What Is Soul? What Is Spirit?

Why are these concepts so maddeningly difficult to grasp?

Today’s piece is for myself as much as anyone else. For a long time, I have intended to explore various ideas about the soul and, also, the contrasting term, spirit. I admit I often struggle to grasp what these words – “soul” and “spirit” – actually mean. What is the difference, essentially, between them? In The Secret Tradition of the Soul, Patrick Harpur does a wonderful job of clarifying this complex, intricate subject. In what follows, I am mainly annotating his extraordinary work, to help me anchor my understanding. Hopefully it helps you, also!

Harpur, readers may recall, is one of my favorite authors. His books include The Philosopher’s Secret Fire, The Daimonic Reality, as well as The Secret Tradition of the Soul (which I published via Evolver Editions). He combines NeoPlatonism with endearing commonsense. I can’t recommend his work highly enough. I quoted this from Harpur a few days ago:

It is notoriously difficult to talk about the soul. If we believe that we have a soul, we tend to picture it vaguely—as some essence of ourselves, some core of our being that constitutes our “real” selves or our “higher selves.” Even if we are not specifically religious—Christians, for instance—we can all still resonate with the notion that there is some part of us that should not be sold, betrayed, or lost at any cost. We can understand the idea that we can “lose our souls” and still go on living, just as we can lose our lives but retain our souls. We still use the word “soul” to mean something real or authentic. Whenever music, dance, architecture, food—anything, really—is said to have soul, we mean that it is the real thing, that it speaks to the deepest part of ourselves.

We associate soulfulness with depth of experience, with pain and suffering overcome or integrated, leading to inner resolve and willpower. Personally, I identify this ineffable quality of “soul” with artists such as musicians Billie Holiday and Miles Davis, painters Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, writers James Baldwin and Henry Miller. Soul suggests a worn, handmade quality; a warmth. Things that are too perfect, cold, antiseptic – like AI-generated art or computer games or anything virtual – innately lack soul. Soul seems to deepen organically with age, strife, and creative accomplishment. Our society should value qualities of soulfulness – rather than external accomplishments – far more than we do. 

In PD Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, the visionary occultist Gurdjieff said the soul — the element of ourselves that continues beyond death — is not something we automatically possess. While we are living, we must do the work to acquire it. He called this work, “conscious labor” and “intentional suffering.” To forge our soul, we must push against life’s vacant, entropic tendencies.