The Soul Is the Sum Total of All of Our Experiences

I shared my favorite definition of the soul this past weekend in the Q&A session that was part of our four-day Christ Consciousness Transmissions retreat: The soul is the sum total of all of our experiences throughout all time. I like this definition, as it implies that every experience adds to our soul, and conversely, no experience can diminish or reduce our soul. In simpler terms, we learn from and therefore benefit from every experience, even the difficult or painful ones.

Q: Someone emailed their perspectives: I really liked your definition of the soul being the compilation of all one's experiences through many lifetimes. It made sense to me as a function of the Intelligence that designs the next life experience to balance karma, etc. However, back in the 80's I was part of a study group from a channel/medium. Their definition of the soul was a bit different than yours in that all the Good, learning, and expansion experienced on the earth was accumulated into the soul experience at death, while the negative stuff (fear-based) was left on the earth plane to be healed and released at a later time. Meaning, we, or someone else, had to come back and take it on to experience it and let it go. I actually came across a sentence in ACIM this morning that said something like this: "there is only Good in heaven," which goes along with that concept. As Jesus, through Gina says, the earth plane is dense and contracted, maybe because of all the fear stuff that gets generated and left behind for us to eventually heal.  Given the state of affairs these days, there's lots to heal, although I do recognize the importance of the power of the Good increasing in "light" of the negative that gets focused on and reported in the media. 

A: Thanks for sharing your perspective. I approach the idea of good and bad a little differently. My sense is that all there is, is good. But not everything is equally good, and some things have so little goodness that they can be dangerous and even harmful. But even the murderer is trying to take care of something (usually trying to protect themselves or their loved ones). But when someone acts from a horribly narrow and contracted idea of what is good, then again it is harmful and often also not even very effective at accomplishing the desired outcome.

You can broaden this view by observing that all of the things we think of as opposites or dualities are actually just different amounts of one thing. Light and dark (and everything in between) are just different amounts of light. The only things that exist are photons...there are no such things as darkons! Same with heat and cold. Cold is just the word we use to describe the experience when there is less heat. And there is always some light and heat everywhere in the universe, so there is never the complete absence of light or heat.

So back to the definition of the soul: the experiences we have that are very dark and painfully lacking in goodness still add to our soul....but they do not add very much. So it is still immensely preferable to have experiences that are full of light, love, goodness, etc. as those experiences add immeasurably more to our soul. And as our soul evolves, we become more discriminating and gravitate more and more to the experiences that fill us with light, love and joy.

Perhaps instead of the negative experiences being left behind, they are eventually awash in so much goodness that they hardly register anymore. This is similar to how when there is a lot of light, we can no longer experience much darkness. And if those "negative" or "less good" experiences do have continuing repercussions here on earth, that ultimately is more grist for the mill for other souls to work with and learn from. Difficult experiences can give other people more opportunities to learn, and hopefully more opportunities to choose wisely and move on from the fear and pain and into fuller experiences of the goodness, joy, peace and love that are also always present in our essence.