions a soul that has descended too far to be rehabilitated from below, therefore requiring it to be redeemed from above.
The Kingdom of God is inside you and all around you
Not in a mansion of wood and stone
Split a piece of wood and I am there
Lift a stone and you will find me.— Jesus speaking in the Gospel of Thomas, from the Nag Hamadi library, early mystic Christianity
The soul and its etheric body, the “house” of the spirit, is where on finds the “heaven within,” the basis for the New Heaven and the New Earth, and the Kingdom of God. At its highest, it is a realm of overpowering light and goodness. It is presence without object, an “I am” without a predicate (without a “that I am”). Split the wood and you will find this heavenly presence, this “I am”. Turn a stone and you will find it. Look deep inside and you will discover it. The soul and its etheric body is the threshold of spirit, into a transcendent dimension beyond imagination— the Way and the Life of new life and perhaps life’s greatest adventure.
Please let me know your notions of the spirit or some compelling spiritual experience you have had that opened your mind, heart, body, and soul to a another way of knowing who you are at your deepest and highest.