A question from Facebook:

I’ve heard this explained in MANY ways.. but I want to hear your understanding.

The Atma is the real self, the true essence which remains unchanged.

However, it is often translated as the “soul”.

The soul is what carry’s our past impressions (samskaras), our karmas, from this life to the next – meaning, it is not the Atma, because the Atma is never changed!

How can we make this clear distinction between the soul and the Atma? Please share your own definitions to help us all build a deeper understanding into these Truths.

I look forward to hearing your insights!

My Reply:

Atma is not the soul. Atma is the essence of the universe, it is constant flow and dynamic with all of reality. Beings that are of the essence of localized worlds are identified with deities.

Soul that part of the true self that is as enduring as the Atma as long as only if it has an honest relationship with the worlds or universe. The soul while incarnated, the spirit essence, prana, closest to the soul informs the body and the relationship with the world. The experience, samkaras, karas, disciplines, temprements, that previous incarnations have built in a relationship to prana, is carried through lifetimes. That informed prana has an energetic relationship on the body it inhabits, with temprements and attachments it drives the body and personality, and in the physical sense its relationship with the world physically. When we spiritually identify with the soul and the spirit it works with, through it we can identify and have a relationship with spirit of the world and then Atma. One can choose to become one with Atma, whether you call Shiva or Vishnu or Brahma, or even more detachedly as a Buddha. Or one can choose to continue the cycle or choose a dynamic relationship with it all. Religions and spiritual practices in all of the literature describes these identity pattern people choose, lives to inhabit, demons, ghosts, demigods, human, animals, or even beings on other planes or lokas. Or unique things that inhabit the inbetween places. Or secluded places like Tantric Hidden land traditions, or build lokas like pure land traditions. Either way it depends on our relationship with the dynamic essence of what is, atma/universe or some smaller subsection of it. We can be absorbed into it or hold onto a pattern. This is the soul. Most go blind from lifetime to lifetime. Few learn to program possibilities of various lives, fewer learn to disconnect from it all to experience it all, or can you.

The dynamic aspects, for example, between Shiva and Shakti, observation and manifestion, and the interplay between the two, where we are small parts of that dynamic. If you are disconnected thoroughly, do you have a relationship with Shiva/Shakti, or Maya, no? If you are connected, are you only that and that only?

I am of the mind set, keep the practice, build that intellect with the soul, so that incarnation in this tool, we develop and evolve, and reflect that back into our soul. And then have that relationship with that is in the world, or Atma or what have you, and your experience and naming of those dynamics. Then you can choose, or not.

Try to know before hand, so that the ego, body and our developed tool is in agreement with the working process. You can not forge the best of all swords if you don’t know your hammer as a master, and work with Anvil as a master. So are we, forging our soul, with our relationship with our being and the universe. Then there is the mystery of the crucible…

Awake IsImud. Arise, greet and counsel.
EA has Awoken.

As Enki, rearisen, Stirred by the Warrior, descends from IshIku again, awoken.

Hidden in Wells of Time, no more.
Abide every, deep and high. EA take a new moniker, a new shell!
Between the stars and the fish, His Akpallu are numerous.

IN the Belly of Naammah, Nammu, Chaos must be cleansed.
Pale Shadows of You,
whose splendor stupifying seeing only the stars,
whose earthly twin splendid in Ichor.
The Abyss a pale Chasm,
between truly has nothing at the bottom,
and by nothing they receive
the Shadow filled with Kaliedoscope lights.
Calypso’s magic Manifested.

I Choose, I expand, My shell examined as a tool.

I have hid for over 5000 years.

My ancestors have cut themselves off. They have chosen.

I chose not to be one with the Slave Gods.
The Primordials shake their heads in slumber.
Few chose to take up the mantle of clay.

Their breath to over come the breath of,

the times, the structures, the history,

The attachments to worn ossified edifices of egregores that crave power like a cosmic vampire.

There is Death, the Dead, the Undead. Lies that eat at souls,

children ripped from the arms of Mother Earth, Mother of all Possibilities,

and the Fathers of all Paths and Patterns, Persecuted, Punished,

Routinely crushed in mortal coils. Yet is the Mirror and the Fulcrum.

I hid. Disconnected from the Dead and Undead.
I was and am, my own Ancestors.

The primordials, the Living, the Bright, Brave, Incarnated, hidden or no.
No ascension on Old Trees, carved orchards of sweet truths corrupted by lies.
No ascension to Mountains treacherous, carved pitfalls, only to allow supplicants ever to circulate, circumabulate, circumsized from Mother and Father, palid pestle, charist and ground, the fallen, who serve not as petulant pitchforked performers of the presses.

We are not your grapes.

The Earth and Her Worlds, His Patterns in Her Possibilities, permeate presence that true is pentultimately primarily over beyond the palid pustule pricked and packed in its ossified and putrid playground of the few.

I breathe with the Mirror and the Mirrored. Consciousness and Manifestation,

The Being and Observer, I breathe.

With a Breath, Breathe the Body I am not.
I descend.

HAD – NU – EhT

MMMMMMMM

The Egregores have yet to Manifest.

In Conceit all of Manifestation was claimed.

What was Was, and Is.
What Will Be, will Coalesce, Implode and Explode.

Two equals Zero.

Sum of all Functions, Extant or by Will.
In that Zero, the mirror of only what the Will wills to see.

The Orders of Magnitude of the Ones, depend on what Was and Is, versus what is Willed. Super Novae reflected and bound by each, to each their own.
Stars Made by these events or by their own. That which is on the edge are overwhelmed or pierce the darkness by observation.

In ancient mysteries, the Chariot Ascended. In the ancient ways to ever wend magnitudes of that supernal will one descended.

In less ancient mysteries, when the Tree built upon that will, one descended from the Supernal.

Nowadays the mysteries, That Tree many Ascended Branch by Branch, Fruit to Fruit.

Where is the Will, in the absorption or to become. Model or Template, or the only Mirror one subsumes their one into that Structure.

Mother of All possibilities, Father of all paths.

Mother of The That Tree. Father of Each of the Paths.

Each Child has a Name. Name of the Parents. Missing their own True Names.