Just recently, I found myself confronted with the inner question: ‘How would I described what is called the ‘soul’?’
I said to myself: actually I know that. I have learned that it is the mediator, the connecting element between spirit and body, or personality. That it consists of different fluids. And that the special thing about my spiritual path, is the birth of the New Soul.
Strange, I have known this for so long.
But now that this question has moved to the front of my awareness, it stirs my being like the susurrus of a gentle spring breeze. And lo, as if in response, I come across a passage of text in the book, ‘De Gloria Intacta’, by Jan van Rijckenborgh:
‘Moreover, there is a life fluid, a powerful life principle that binds together the sevenfold bodily form, controls thought, keeps the auric being within certain limits, makes the life forces of nature that reach man through ether suitable for the body within a certain scale of vibration, and gives a certain measure of health to the material appearance. This life-principle is therefore the controlling and all-balancing substance of human manifestation; it animates and restrains, entirely according to the qualities and possibilities of the human being concerned. This life-principle, which proves to be “light” in all its aspects, is not only a vibrating cloud of force, but also proves to be a luminous “life” of its own, an intelligent, conscious soul or soul-form.’ [1]
It is as if a door opens within me. Yes, there is the vibrant being pervading my personality, animating my life.
I cannot touch it with my normal senses, but I can feel its presence instinctively. I feel a wide space open behind the narrow door of my consciousness.
***
When it comes to our ‘being’, the soul acts as the primary connection; it stands ‘in-between’. Receiving on the one hand, while radiating on the other. The soul expresses the ‘spiritual’ impulses wishing to be active in the physical. It ‘looks’ into both the heavenly and the hellish. It is the vessel that receives that which emanates from beyond our material world, while it animates that which lives in the material world.
The soul can be the luminous light of life – pure, tender and radiant – expressing the ‘power currents of understanding Love and spiritual Will’. [2]
It can however, also contract its blossoming radiance on a single point of energy, which the darker vibrations that express the lower aspects of the human being, and which are subject to death, can overshadow and make almost impalpable.
And it can be that this single point of contraction can vibrate as a dark silence, engulfed by the withering parts of the being that are without spirit, subject to the process of decay and death.
When the daily longing, the struggle for the pure, the luminous, fills my being – when the ‘dying daily’ increases, I know I am on my way.
No task confronted in the here and now can be bypassed or avoided simply because it appears too difficult, confronting, or unimportant. Every moment of life serves this ‘becoming’. Everything is a likeness, an imprint of the ideas that have their home in the ‘unchanging’.
Sometimes an inner tension and struggle develops – the heavier, earthly energies of ego-centricity and mortality active in the soul, resist the transforming and higher impulses of a spiritual Love. But it can also be that a gracious and gentle realisation opens the soul to these higher spiritual impulses.
In this struggle the ‘sun angel’ awakens, the light soul blossoms anew. [3]. It begins to breathe; it’s longing strengthens it’s inner light, which is received and absorbed by the ‘heavenly’. The heaviness of the earthly elements gradually lose their power.
***
I perceive that the actions of my personality should not avoid this struggle. The pain is too great when the souls’ light fades, because I engage my desires, stare mesmerised at my life’s circumstances, or am captured by my senses, and allow their voices to fill my being and drown out that which is important. I then experience a great inner emptiness, a gloomy silence, and the harmonies of joy are blown away.
For the ‘sun angel’ brings a special radiance into my life – love.
Everything becomes simple when I let go of my imagination, my ideas, my ego-will. And simply listen silently. Surrendering. ‘Lord, what do you want me to do?’
Then the ‘Angel of the Sun’ calls. Delicately and quietly. At first in simple images. Sometimes early in the morning. I get up and open the window at dawn. I hear the birds singing like a hymn of praise to the awakening dawn of life. The rhythmic sound of voices coalesces in the ether, floating like a cloud of thanksgiving. Listening.
I close the window again and sit down – the morning silence embraces me. Something within me grows, expands – hears, listens, feels. Sometimes I immerse myself into the innermost atmosphere of the spiritual community I belong to, into that which burns in its midst. Something within me gratefully perceives purity and power, a luminous clarity showing me where the path of being human leads – how it can be walked.
Every now and then I sense what lies beyond death. The dividing wall becomes more permeable. Yes, there is space behind death.
At other times, the shock, the pain of the reality that one day ‘I’ shall no longer be, is gone. Yes, that is a good thing – I am comforted by it because something else is there.
Words that I read suddenly open the spaces within me, and something of me enters into them – everything in my life is placed into a big picture that can be looked at – and it is good.
Sometimes, I feel very close to others.
***
The soul can connect to very different energy fields; it can immerse itself in them, draw from them. Accordingly, it can be both light or dark. Many people feel this at the moment. They experience a kind of mandate from an deep inner longing to give space to the soul, to react to its impulses, to reflect this both in themselves, and as a humanity – a soul that is open, connected, that can warm the whole.
It is not simply a matter of feeling ‘good’, but giving a voice to the insight that through the light-filled soul the ‘vertical’ path is erected, the connection with the highest, with the Truth, with the spiritual-eternal becomes possible. That Truth and the meaning of life manifest themselves in this connection – for me, for you, for the animals, the trees, the mountains, the wind and the sea.
That is why it is good to be aware of the energy fields that drive me – do they offer the power of the spirit for the unfolding of consciousness? Do they offer light and space, coming from the eternal, flowing into the eternal?
For only in this fiery space of light does the ‘sun angel’ unfold his wings with all his might.
***
It is not we human beings who seek the spiritual, the divine – no, it is we who are sought, longed for. The longing of the soul, is the longing of the spiritual within it.
For when the ‘sun angel’, the light soul, awakens, the spirit kisses it. Pulsating life, creative-loving, arises!
References:
[1] Jan van Rijckenborgh, co-founder of the spiritual School of the Golden Rosycross, repeatedly placed the soul at the centre of his reflections in his books and lectures. The passage quoted here is taken from Chapter X ‘The Mystery of the Soul’ of his book ‘The Christian Initiation Mystery – Dei Gloria Intacta’.
[2] Alice A. Bailey, American theosophist, names the inflow of these two energies as characteristic of the soul in the first chapter of her book ‘A Treatise on the Seven Rays. Volume II’.
[3] Alice A. Bailey uses this expression in the same chapter to describe the pure soul being that stands between the personality consciousness and the spirit aspect, the monad, and whose influence in man grows more and more on the spiritual path.
