In your opinion, is your conscience a part of your soul?

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So what is a soul? I’ll recap my current position on how we exist.

Our souls are timeless repositories of learning. Anything we learn / experience, makes an indelible mark on our soul that makes it impossible to go back completely to the state prior to that experience.

Souls are constantly being made, and they never get destroyed. Instead what tends to happen is they gather into collectives. Our own bodies and minds are made up of countless individual cells, each with their own souls. You have a soul, your body and mind comprise the collective actions of billions of other beings, each with their own soul.

These beings enter and exit your ‘dominion’ almost at will, in a similar fashion to you joining and leaving a company. The choice to become a part of a new company isn’t something to take lightly, but it’s also not something that forever defines you.

It’s this that creates the mechanic of free will. Just like how other beings choose to become a part of you for a time, you choose to adopt certain beliefs. As stated above, anything you learn or experience becomes a part of your soul, your ethical choices and experiences are no exception. So your ethics are forever malleable by the experiences created from living the life that your ethics demand.

Souls are timeless, whatever is added to them can never be taken away. Your conscious existence is the process of experiencing the adding to your soul. Your ethical stance constitutes the sum total of what the current state of your soul will allow you to do, and so create more experience that will change your soul.

One experience can have very long-lasting results. An event like, say, your parents dying early, can have far-reaching effects on your Earthly life, as grief does terrible things to the mind when you have to do it young. Generally negative things that happen to you while you’re on Earth only affect your Earthly life, once you die and pass on, your spiritual life operates according to the positive things that happened to you here, what you’ve come to love.

Your spiritual body after you die is just your mind, at first it feels like an extended dream. Soon you get acclimated to the environment and your spiritual senses activate. These senses are far more vivid and the environment far less restrictive. All experience in the spiritual realm affects you 100x more than it does in this life. It’s also more proximate to God and angels, so generally speaking dead people will rapidly shed everything that held them back in Earthly life, leaving them with one eternal quest, to pursue that which they loved in life.

This will take you to one of three places, heaven, hell, or the spiritual realms, depending on your relationship towards self and others. What draws people to hell is loving self more than your neighbor. The degree to which this love is present determines how deep in hell you wind up. The afterlife is an immensely social place where you’re constantly interacting with others, unless for some reason you need to be isolated. There are countless people in the afterlife, more than there are atoms in the physical world. The connections you make here continue on in the afterlife, you’ll also find a peer group the same way you find peer groups on Earth. Shared interests, values, and activities.

Everybody’s protected in the afterlife, meaning that nobody has to deal with any part of anyone that doesn’t fit in with their soul. This drives your found afterlife peer group to a large extent. If someone starts talking to you and you don’t like what they’re saying, it gets tuned out automatically and they start fading away. The other person doesn’t even notice.

Your loves determine the path your existence takes. Eventually your spiritual self falls apart the same way your Earthly body did once you die. It happens on an immense time scale, your spiritual self can last billions of years and isn’t subject to the death of the physical world and the subsequent big bang. When you’re ready to give physical existence another go, your spiritual body will sleep and wake up in a brand new physical body.

This happens through a process I call ‘imprinting’. Have you ever noticed how a person’s creations all have a distinct ‘flavor’? This is a person imprinting their uniqueness on something that’s not them. It’s the same process your soul goes through to inhabit a body. The imprinting drives all manner of things about the development and circumstances you’re borne into. Very quickly, the soul imprints on your brain and the development of your personality. So you get a body, a person, a mind, that was influenced by your soul, but isn’t totally dominated by it, so that you get free will, the ability to make your own life. It’s an amazing gift when you stop to think about it.

So there’s the two-way flow. Your soul imprints on your life, while your life imprints back on your soul through your experiences, both here and in the next life. The rules are different, positive experiences imprint on your afterlife more than negative ones do, which get wiped away as soon as you die. The process is continuous, and the death and rebirth process, both from here to the spiritual, and from the spiritual to here, each have different ‘rules’ as to what gets carried over. Conscious things pass from physical to spiritual life, while it’s unconscious things that pass when you move from spiritual life back to physical life.

On the larger time scale, moral conscience is not terribly salient to soul development. We pass from good moods to bad while in this life, but not really from good to evil. In the afterlife going from good to evil and back just happens. It’s like going onto a Star Trek holodeck, you can play the hero or the villain, it’s whatever you feel like at the time. It’s your accumulated ‘state’ that determines whether you primarily identify with good or evil. The afterlife only enables, never constrains.