Soul is difficult to define. Perhaps it is beyond definition, one of those ruined words. Some traditions maintain that we create and build a soul by how we live today. Others believe that a form of subtle consciousness exists independent of the physical body. What matters, the meaning of life is what we make of it. Everything else comes second.

I can define spirit by using somebody else’s word but I can’t define soul because I don’t think it has a definition. It’s probably one of those ruined words that doesn’t seem to mean anything to me.  George Jaydar, a teacher out on the West Coast, claims that we have to breathe and build and grow a soul.  He might be onto to something there.  The idea that we just bequeathed a soul from heavenly powers at the beginning is probably not the case.  

The Waldorf people look at soul as the inner most core of one’s being, simply the since of I am, not my awareness of being me as distinct from anything else, puts it into a psychological realm rather than a spiritual realm.  All these books on soul just sort of give me a pain.  I have very little confidence in any of that stuff.

Spirit is something different because spirit is all pervasive. There’s nothing that is not spirit.  It’s sort of like David Bohm with his level of energy that underlies all conscious process, whether that conscious process expresses itself as matter or energy or intelligence or whatever, it’s all just this great force of life itself.  

I would say the will to live is everywhere.  It’s all pervasive.  That’s what the whole universe is, this will to live. And that’s spirit, but this business of soul as though it’s my possession, I don’t understand the word.  I don’t particularly care for it.  

Walt Whitman, I did use his term.  He uses the term soul.  He goes out at night and he looks at the starry sky above and he asks his soul a question.  His soul answers.  Now this is his dialogue with his own self which he refers to as his soul.