SOUL VERSUS SPIRIT

What is meant by soul and what is meant by spirit? There has always been a lot of confusion here, because many teachers use the word soul, meaning spirit. And they use the word spirit, meaning soul. But for our purposes let us try and discriminate between the two.

Man has three aspects: the physical body, the subtle body, and the spiritual Self.

What we could interpret as the soul is the individuality. The individual soul is that which is not pure spirit. The individual soul is a combination of the spiritual Self of man and the subtle self of man.

The spiritual Self forever remains pure. It is untarnished, as the Gita would say; you cannot wet it; you cannot burn it; you cannot pierce it; you cannot destroy it. It remains eternal.

So, when we talk of an individual soul, we mean a combination of the spiritual Self of man and the subtle body. The spiritual Self is omnipresent, universal, eternal, immortal, but have been veiled or covered with the subtle body of man. That is termed as the individual soul.

So, to recap, the individual soul means a combination of the subtle body and the spiritual Self, minus the physical body.

……… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang US 1977 – 28