In reality, soul and essence are two aspects of the same thing, just as the body and protoplasm are two aspects of the same thing. For us, for our experience, which is all we have, they are nondual, they are our nonduality. Because they are nondual it is not possible to differentiate them completely. More accurately, we can differentiate them but we cannot dissociate them, we cannot make them two separate and independent realities. How we see their relationship is bound to be somewhat arbitrary, depending on how we differentiate them in thought or experience. We can see essence as a potential of the soul, as its most primordial potential; but we can also see the soul as one of the aspects of essence, as the aspect of life. We can see essence as the ground of the soul, but we can also see the soul as the wholeness whose very fabric is essence. Both possibilities arise in direct experience and in advanced stages of the inner journey the difference between the two gradually dissolves. At this point we experience an essential soul, or a dynamic essence, indicating a complete and total coemergence of essence and soul, reflecting the primordial nonduality of Reality. (See chapter 23 for further discussion on this point.) – The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, ch.8
We can now formulate in the language of systems theory our previous discussion of the soul as an organism of consciousness. Understanding the soul as an autopoietic system illuminates various properties that are central to the soul’s development, functioning, and transformation. In short, the soul is an open dissipative dynamic system of consciousness capable of self-organization. The soul, like all living organisms, lives within a context, in this case a space-time environment with emotional, mental, spiritual, social, aesthetic, political, and cultural dimensions, among others. She is in constant exchange with her environment, and through the metabolism of this exchange she develops and matures. She constantly dissolves inner structures and builds new ones, through the interaction of her inner potentials with her contact with the environment. – The Inner Journey Home, Appendix E
It is because we are the conscious current that streams in and through our external contexts that we tend to call such contexts our life. These contexts become more our life the more we fill them, the more that the current of life, which is the soul, impregnates them. In other words, as the knowledge and freedom of the soul grows, we have more life not because of how various or how rich is our external context, but because of how present we are in it. The external context does not give us life; we give life to it. We are the life that we live, and the deeper we realize this the more we have life. – The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, Ch. 8
The soul, then, is not simply an organism of consciousness, but is also an organism of knowledge. When we recognize knowledge as the fabric of all experience, we cannot hold on to our habitual dichotomy of experiencer and experienced, knower and known. The knower is knowledge, the known is knowledge. The knower is the field, and the known is a form that this field assumes without ceasing to be the field. When we experience fear, our consciousness is the very sensations of the fear. The fear is the conscious field forming into fear, and knowing itself as fear. We might be experiencing fear in the belly, as some kind of vibration, an uncomfortable shakiness and irritation. Our consciousness is manifesting itself as fear in a particular region, and as consciousness we are aware of the fear in that region. We cannot actually separate the fear from the knowingness of the fear; they are the same arising in the belly. – The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, Ch. 4
Experiencing our soul as potential, we recognize that we are, more than anything else, the potential for experience, and for whatever is possible in experience. Soul is at the root pure potential, potential for consciousness, knowledge, experience, life, growth, learning, expansion, and so on. We do not merely have the potential for all of these, we are rather potential itself, pure potential. This points to a profound possibility of freedom; for we are not the particulars of our potential—the experiences, forms, qualities, and capacities—we are potential itself, free from the particulars, for our nature precedes them and underlies them. We begin to recognize that the soul constitutes an unlimited possibility of development in all dimensions. The soul is actually a potentiality, free in all ways and containing all possibilities. – The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, Ch. 5
This brings us to a further fundamental truth about the soul: Since the soul is the experiencer, the fabric and container of experience, and the content of experience, then the experiencer is not separate from this content. The subject of inner experience is the soul, but so is the content, the object of experience. In other words, as we recognize the soul we begin to see the nonduality of subject and object of experience, at least with respect to inner events. For instance, if we consider an emotion that arises in our consciousness, the agent or experiencer of this emotion is not a subject that experiences it as an object, an object separate and different from this subject. The subject is the field and the emotion is a manifestation of this field, in this field. The emotion is nothing but the field itself with a certain manifestation or frequency arising in some region of it. The field is a field of sensitivity, so it is sensitive to this change in frequency or vibration. There is no distinct separate observer experiencing the emotion. The soul, a medium or field, is in its totality aware of the emotion. The soul is the agency, the medium of experience, and the experience itself. The three are not separate; they are the same thing. When we recognize the unity of the three we are truly recognizing the soul. This differentiates the experience of the soul from that of the ordinary self, whose experience is egoic. For egoic experience, the three are different and separate. The site of the emotion or other experience is not clear, or not perceived at all. The site is experienced generally and vaguely as inside. The object, the emotion in this case, is an event separate and distinct from the experiencer, who is a subject over and above this object. – A. H. Almaas, The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, Ch. 2
The soul’s identification can shift in a fluid way as part of its growth and unfolding, or it can become fixed on particular forms. When identifying becomes fixed on some part of your consciousness, some particular form, you easily lose sight of the whole—yourself as a soul. You may never have known yourself as anything but forms of the soul (your body, your history, your thoughts, your emotions). Or you may remember beginning your life with some awareness of the soul and later losing touch with it when you became identified with one or more of its forms. Either way, you do not now recognize your true nature as presence, transformation, unfolding experience, and aliveness.
This soul loss is often not noticed until you begin to feel your experience pervaded by a lack of substance or inner meaning. When this happens you have come to a point where your identity is so much about familiar forms that you have lost all contact with the living, dynamic, substance of who you are. There’s no juice left in your life. You find yourself saying, “This can’t be all that I am. There must be more to life than this.” Many people consider this indicative of a midlife crisis. In fact, it is the cry of your soul reminding you of your soul nature. – Byron Brown, Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within, Ch. 1