The World Soul

(Introduction to the Series)

In our deeper moments of meditation, prayer, or presence, our attempts to open to the higher or Sacred are constrained by two primary factors: first, the state of our personal spiritual robustness and purity, and second, the spiritual robustness and purity of our surroundings. The first has been and will continue to be addressed in detail on these pages. For now, we turn to the latter constraint, the spiritual fragility and selfishness of our societal environment.

We know the challenges of finding our way through our inner fog, but what about the outer spiritual fog? Are we not also infected by our society's almost exclusive orientation toward the material world, and by all the divisions, personal, national, and global, which that material orientation promotes? When mixed, as it is, with the scattered and short attention spans endemic to our culture, the result is a barren and pervasive outer and inner fog that tends to obscure the spiritual vision of anyone within it.

This is why group meditation and communal worship are so helpful: they surround us with an alert and spiritually aligned environment that counteracts the outer fog and helps ease the inner fog.

The outer fog is more than the visible problems, antipathies, indifference, and material-world-only orientation of our culture. All of that shapes the subtle side of the outer fog, the invisible spiritual climate of our planet, which is a reflection of the current condition of what we can rightly call our World Soul. Just as we have souls in development, so does the Earth as a whole. Our individual inner life, the coherence and quality of our inner energies, and the degree of purity of our will are inner manifestations of the condition of our individual soul. And because we are not separate, the intimate connection between our individual inner life on the one hand and the inner life of our society and planet on the other transmits influences in both directions. We are affected by the spiritual climate and that climate is affected by us. These formative souls of ours collectively are major components of the World Soul. The status of our culture and planet are reflections of our shared World Soul, which itself is a reflection of its components, namely us.

This structure has many ramifications, not the least of which is our responsibility to develop and cleanse our own soul to support the development of the World Soul. It is also true that there are levels or scales of the World Soul, which include the collective Humanity Soul, the Earth Soul, and the Universal or Cosmic Soul. We will investigate these in the coming weeks, with a particular focus on direct, experiential engagement with each level.

There is, of course, yet another level, that of the Creator, the Source of All, which stands in the same relationship to the Cosmic Soul as we, as our real I does to our individual soul. As we delve into the World Soul, we may get hints of the reality of the Creator behind it all.

As an aside, this discussion of the World Soul is not intended to promote any particular political view or style of government. For example, despite considerations of the one World Soul, the peaceful competition among separate nations may well bring out the best in all of us and be effective for advancing the spiritual evolution of our planet. We are probing a deeper level than the material world we live in, as important as that world is. We are looking instead at the spiritual, inner side of reality. Our path leaves it up to each one of us to determine our approach toward issues within the material world in accord with our individuality, our conscience, and the reality of love. Indeed, one of the ways we develop our individuality is by facing the issues of the day, both personal and beyond, and seeing our own way through.

Pondering the notion of the World Soul changes our perspective, giving us a wider view of the reality we live in. To go a step further requires us to open our perceptions to the World Soul. We take the direct approach, which is easiest to learn while outdoors. Wherever we are, we relax within ourselves and relax within our surroundings. We relax our inner self. We let our vision go wide, allowing the whole visual field into us. We relax to the point of allowing all that we see to come into us and to become us. We relax to the point of letting our separateness evaporate, so that we are the world and the world is us. Our body, our heart, our mind, our senses, and our sense of self merge into the vast stillness that includes All. We are embraced by the World.

The Soul of Humanity

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