The most prevalent misconception formed in trying to understand the nature of the soul, comes by viewing it as being the body and personality of the body. The soul isn't the body as a person, located in a particular place and time, confined to live within a specific set of circumstances, it's the nature and character of the mind that's carried forth from one incarnation to another. We all have what you might think of as two natures. A lower, animal nature formed as our body, and a higher one that's divine and creative in nature, both of which combine into one, forming our character. Our higher, conscious mind acts to project itself as an archetypal being into the lower plane of the material realm as a part of the subconscious mind, inherent in all of Nature, which is what we can think of as our material mind that acts to form what we perceive as a material reality. It then combines with its own lower mind as a means of expressing through the 3-dimensional material construct formed as a means of experiencing itself. As we form experiences of our self through the reality we act to create, we come to know ourselves through our own experiences, and we shape our character by how we associate with our own creation.
Our lower subconscious mind, formed as our physical (animal) body, is primarily emotionally driven and instinctual in nature, and acts on impulses to fulfill perceived needs of survival and generation, and forms imaginary realities out of its emotional states in place of what exists fundamentally as an objective and neutral reality. Our conscious mind is creative, rational, self-aware, and creates reality by turning thoughts into material forms in the imagination. This is the aspect of our mind that has the power to judge, evaluate, discriminate, reason, and make calculated decisions based on our own thought processes. Our conscious mind can internally generate its own emotions, which arise naturally in relation to how ideas are formed the imagination, while also having the tendency to be run by the very emotions it acts to generate. When the two minds combine, our higher abilities tend to be governed by the emotional delusions formed by our subconscious, and thought is used to not only construct the world of our emotions, but also as the means of validating them through reasoning.
Our Personality and IdentityOur lower nature forms what we call our personality, which comes in a completely unconscious and natural way through the dynamics we were trained to as a part of our formative conditioning, and our higher nature forms our identity, which comes by how we see ourselves in relation to others and our life situation and what roles we naturally take on as a result. While these two are compatible in the sense that each one systematically evolves out of the other as an interdependent unit, when we allow our lower emotional nature to run us, we fail to recognize a higher part of ourselves nested deep within, and we mistakenly build our identity out of our material existence.
We develop our character by always playing out emotional dramas that are fantasies oriented towards acquiring material possessions and status of some kind, and develop our character primarily out of a selfish, self-absorbed mindset. We become like an animal and lower being consumed by our own emotional dramas, made heart-sick with fear and anxiety, and ultimately condemn our soul to a life where we unconsciously self-administer our own pain and suffering. We literally shape our character to be an unconscious being manipulated constantly by outside forces inherent in our life situation, rather than using it as the means for consciously creating ourselves by actively directing our own higher mind of thought in how we experience ourselves and the world around us.
A Prolonged Case of Mistaken IdentityMankind suffers from a fundamental case of mistaken identity where we shape ourselves out of our lower nature. We don't realize we are a dual, multidimensional being capable of directing our own lower, subconscious mind in using our body and physical circumstances to experience ourselves in whatever way we choose to. We become who we are through how we create experiences of ourselves. Many don't even realize that they are the ones creating their own experiences through internal processes. When we create out of an unconscious state, we don't comprehend how it is we're shaping ourselves by what qualities and character traits we're utilizing in a consistent manner to not only construct our reality through our perception of it, but also maintain and direct how it continues to unfold.
Once an illusion is built and set in motion, we exist in the center of it as a direct experience of ourselves as that reality, and don't know to get out of it, because we don't realize we're the one creating it. We're always acting on ourselves to shape ourselves through an interaction of outer forces set in motion by inner forces of the same kind and type. We imagine life as happening to us by outside forces beyond our ability to influence or direct them. Because we're experiencing it, it seems real to us, and we don't realize we're the one forming it by how we're thinking about it and perceiving it through a predominantly emotional state. We get caught up and hopelessly lost in our own unconscious delusion.
In many cases, everything becomes a doggy-dog world where you're always struggling just to survive and try to somehow be alright with everything that's happening around you. Surviving and maintaining some form of security and safety becomes your most basic concern and trying to maintain this becomes your constant life's work. All the while, without directly realizing it, you're using certain parts of your character and personality consistently, and as you use it to maneuver and experience reality, you develop it into a strength. When you're driven in the most basic sense by fear and stress of some kind, you develop whatever parts of your character are correlated with it and brought out in response to it as a means of trying to work with it. Outside pressures act to stimulate and call forth corresponding inner qualities of the same nature, and together, form how we experience ourselves through the drama that naturally ensues out of them.
