What is Soul ?

What is Soul ? Spiritualists and philosophers have evolved various definitions for this word. Some modern dictionaries explains the word like this: 'the immaterial part of a person; the actuating cause of an individual life'.

While living as an young man in the regions of the present day Israel some 2000 years ago, Jesus Christ used an equivalent of this word in his native Hebrew language and also in the ancient Greek language which he knew while he used to interact with those who listened to him. 

He used this word many times that one progressive thinking man of that day in the city of Ephesus (the then capital of the Asian region of the Roman empire of those days) asked him the meaning of this word ' soul'.

Jesus explained it in the following* manner:

“The soul is the self-reflective, truth-discerning, and spirit-perceiving part of man which forever elevates the human being above the level of the animal world. 

"Self-consciousness, in and of itself, is not the soul. 

"Moral self-consciousness is true human self-realization and constitutes the foundation of the human soul, and the soul is that part of man which represents the potential survival value of human experience. 

"Moral choice and spiritual attainment, the ability to know God and the urge to be like him, are the characteristics of the soul. The soul of man cannot exist apart from moral thinking and spiritual activity. 

"A stagnant soul is a dying soul. But the soul of man is distinct from the divine spirit which dwells within the mind. The divine spirit arrives simultaneously with the first moral activity of the human mind, and that is the occasion of the birth of the soul.

“The saving or losing of a soul has to do with whether or not the moral consciousness attains survival status through eternal alliance with its associated immortal spirit endowment. 

"Salvation is the spiritualization of the self-realization of the moral consciousness, which thereby becomes possessed of survival value. 

"All forms of soul conflict consist in the lack of harmony between the moral, or spiritual, self-consciousness and the purely intellectual self-consciousness.

“The human soul, when matured, ennobled, and spiritualized, approaches the heavenly status in that it comes near to being an entity intervening between the material and the spiritual, the material self and the divine spirit. 

"The evolving soul of a human being is difficult of description and more difficult of demonstration because it is not discoverable by the methods of either material investigation or spiritual proving. 

"Material science cannot demonstrate the existence of a soul, neither can pure spirit-testing. 

"Notwithstanding the failure of both material science and spiritual standards to discover the existence of the human soul, every morally conscious mortal knows of the existence of his soul as a real and actual personal experience.”

Could you get it ?

* From Paper-133 of the Urantia Book