The Lexicon
Who you really are
Soul
The soul is the immortal essence of you — the living individuality that wears the body for a season and continues when the body is laid down. It is the seat of depth, conscience, and longing, the part that yearns for meaning and feels the pull toward its source. Across the traditions the soul is understood as both intensely personal and rooted in the eternal, carrying its own curriculum and destiny across the arc of existence. It cannot be wounded at its centre, for its substance is spirit.
Carried by 8 teachers · across 5 traditions · 4 quotes
The sages speak of it as deathless and self-chosen. The Bhagavad Gita declares the soul is neither born nor dies; the survival traditions hold that the soul chooses its own lessons before it comes; Henley's defiant cry names it the captain of one's fate. Teresa of Avila imagined it as an interior castle of many radiant rooms, and the contemplatives counsel us to descend through those rooms toward the God who dwells in the innermost chamber. To tend the soul is the quiet work of a lifetime.
In their words
The soul is neither born, nor does it ever die... it is not slain when the body is slain.Bhagavad Gita 2:20
I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.William Ernest Henley
I thought of the soul as resembling a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms.Teresa of Avila
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.Edwin Hubbell Chapin