Well said, Ebbie. You hit the nail right on the head.

Mario - Yeah, brother, I know exactly what you mean, but that's not the Soul you're speaking of...it's the thinking, calculating mind...and the mind can indeed be utterly vile in some people...as long as it remains in a vile, or as Amos has indicated, a tortured and separated state of consciousness.

The trouble is, most people are consciously dominated almost exclusively by their mind, and the ones who are most dominated by it (and proudest of it) usually have no idea that they even have a Soul or that anyone else does either!

Put it this way. The mind is that consciousness that says: I am here and I am me...alone...and I am irrevocably separate from everything and everyone else that I perceive. I am small and in danger. Continual danger. I don't have enough...enough food, money, sex, property, power, security, love, respect, and all the other stuff I want in order to be out of danger...so I have got to scheme and use any means at hand to GET enough of these things I want. Everyone else is either a threat...or they're an opportunity for me to gain something I want. If they're more powerful than me, then I will either find a way to placate and serve them or I will wait for a chance to stab them in the back and usurp their power. If they're less powerful, then I will use them for my own advantage. I am important, they are not. But...it's important for me to appear the way other people want me to appear while I set about doing what I have to do (looking out for number 1), because then I will be fairly SAFE. It's important to conceal my real motives from them, cos if they knew the REAL me, the game would be up. They would despise me or destroy me or reject me.

Now that's a pretty unhealthy mind I just described, because it's in constant great fear, but it is really fairly typical of the human mind in general, when left entirely to itself, believing it is completely alone.

It's basic statements are: I FEAR. I NEED. I WANT.

The Soul says I Am. I always have been and always shall be. I am not the body, but I am for now in the body. I am not only in me, I am in everyone and everything, and they are in me, and we are very much the same. We are of one Soul. Therefore I love them as I love myself, and I have entirely enough of what I need, and I joyfully share it with all others who, like me, are embodied individually in this beautiful experience of Life. I am sacred, so are they, and so is all of Life. I cannot die.

It's basic statements: I Love. I am Love. I already have everything I could ever need.

The Soul casts no shadow. A physical body in the presence of a partial light does cast a visible shadow, and a mind can look out through physical eyes at that shadow and decide (for whatever reason) that the shadow is realer and more powerful than the light, when the shadow is truly...nothing at all. Minds are capable of being entranced by shadows, dedicating themselves to darkness, and falling into absolute chaos. There lies madness, murder, and a form of spiritual death...but not the death of the Soul. Only the complete denial of the Soul.

- LH