Affirmation means accepting your soul as it appears in your creaturehood. I said this earlier (in chapters Seven, Nine, etc.), but you cannot deny your creaturehood without denying your soul, and you cannot deny your soul without denying your creaturehood.

(“I’d been working all day,” Jane wrote, “on my book of poetry, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time. Working like crazy, really on a creative ‘high.’ Just before supper time I’d been writing about the single yet double universe of self and soul, and the last line had quoted the mortal self:

[...] The heading referring to the soul in chemical clothes is for the next chapter (Ten), which is the first chapter in Part Two.

[...] As I have mentioned in other books, the soul cannot affirm itself fully through bodily experience at any given “time,” so in those terms there are always portions of you that are unexpressed.

As I have certainly hinted, the body is a miraculous organism, and you have barely learned the most simple of its structures.¹ You do not understand the properties of soul or body, yet the body was given to you so that you could learn from it. The properties of the earth are meant to lead you into the nature of the soul. [...]

[...] Souls and molecules each are learning, each are forming realities, each are a part of a divinity in which each counterpart has a part to play.”

[...] And that trust is within you whether or not you recognize it, for it gives you your present experience; and no matter how your mind questions, it rides securely in the great creativity of the soul.

[...] Mortality with its birth and death is the framework in which the soul, for now, is expressed in flesh. [...]

[...] The experience was to inform you emotionally and spiritually of the great meaning of each individual, portray the lovely brilliance that is within each human being, and let you know that the integrity of the self and the soul exists beyond the possibility of annihilation, as you yourself will continue to exist regardless of which path you choose to take — dying within two years, or living physically on for many more. [...]

[...] Unconsciously, therefore, you chose a situation in which a crisis was precipitated, rousing all the greatest elements of heart and soul, so that they must strain to understand, to perceive, to triumph. [...]

In so doing, the soul continually creates new varieties of inner reality to be explored. Working in the opposite direction, so to speak, the soul divests itself of all symbols, all representations, and using its consciousness in a different way learns to probe its own direct experience. [...]

[...] In this stage of consciousness the soul finds itself alone with its own feelings, stripped of symbolism and representations, and begins to perceive the gigantic reality of its own knowing.

[...] The soul would then begin to explore the reality of this joy in terms that can hardly be explained, and in so doing would learn methods of perception, expression, and actualization that would have been utterly incomprehensible to it before.

[...] The soul’s body cannot grow at the body’s misery. The body’s joy and flexibility physically expresses the great energy of the soul, and hampering the body then hampers the soul’s expression.

[...] The word “soul” unfortunately has been so used in regard to your species that it becomes highly difficult to unravel the conceptual difficulties. Using usual definitions, you would call a soul the result of a certain organization of such units, which you would then recognize as a “soul.”

(9:47.) That leads to the old inevitable questions: Do animals have souls — or do trees, or rocks? In line with the usual definition then, in your terms, this smallest unit would be “soul stuff.” That viewpoint however is highly limited, for “above you,” using that scale, there are other more developed organizations of these units; and so from that “more exalted viewpoint,” you would seem to be junior souls indeed.

Using this as an analogy, you are a part of your psyche or your soul, dwelling within it, easily following your own sense of identity even though that psyche also contains other identities beside the one that you think of as your own. [...]

In metaphysical terms, you have your being in your psyche or soul in somewhat the same manner. [...]

[...] In greater terms, the psyche or soul nowhere exists as a finished product or entity. [...]

[...] Evolutionary man, with Darwinian roots, could not be a creature with a soul. [...] (Pause.) There is no doubt that the church cast the soul in a position of stress, caught as it was between its heavenly source and original sin — but there was a sense of psychological mobility involved, one that saw continued existence after death.

Instead, previous to psychology’s entrance, before psychology mapped the acceptable or forbidden, the dangerous or safe compartments of the self, man used the word “soul” to include his own entire complexity. [...]

[...] The interested reader will also be able to compare her composition with certain passages in her long poem, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time, when that work is published in book form in September 1975.

