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| SOULS | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Good humour is the health of the soul, sadness is its poison. - Stanislaus |
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| Souls... something everyone has wondered about at some time during their lives... no doubt. But what is a soul? Who has a soul? Where do souls come from? These questions and more were discussed at a mailing list I'm on, and I'm going to post some of the answers by two of the participants; Johanna Sabine and Anufa Ellhorn. What Johanna and Anu posted mirrored my thoughts on souls so well, that I decided (with their permission) to simply put their insights up here, along with a posting by Violet, another woman on a different list, whose theory on where souls originated from, is just fascinating :-) |
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| What is a soul? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Anu: A soul is the inner being of everybody and everything. Sometimes the soul is "connected", this means for me in contact with the being ( so one can get information that is stored from all past and future lives, all the questions, in the universe can be answered), sometimes she is not (that means the brain works on its own behalf) and most of the time there are a few communication knots, so we do not get the full potential. Johanna: To me, it is the divine being within us, the eternal being in us who does not die, fade away or become extinguished, but re-incarnates to learn. Laughing Koala: My thoughts on the matter are like both Johanna and Anu's. The soul is our divine being, which comes from Divinity and the lifeforce itself. When Anu speaks of the soul being "connected" or not, I see it in respect to the Higher Self... the part of our soul which knows all, and keeps all in their grasp. So if we are connected, we are in touch with our Higher Self.... this is not the case with everyone, many people find it hard to get in touch with their Higher Self and instead, deny this connection, breaking it and letting their brain take over. |
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| Who has a soul? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Anu : Everything has a soul, even if it sometimes does not look like that .)) But then there is just one of those knots... Johanna: Every being alive has one - for me this includes human beings, animals, plants, stones, and our home planet, our Mother Earth. |
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| Do all humans have a soul? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Anu: as above Johanna: Yes, of course. |
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| Do animals have souls? If yes, does that include ALL animals? Do plants have souls?? |
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| Anu: Animals and plants do have souls but on a different level. Their souls most of the time are more connected to the "pool" as I call it, then to the individual animal or plant. As usual there are exeptions, some animals are very consious, their souls are more individual, able to be creative and so developping faster than the rest. I think that these are "human" souls that wanted to learn something specific not available in human bodies. Same with plants, sometimes one can feel that there is "somebody home who has a name" and sometimes itīs pure lifeforce. Johanna: I believe that all animals have souls, but on different planes - an animal which is loved by people individually (cat, dog, horse etc.) has a sort of "personal soul", like people. I believe that sometimes people choose to reincarnate as animals ( I met a special cat who surely was a human being sometime!). I believe that wild animals, like birds, deer, foxes, wolves etc. have collective souls to share, like Sheldrake explains in his theory of the "morphogenetic fields". When you have personal contact with a wild animal, learn from each other and love each other, the wild animal's soul will grow and expand and become a "personal soul". I think that animals like flies, ants, spiders etc. have some sort of collective soul or spirit on a different level, but not personal. I think trees have more developed souls/spirits than flowers, sort of what I explained about animals. |
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| Do "inanimate objects" have souls? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Anu: As long as they are alive and have natural roots, see above. A skull of a fox as an example, has a kind of imprint of the soul that lived in it. A kind of taperecording from that particular life. Johanna: As long as they are of natural origin, I believe they can hold some form of spirit, experience, thoughts and feelings of someone who held them. I think they can hold the spirit or essence of what they are (crystals, rocks, wood, leather, fur, bones), I LOVE Anufa's expression of a taperecording of that particular life or contact, and I agree to that. |
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| Where do souls originate? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Anu: There is a big pool somewhere, out of time and space, where all the souls want to go (and came from). Every experience takes her further and at the end, she goes back like a raindrop into the sea. Still a soul but with all the knowledge of all the souls around her. No borders, everything connected, like the waters of the ocean. Johanna: I believe they come from the Goddess, or the Divine. Somewhere there's a place they all come from and go back to, and every soul is an individual, it is incomplete and wants to learn, to grow and join others, and every soul chooses new tasks to learn, they nourish each other with love and are nourished with love from the Goddess/the God. |