 Because this is all happening at the subtle, semi-unconscious level of partial awareness, you start compromising yourself through a process of negotiating your character in whatever way you deem necessary to establish safety and control and be alright. The more difficult or intense the situation is, the more willing you become in compromising your own integrity. As you're pressured in some way, you start moving past previous rules you set for yourself as standards, and you begin rehashing things. The thought of losing whatever it is you've built your identity out of, causes extreme grief and deep feelings of insecurity that consumes you with a deep and pervading feeling of anxiety that seems almost unbearable. Most people, when pushed to the end of their ability to cope, will collapse with mental fatigue, and sell their soul to whatever force is threatening to take them out. This is the adage of selling your soul to the devil. The devil is the archetype also known as the tempter who tests us.
When we build our identity out of our physical existence and personality, which is what the higher soul is, and the thought of losing the very thing we made ourselves out of, represents a form of death of our self. This phenomenon is what's referred to as the death of the ego, which, like all things born out of and sustained through a purely physical existence, is a misnomer, because the identity we form of ourselves as our physical reality, always dies with the body it was designed to sustain. All things of a material nature, no matter how solid and stable they seem, are temporary in nature, which means they are subject to a life and death process. The only thing that remains intact after death, is the memory we form of ourselves attained through our experiences formed while in a physical existence. We shape ourselves as our character (archetypal nature) through how we experience ourselves through our own mental construct. It's our character and who we are as a person, regardless of what our life conditions and circumstances are, that's eternal, because it's our internal nature as our own creation of ourselves, that's eternal in nature, and transcends the body at death as memory of ourselves.
This idea is represented symbolically by the concept of gold as being pure in nature, free of contamination by other minerals, while also being malleable, and able to combine with ordinary minerals as an amalgamation. As gold is melted and combined with other metals, they're fused together as the same thing, fixing and strengthening the gold making it hard and rigid, yet, when heated, the gold separates from the stone it was combined with, and returns to a state of purity, free of the properties inherent in the minerals it was bonded with. Gold, in this case, symbolizes the higher soul of the conscious and creative mind, that's comprised of archetypes that make up it's constitution as its character. Whatever traits we actively develop by how we move through our life experiences, whether unconsciously without realizing what we're doing while in the process of doing it, or consciously by realizing and choosing our actions, we shape and evolve ourselves accordingly.
When we shape our higher consciousness out of our lower, physical nature by building our identity out of it, we literally bond ourselves to it in mind and spirit. This means that we only know who we are when in physical manifestation of some kind, and when we die, which means our body and life situation dies, we (our soul) have to incarnate back into another body and similar life situation in order to know itself. Whatever we use to create ourselves as an ongoing and continuous experience of ourselves, we bond our soul (memory) and spirit (archetypal nature) to. Our higher, creative mind becomes a slave to our lower, instinctual nature, and we become like an animal, driven by the delusions formed out of emotional impulses and instinctual drives. Once we realize that we are the one creating how we experience the events of our life, and we begin identifying with our higher self as our conscious (self-aware) mind, and we shape our archetypal nature in a deliberate manner, we likewise form our self out of a higher, and much more dynamic way of being.
It's only our archetypal nature as our character, and how we develop it through our life circumstances and situations by who and how we become, that's eternal in nature and ultimately determines our soul's destiny. However it is we develop ourselves through what we experience as one life, which is a cycle of growth and development, becomes the basis for the next life, because its only our character as our internal nature that survives the death of our body and remains intact as an invisible field of organized information (memory) that vibrates with our soul's frequency. This field of living energy is organized as a formula of archetypal qualities that shape the characteristics of the material world as an outer image of itself. In the same way we develop our character through our life situations, we also shape our life situations according to our character. This is because one is acting to order and construct the other, and together, as an amalgamation, they act to set up the material circumstances that bring correlated experiences. The material world is always being structured by invisible forces, which also animates it with the activity it takes on. Attributes and qualities form characteristics which determine the shape something takes on and how it functions. Our higher soul makes our material reality as the means of using it as a vehicle and instrument for knowing itself through the direct experience of its own mental construct.
The Archetypal Nature of our CharacterThis idea appears very elusive because we tend to perceive ourselves as just being our physical body, rather than as we exist from a higher level of consciousness as the whole reality in which we live and experience ourselves as being a part of it. We don't grasp the fact that our reality is being shaped by our mind as the equivalent correspondence of our character. Just as we shape ourselves through our outer world, we're also shaping the world that reflects back to us our own mental nature, where they combine as an amalgamation to form a singularity as an experience. Our mind is an invisible field of intelligent forces combined in different degrees, measure, and potencies, forming a vibratory frequency. This frequency, which is unique to us as our state of being, is simultaneously shaping both our inner and outer reality to be a direct reflection of each other on smaller and larger scales. Our character determines the nature of the story we naturally act to tell, which can only be told congruently through the proper stage and setting. If we've shaped our character out of a consistent feeling of fear, we simultaneously project and perceive the reality of our fear, while developing all the traits called forth naturally in response to our fear. This way, we come to know ourselves through and as the reality formed out of expressing those traits.
