58 Soul-Spirit

“You can’t play the blues without soul.”

Attributed to Blues Piano Legend Ray Charles

Symbolic and multifaceted representation of a Soul/Essence

Symbols and Color

• Background Image: Though difficult to recognize, just like the Soul itself,
  the image behind the card is that of the Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone
  National Park. It is a seething, steamy fiery essence; which is nondescript and
  has a potent emanation of living Sulphur.
• Cupid and Psyche: the fated lovers between Spirit and Flesh. Means intersection of Essence and Personality. The material body and the immaterial soul.
• Alpha and Omega: signifying that every Essence is part of the greater
  Universe
• Treasure Chest: When one goes within, there is always some golden wisdom, or gems of delight.
• Nautilus Shell: The Spiral of Cycles and Soul Age
• Border Color: Brown – Augments Groups – Innate Qualities – Denotes “the good red road” of life.

Implications of the Upright Position or Positive Pole

The battery is the metaphor that Essence is the power pack of Personality. When all the verve for life has been drained, the battery put into our avatar (representation of Essence on Earth – your Personality Card 56), we are done, spent, and we die. (see Card 76 – Cycle-Off ) On the side position is the statue of the Myth of Cupid and Psyche, from the Louvre in Paris. It is a potent metaphor to this card since it is the star-crossed love affair between the god (Spirit) Cupid, and the human (Personality) Psyche. The two could only meet at night during dream time, and then Psyche was never to actually look upon her love, lest it would break their agreement; and he would leave. To the Personality, Essence often feels allusive.

Card messages in the Illuminated position.

+ Essence

(Being, Spirit, Core, Causation, Element, Root, Atman, Elan, Pneuma, Soul, Agency)

1. At the core of every thing, there is an Essence, or center, from which radiates the source of life force. Root what you do into this power and you will be guided. Great faith is required in the foundation of your very being.
2. Go deeper for the core motivation. Beneath the surface, another goal or intention is directing. 
3. In music, it is said, “if you ain’t got soul, the music is just sound.” You can play it, but you don’t feel it.” The essence of life is the spice you bring to it. Dip into your well and feel, don’t think. It is always there. Have you forgotten what it feels like?
4. Are you looking deep enough for the core motivation? Beneath the surface a different outcome directs. Find the real center.
5. Congratulations! You have just found the Essence of the situation. Golden wisdom lies within it.
6. You hear in gyms and workout rooms “work on your core.” Well, that is the same message but with a larger implication. Both with strengthen your guts, one physically the other spiritually. Your Will is your source of self-determination (Card 57). Go after it and gain access by striving for/in your life.
7. Review your dreams. They have messages for you. Your daydreams count, too.
8. Imagine that you are running life instead of life running you? Even if the whole concept is nonsense, one thing is for sure, you will feel a lot better about the process and the outcomes.
9. Acting as if you were part of something larger, something greater than yourself, provides a potency to your resolve. No need to believe it is GOD, but believe it is YOU driving YOU! That is biggest force you can touch in with is within you.
10. Essence is Personality’s creator. Whether from on-high or from DNA, it is essentially the battery pack. When you are in-touch with it, you receive the clearest instructions. You might feel as if they are on delayed timer, or after the fact, but recount what you have been given and consider it with great analysis.
11. The eyes are the window to the Soul. Make eye contact with someone and share yourself.
12. To be in your personal integrity with yourself, you may have to act in ways that others might not like. If you are in this spot, do it with dignity, humility and love.

Quotation Illustrating this concept…

• “What is uttered from the heart alone, will win the hearts of others to your own.” ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• “True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.” ~ Albert Einstein
• “Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Implications of the Reversed Position or Negative Pole

The man crossing his fingers is making a blind choice in his book of life. Because he is out of touch with Essence, he feels blind to what his happening. His actions displaying an old fashioned belief in luck, good or bad. Belief in blind luck or dumb luck is a comfort for some to explain circumstances that appear beyond their ability to understand, or seem overwhelming (see Card 40), let alone actually have choice about. Fate and destiny are popular themes which imply that anything that happens to us is somehow predestined, and therefore, out of our control. Not everything is in our control, however, the way we respond is far more likely to be.

Card messages in the Shadow position.

– Fate

(deterministic, pawn, ablution, effect)

1. Fate is the idea of refuge used by those who’d rather believe that the choice of their destiny is controlled by something outside of themselves. Are you allowing circumstance to guide you and not being proactive?  It might be OK, but stay ready to act.
2. You have unleashed the forces of unintended consequences. Backtrack and find the thread of where it began. Other possibilities may be found.
3. Whenever to abdicate choice, a choice in itself, you have let loose the forces of fate. It takes you on whatever journey, no matter how pleasurable or bumpy, to a destination not of your conscious desire, but where some learning or remembrance may still reside. Are you willing to pay attention?
4. Sometimes, to “thine own self be true” simply means you act in a way that others might not like. If you are in this dilemma, do it with dignity, humility and love.
5. Tempting as it may be to leave things to fate, you never know which choice is the predestined one or not. Quit stalling and calling it destiny.
6. Fate is just chance that intersected with the trajectory of your own unconscious patterns in the circumstances where you find yourself. The other part of the definition is that you take no notice or responsibility for allowing the situation you’re in. Choices influence everything: sometimes momentary, sometimes life path. How did you get to this point?
7. Was it meant to be? Or was it luck? Deep within you know which is which. Stop misusing ‘karma’ and the ‘law of attraction’ as rationalizations for failure to be accountable to a lack of planning or a poor plan.
8. If you are constantly at effect of life, i.e. perceive yourself a victim of circumstance, maybe you should try recasting your narratives about those circumstances AND then get some new circumstances to be a part of.
9. If you aren’t directing your life, life is directing you. If you like where it is taking you, great! If you feel like a pawn, why not at least pretend you have a choice? Then notice what happens as a result.
10. There is more power here than you realize. Stop letting the situation act upon you and act upon it.

