Spirit And Soul

MON., OCT. 24, 1988, 7:04 AM
FARM, STUDY

Since this question of some distinction between spirit and soul has arisen, let Me offer you some light as this new morning dawns. Remember, once again, that this is a Teaching for you and may not be like unto what another understands, even from communication with Me. You can check Biblical references later also (and you did after My Teaching on Weather), and once more you’ll find lots of influencers, but nothing clear and unequivocal.

Therefore the relationship between spirit and soul is a matter of doctrine, and I am pleased with some diversity of doctrine. Just as it is part of My created world that people will differ in size, in strength, in skin color… in language and in thought patterns, so there will be differences in doctrines about spirit and soul. When you speak of this theme, however, feel free to offer your source… Me, the Holy Spirit.

Spirit is that aspect of each person that is actually and potentially in communion with Me. It functions as a triad with body and mind, but the distinction is not a clear one. In some ways spirit works counter to the mind, and I have offered you this observation many times. The purpose is to achieve balance, and this is what a strong, developed spirit does best. Yet it is also vital to know that in many persons spirit and mind function together smoothly and in cooperation. Imagination, for example, is an overlap area. Imagination is partly intellectual, based in the capacity to remember and know in certain ways and then manipulate knowledge and apply it in new ways. Imagination is also partly spiritual, as in being able to envision, from “contacts” with minds and spirits beyond your own, relationships and states of being that are quite beyond your present knowledge.

Spirit is the unifier and the balancer of all the other dimensions of being. Yet in each new being it has to be developed anew in each lifetime. Each baby is born with potential for the development of spirit just as with the development of the mind and of the body. Potential, of course, is an unproven and unprovable phenomenon. It is as much a concept as a fact. If a child develops and IQ of 140 (whatever that may mean) that shows there was the potential for high intelligence… but could it have developed even more? Another child has an IQ if 100… is this the acme of her potential or could she have developed a little… or much… further? Runners and swimmers continue to break records set by people in the past who supposedly had developed to their fullest potential. Do young people now have more potential or are they developing what they have more fully? Good questions.

The potential from which spirit develops in a person is his soul. Soul is the spiritual counterpart of genes and chromosomes that are the fount of potential for body and mind. A few souls are “brand new”… just beginning… but most souls in humans in the earth have some accumulated experience in spiritual realms… and some have been in the earth, even as humans.

Soul is the accumulation of all that you have been, that which links you with both the past and the future. Spirit is the active manifester of soul. Spirit acts. Soul accumulates. Soul is the inner source from which spirit receives strength; how much depends on how much the soul has accumulated… how much potential a person has.

The well developed soul offers the potential for a very spiritual life… and, again, this means a perfectly balanced life, but one fundamentally of service to Me and to others and to the earth and its myriad life forms. And then as you lead this life unified and balanced by spirit your soul develops even further, thus being able to offer more potential in its next sojourn, in the earth or elsewhere.