Soul

The word ‘soul’ is significantly related to the word ‘breath’, their connection referring to the subtle, higher, divine, life-giving aspect of the body. Thus, in the myth of the Creation (2:7) of the Christian tradition, God creates man in his own image and likeness: “Then the Lord God took dust from the ground and made man, and breathed into his face the breath of life; and man became a living being“. Also in the multi-millennia-old yogic tradition, the term jivatman, which designates the embodied human soul, comes from the Sanskrit verbal root jiv, which in the English translation means “to breathe.” The words ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, which refer to the living essence of the human being, implicitly relate to the notion of breathing and the breath. In the spiritual traditions of mankind, the awakening of the soul is an essential condition and stage on the path to inner fulfillment, all the efforts of aspirants being oriented in this direction.

The notion of the soul is very complex and it should be noted that, in this respect, the Chinese initiatory schools distinguish on the one hand a so-called higher soul, which would seem to be very close to the very elevated and pure vibration of the supramental, and on the other hand, they distinguish a so-called lower soul, which represents the instinctive and changing aspects of the human being. In Orthodox Christianity, the structure of the human being is seen as a binomial: mortal body – immortal soul, and the soul, in turn, has a lower aspect, called the “suffering part”, which is subject to suffering and the bondage of the senses, and a higher aspect, called the ” non-suffering part”, which is beyond the gross influence of the instinctual. In the Catholic doctrine, the soul occupies a middle position in the structure of the human being, which is ternary: corpus, anima and spiritus. In the yogic tradition, the soul is intimately connected with the supramental sheath, vijnanamaya kosha and the higher intellect, buddhi. In Western psychology, the soul is erroneously equated with the “unconscious” (the lower extension of the subconscious), although it is an aspect of the superconscious, corresponding to the higher Self of the ancient initiatic schools.