Quotation Illustrating this concept…

•  “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” ― John Lennon
•  “We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming – well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.”  ― Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses
• “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” —Carl Jung

Relevance in the Michael Teaching

The Soul, or in this teaching the Essence, is the individual’s unique exposition of the TAO first created as unique particle of light with its own energy.  Cast or spawned as Michael phrases it is a refraction of one of the primary rays of light that happens when the complete white light of the TAO is placed in front of a prism of Creation.

The Essence, paradoxically, is a quantum singularity in itself the Soloverse, and yet resides in another larger, more expansive and inclusive amalgam the Universe. Within the narrative of the Michael Teaching the Essence bears the single point of focus from which each person expresses their beingness. As to being in a body, a corporeal incarnation of that Essence, the manifestation is formed with building blocks, the waves to the particles of light, which form an unmatched yet structurally similar biochemical offspring which we think of as living beings. Once in a body, Essence works through the Unconscious, guiding you through a path where your actions and reactions seem random or predetermined but in some way out of your direct control. This is the motivation of Essence. But when a conscious Self begins to emerge, and the talents, aptitudes, memories, values, and principle objectives born of a synthesis or fusion of both realms, then a person commanding their own power, setting sail in directions of their choosing, but guided by the winds; sometimes being pushed with terrific advance while others tacking into them holding on for dear life. And it is life, in the physical form, which the Essence wants to experience when it creates you!

Personality (Card 56), is constructed with and of the Overleaves, tempered by Soul Age, and colored by the content and conclusions of past lives. It is the Essence’s vehicle to sojourn on the Physical Plane. The requirements of Ego, survival, may elicit fear and cause it to block clear access to its source.  But Ego does not eliminate Spirit entirely, but disconnection from an ongoing source can make it stale, repetitive, and become rank with fear. In either case, what we think of as Spirit or someone being spirited, shows a life force contained within an individual energy signature as unique as a fingerprint, DNA architecture, and neural pattern. So the phrasing that “you are God” as some Eastern religions and New Age adherents suggest; the criticisms issued by fanatical evangelical or fundamentalist movement: Moslem, Christian, Judaic, Hindu or any other offshoot like Mormanism, Scientology and the Unification Church, does NOT preclude the existence of THE GOD or Supreme Intelligence or TAO as we refer to it. NO! What it does do however, is exactly the opposite of what many of these religious sects seem to disavow: personal responsibility as a creative force. The force of Essence!

And no matter what evidence of one’s existence is, grand or miniscule, it is the ripple effect which alters the course of all human affairs, whether you deem yourself to be a grain of sand hitting the water, or a meteor crashing into an ocean causing great waves. You are Spirit, you are the Essence of God stuff, and you are, as a human being, empowered with an ability-to-respond, not just react, to your lives.

Thus stipulating this core ability, is it essential to grasp that no matter what story or what justification one offer’s themselves or the world, YOUR actions and reactions are within your volition and rights and you are accountable to them. Acceptance of that Universal Truth is not required, but denial of it provides no exemption from it.  No attribution to or in declaration “I do this in God’ name” has anything to do with the Creator, but the lack of recognition of and taking responsibility for one’s choices. Let us let GOD off the hook!

Essence/Soul/Elan/Spirit or whatever you call a central Executive Function of your choices, encounters opportunities to experience life by being alive. The TAO unleashes beings into life for a multitude of lives to interact with every possible permutation. I call it the A-Z Soul experience. But depending how you as an individual decide to deal with life’s propositions you might simply act as an asshole, instead. The one thing that is a clear demarcation about your existence, is the attitude you choose to face it with: openness to awe, kindness, and courage. Or, closed-mind or heartedness, callousness, and cowardice. Those are internal choices of the A-Z Soul. But when caught in the embrace or trauma of the Personality, it is easy to regress or retreat into the asshole.  Your choice. But just for fun, what kind of asshole are you? (List to be posted.)

Cultural Meaning

Few concepts are more fundamental to the entirety of the human experience than that of the Soul. Declaring it to be an absolute object in time and space is far less relevant than its symbolic or metaphorical implications. From the advent of Scientific Determinism, the new fate so to speak; the vary existence of a soul itself is constantly a source of derisive debate and social grandstanding.

But the debate is misguided unless one speaks to the issue of permissive unaccountability that a Soul, as a gift from a Abrahamic God, endows some special dispensation to the perpetrator of cruelty or atrocity in the name of that God. Acts, which at both extremes totalitarians and terrorist alike engage, are laced with the common thread that God, or whatever higher force, gave them sanction to carry out.

The Soul of anything refers to the core of it. Its center! To imbue something or speak of it as having a soul or an essential quality which defines the thing or to differentiate from other things is useful; but also natural to human consciousness. If for no other reason, this one alone, in my opinion, makes acceptance and applicability of the Soul concept so completely indispensable, that to discard, diminish or deny it is a monumental waste of energy and by far the most misguided and misapplied use of our attention.

Can’t humans get a handle that it is the tangible universe which is our most immediate and governable concern? Worrying about the afterlife effects on a part of you which now have no control over accept whether to seek it out for counsel, is for the most part ludicrous. My words seek neither to confirm or deny one point of view over another; but to assert that we are missing the point all together!

The collective Soul of humanity is here on Terra Firma…Mother Earth. And though I choose to believe there is some larger force at work, it is a belief which neither distracts, nor relinquishes my attention on our journey here.

by Stephen Cocconi © 2011, Updated 2024

For a Motivation Cards Reading or Channeled Consultation call: 209.768-4956 or email Stephen at channeling@themichaelteaching.com