Our higher soul of our conscious mind exists as a form of archetypal matrix or formula of qualities and character traits, which automatically form our reality as a construct of light, which we then enter (project) into as what we refer to as the lower material plane of the subconscious mind. The lower plane of physical reality is being projected downward as a unified construct, where once we enter into it as a part of it, we become unconscious of the fact that we're actually the one creating it as a way of experiencing ourselves and coming to know ourselves through our experiences. While we're in it as a fundamental part of it, having a direct experience of it through an unconscious state, we lose awareness of also being outside and above it, being the one who's also orchestrating it as a means of knowing ourselves through our own creation. The material world of formation is also what's referred to in Esoteric texts as the plane of knowledge of good and evil, and we only acquire knowledge of ourselves through experience that breeds understanding.
The Illusion of Life and DeathAnother fundamental illusion formed as a paradox we're always engaged in is our perception of what we call life and death, and what it means to be both mortal and immortal. While we refer to our material reality as being life, upon closer examination formed from a different perspective, we come to realize that this is death, because as soon as we're born into a physical existence, we are simultaneously destined to die. Life also assumes death as a cycle of growth and development. As we enter a material world formed as a cycle of time, or lifetime, where the time we spend here is temporary, and ends when our soul departs from our physical body, causing it to die. We experience our temporary reality in a fundamentally fixed and stationary manner, where change usually only comes over a long period of time as a limited movement based on internal development, which, when looked at in light of what's actually happening, is dead and often void of actually living.
Our higher soul, which is our mind, is a living field of intelligence forces that not only shapes our body and outer world while also inhabiting it, but is what also congeals, regenerates, and holds our material essence together as a single unit. When our soul separates and departs from our body, it's no longer alive and held together by energetic tensions, and begins disintegrating. It falls apart and returns to the mineral kingdom it was formed out of. The only life the body or any part of our natural world has, comes from the soul organizing and animating it. The molecular structure of our body in constantly being regenerated by our soul through life and death processes where it recreates it through memory of itself. This is because only the higher soul is creative and able to construct reality as an outer projection or mirror image of its mental paradigm.
It's the natural forces operating as a field of organized information at work in shaping, vitalizing, holding together, and consistently reconstructing its own image of itself. It's only this higher aspect of ourselves as our soul's memory and constitution that transcends the physical world when the body dies that's actually alive. Its what orders, assimilates, metabolizes, and animates its own material construct (which comes as a reflection of its own inner thoughts) as a way of knowing itself through a direct experience of itself. The soul is eternal as life itself and what brings life to all things. It lives eternally outside the illusion of time, because time is created through the space formed as a 3-dimensional material (light) construct. As we form dimension through the movement of conscious energy between polarized aspects of itself (vibration), we also create time as the time it takes to move from one place to another within that construct. As soon as the spatial form ceases to exist, so does time. Time is only relevant to the material world.
The Principle of CreationAll of what we call universal principles exist in every aspect of what we perceive as reality, and operate in a consistent manner as the fundamental process of creation. This means that the same processes that occur at the microscopic level are also taking place at the cosmic level. This isn't referring to the material formation itself, but to the invisible forces that shape and animate the material formations. Just as our spirit constantly regenerates our body out of memory, causing us to go through a life cycle where we're born a baby, then steadily grow to maturity until we hit a high point and then begin declining until we die, we're simultaneously reshaping our material world in the same way through the same process of self-regeneration.
While we can have a tendency to believe that others and the world around us exist independent of us as a stationary idea that has nothing to do with us, upon closer examination of our own psychological processes, we may discover this isn't at all true. We're only capable of knowing reality through our perception of it. Our perception is formed out of the model of our mind, called our paradigm. Our paradigm can be thought of as a dynamic series of mental filters that all work together to form the lens we look through to perceive the outer world. Each filter is produced by our values, beliefs, preferences, attitude, and memories, which act to sift through and separate out (order) only certain parts of what exists as a greater whole, and reconstruct (organize) the selected parts so they reflect back to us our model of the world.
https://drlindagadbois.com/the-physics-of-the-soul-the-nature-of-our-character-and-the-holographic-nature-of-reality/
