Dead Souls

The notion of life in the human mind is tightly linked to the idea of the soul as the seat of life.

However, detailed analysis shows that this is not entirely so.

Even the biblical text contains an echo of this idea:

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

The same story appears in the Norse myth — Odin gives a soul to the inanimate Ask and Embla (Lodur gives them feelings, and Hœnir gives them intellect).

In other words, the creation of the human being and the creation of his soul are two distinct stages of creation.

Magical myth, based on the visionary experiences of energy-seeing Magi, distinguishes several concepts that in everyday language are conflated into the general notion of “soul” — 1) the source of vitality: the “etheric,” or “vital” body; 2) personality as the way personality manifests individuality at a given moment in time; and 3) what is properly called the soul: the substance the mind creates during life from the matter of its channels — just as the mind translates the Life Force into the Power of Awareness, it “animates matter,” producing a soul that contains the mind’s experience of the mind’s interaction with various energies over the course of life.

We have already said that it is precisely in this last sense that the soul has qualitative and quantitative characteristics and that it can be lost, damaged, or sold.

So, the soul is a product of life; it is a repository of experience, the container of the “dry residue” of an incarnation. It is in this sense that we can speak of the “immortality of the soul” — not as the immortality of personality, but as the Monad’s accumulation of experience.

In the previous discussion of the soul, the question arose of its loss. Let’s examine this problem in more detail.

Not only is the world lately teeming with “buyers” of souls and thieves who steal souls, many people ruin their souls willingly by their own will — either by losing connection to them or by destroying them.

Of course, strictly speaking, one cannot “kill” a soul; by the “death” of a soul, we mean a persistent and long-term severing of the connection between soul and personality — neshama and ruach. In other words, the link between the process of incarnation and the reservoir of its experience is broken, so that new experience either proves to be empty or leads to other fragmented containers.

For the Parasite of mind, soul death benefits it greatly. At the personality level, this appears as a lack of will to strive, little desire to gain experience. In effect, the Psychocosmos regresses to a vegetative — “plantlike” — existence: a slow assimilation of Life Force and its slow conversion into awareness. Naturally, the amount of such “vegetative” awareness is small, but it freely gives its life as nourishment to the Parasite. Such a person is no longer a “chicken” in the coop but a “vegetable” in the garden — less trouble, and they won’t run away. That is why many Parasites ruin people’s souls in childhood, turning them into zombie-like beings without a Way, without destiny.

Fortunately, this process is fundamentally reversible, though lengthy and difficult. For people who have “killed” their soul, it is possible to restore the connection with it, to resuscitate it, to integrate it, and provide long-term treatment.

Far worse is the situation with people who have sold their souls or whose souls have been stolen.

By such a “loss” of the soul is meant the transfer of the soul after death not into the Monad’s common repository — the “soul of the soul” — but into another source. For the being, this means the loss of incarnation and a long interruption of the Gilgul, associated with waiting for suitable conditions to repeat the same Way and resolve the same tasks. Clearly, waiting can stretch over an indefinite time, while the being cannot fully disincarnate, becoming stuck in Sheol or in the Interworld and risking a transformation into a utukku.

To “return” a soul in such a case is much more difficult — because not only is the connection between soul and personality severed, but a new bond to a new owner is formed. It follows that a person who has “lost” a soul is the slave of two masters at once — their life energy belongs to the Lamassu, while their experience belongs to the soul’s owner.

In the case of a “sale” of the soul, the only way to recover it is annulment of the contract; in the case of a “theft,” recovery means its reverse seizure — that is, either reclaiming it or stealing it back. Both of these tasks have, for millennia, been the province of specially trained shamans, sorcerers, and Magi.

Thus, despite its ephemeral nature, the soul is a rather fragile substance that requires attention and care. Neglecting one’s soul risks its loss, the consequences of which are worse than death.