[...] They bask in a sort of universal steam bath that drives all impurities of individuality or creativity from their souls, leaving them immersed, supposedly forever, in a bliss beyond description; in which, indeed, their own experience disappears.

[...] It is a privilege to be here, to look out with this unique focus, with these individual eyes; not to be blinded by cosmic vision, but to see this corner of reality which I form through the miraculous connections of soul and flesh.

[...] He cut off his ego to save his soul, and nearly lost both in the bargain. The ego indeed is part of the soul. It is one of the voices of the soul. [...]

[...] There are those who are so tightly meshed within physical reality that the soul is squeezed dry. [...]

[...] As I came out with that, I got something over here” — she gestured to her right, indicating one of the channels of information available from Seth — “about the unpredictability of consciousness, and precognition and heredity: the cell’s soul and the soul’s cell….”

[...] The present idea of the soul, you see, is a “primitive” idea that can scarcely begin to explain the creativity or reality from which mankind’s being comes. [...]

[...] All such discussions are based upon your idea of one-personhood, consecutive time, and limited versions of the soul. [...]

[...] We will discuss the ways in which this can be encouraged, as well as the role of the conscious mind as the director of “the soul in chemical clothes.”

These interchanges represent periods in which the soul and flesh meet under the most optimum conditions. [...] There is not just one intersection of soul with the flesh, therefore, but at the least a constant series as you would think of it. [...]

Now: As there are better times than others in your sphere of activity for sending rockets or spaceships to the moon, so there are peak periods when the self and the soul (or entity) coincide — when communication is at its best.

[...] A rigid, dogmatic concept of good and evil will force you to perceive physical existence as a battleground of opposing forces, with the poor unwary soul almost as a buffer. Or you will think of the poor soul as a blackboard eraser, slapped between two hands — one good and one evil.

Upon the blackboard, in this homey analogy, would be written the soul’s earthly experiences. [...]

[...] You may believe that the soul “descends” into the body, and therefore that the body is lower, inferior, and a degraded version of “what you really are.” [...]

[...] In that regard, for example, James was quite correct: certain religious societies interpreted the theme so that it read “evolution of the soul”; but there is no soul in Darwinian theory and hereditary, and certainly none in the environment. [...]

[...] The soul or any remnant of it vanished, so that all of the action had to occur in an arena where competition ruled. [...]

[...] He tried to wipe God’s hands clean, as he understood the nature of God through his early beliefs—but in so doing he wiped the soul from the face of nature. [...]

THE POTENTIALS OF THE SOUL

[...] That energy which is projected from our “superself,” that spark of intense identity that resulted in your physical birth, that unique impetus, in the one way has many similarities to the old concept of the soul — except that it contains only a part of the story.

While you continue to exist and develop as an individual, your whole self, or soul, has such vast potential, that it can never be expressed fully through one personality, as somewhat explained in one previous chapter.

The soul creates the flesh. [...] The soul creates the flesh for a reason, and physical existence for a reason, so none of this is to lead you to a distaste for physical life, nor toward a lack of appreciation for those sensual joys with which you are surrounded. [...]

[...] So you can say that certain portions of it deal with physical reality, physical manipulation, and plans; some with deeper levels of creativity and achievement that insure physical survival; some with communication, with even more extensive elements of the personality now generally unknown; some with the continuing experience and existence of what you may call the soul or overall individual entity, the true multidimensional self.

[...] But the term Israel still stands for one individual, along with its multitudinous parts, and all of the colorful, feared, anguished or enticing heroes of the bible represent elements of each person’s soul, personified, set momentarily alive in myth. [...]

[...] Jane has seen some of this, and could have identified with the Golda Meir character as representing the soul of Israel, and well as its individuals and its multitude. [...]

[...] I wanted to know how suffering could be good for the soul, among other questions, since from its supposedly exalted position one would hardly think the soul needed suffering to improve its position or understanding. [...]

In the framework of the Sinful Self’s points of reference and in the Catholic philosophy in which it is based, suffering for a good purpose, toward a good end, toward a good goal for the sake of the soul, is a virtue. [...]