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| In the case of human souls, when does the soul enter the body? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Anu: I do not have kids, but I worked my shiatsu with pregnant women lots of times. There I had some interesting experiences...Some babies are at home-having the soul connected, gives me a feeling of a house with lights on and people in the kitchen- from the very beginning, sometimes there was nothing till they were born. One time I could tell that my patient was pregnant 5 days after conception, cause the little one was at home (the girl did not belive me in the beginning, but one week after that the test was positive .))) So I think that depends on the baby, whether there is a soul standing on the edge and waiting or not, so to say. Johanna: I have been pregnant 2 months before I lost the child, and I had the feeling that the soul was there when I learned of my pregnancy and contacted my baby. I was outside under my favorite apple tree in a full moon night, and suddenly there was the little soul of my daughter within me, her name, her face, everything. |
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| When does the soul depart the body? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Anu: Departure is the same thing...whenever the astral body has a little walkabout, the soul is travelling with it. When you are seriously shocked, the soul tries to get out of that situation, and in very unpleasant circumstances, she does that too. As long as the body is still alive, I do not think, that she really can leave, but she can stay outside, just connected with the cord, like coma.When one is dead it depends how fast the soul can get the point. Sometimes she is leaving with the last sigh, sometimes she needs time "to make her mind up". Johanna: At the time of death, when all bodily functions die (heart, breathing etc.). I have been clinically death for 2 1/2 minutes, and I felt myself slipping easily and painlessly out of my body, watching everything from outside. The doctor who reanimated my body felt the shock when I came back into my body - since that time, I call my body "the temple of my soul". This experience was some initiation for me, a shamanic death to become reborn, and after the instant panic of "oh Goddess, I'm DYING" everything was peaceful, I felt a great relief, and I'm no longer that afraid of dying. |
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| Where does the soul go after departing the body? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Anu: I think she stays in the summerlands, to get fit for the next trip. Johanna: I believe that each of us has her personal place to go - to me it is Avalon, the Isle of Apples, the Tir-nan-Og or Land of Youth, to rest, to heal, to love and be loved, to play with others. Yes, I love the idea of the celtic Summerland, the feeling of being a child again, off school for summer, dreaming in flowery meadows, frolicking about with friends, relatives and pets. I believe we all come back from that "Otherworld vacation" to a new life when we are ready. This idea helped me a lot with the death of my baby in pregnancy, we will meet again, and the time or how long it takes does not really matter. |
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| If you believe in reincarnation, how does the soul travel from body to body? Is there a period of time between the end of one life and the beginning of another? If there is a delay between lives, where is the soul during this time? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Anu: As soon as the soul decides to change vessel, she can. There might be a rest but if she decides that she does not need one, then she leaves one body and enters the other. There is absolut free will for the souls when and what they want to do, as long as they are in the summerlands. I think that they even can choose the work they do during the next life. Unfortunately (communications knots) when she is inside the body, we do not always get the message .))) Johanna: See my answer to question 6. I believe that from that Summerland we go to a place where we choose our parents (together with the land where they live) and our tasks to learn, and I feel that we meet others in our actual lives we know from past lives, and who have chosen to meet us again. I have a dear friend where both of us are sure that we know each other since the beginning of time, and that we'll meet in every new life, again and again, and recognise each other. As to the traveling question, I think that the soul travels as a "light seed form" from the Summerland into the womb of a pregnant woman and starts taking on human form again. |
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| Violet's Theory on the Origins of Souls | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In the beginning, energy streams existed, however you care to think of "energy." Souls are produced when they cross and the energy interacts. This can happen by accident (chaos-souls) or by deliberate doing of some other power. Additionally, once a soul is created, it can split itself apart to become more than one - either by dividing itself and actually "losing" the original, or just sloughing off parts of itself. [Addition: or, these souls can deliberately cross the energy-streams to create other souls - I wasn't limiting this activity to "gods," a term which in this context is nigh meaningless anyway.] I'm not going to speculate as to how the "first soul" was created, but I have a sneaking suspicion it may be the chaos method Now how this translates into Otherkin - well, you can see (maybe? I hope!) from my drivel that you'd get "trees" of souls, "families" if you will that were all created by the same being or all were part of the same being up the line [that is: similar meaning/reason to their existence, they are somehow related in "parentage" or suchlike]. These I think are groups that are somehow related - for example, one such group is "elves," another "dragons," another "humans," another "Sirians" and so on. This is not to say there is necessarily a "group soul" for each species; merely that they are somehow related in their creation. As far as nonhumans reincarnated in human bodies, I think that's self-explanatory... (well, the mechanics anyway... not the "why!") I don't think souls stick to one species. I think a soul that is basically "human," that is, it was created with such a thing in mind, also live lives as plants and animals and all that. I do think that they tend to stay on the same planet, but then I really don't know how all us non-Earthkin got *here*. Intentional incarnation may have something to do with it - some souls choose to stay on Earth, others don't. I wonder what a human soul incarnating on an Elenari world would feel like - would zie call hirself "Otherkin" there? |
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