As I sit here in front of the computer writing I am filled with an awareness that what I am is much more than the body, and that reality is much more than what I can perceive with the five senses. For me the idea of soul is a natural one and I am not alone in this. The concept of soul goes back a long way, and as such has been with humanity for a long time. Only recently has Atheism arisen, an orientation that has no place for soul, one that courts purposelessness in a meaningless world, and one that has eyes only for the tangible and the readily visible. In Evolutionary Astrology the journey of the soul is important; when we try to understand our lives through EA we take a much larger context into account, we want to give room for a much larger journey that encompasses more than one lifetime; we see life events as part of a larger pattern of experience or development as a means to open the way to greater depth of self-understanding. Why does soul exist? Why does the soul journey through separation and back to union with All-That-Is?
Meher Baba, an Indian spiritual teacher who died in 1969, explains so well the purpose of soul and the deeper nature of our human existence in this piece entitled The Lover and The Beloved written in 1961.
"God is love. And love must love. And to love there must be a Beloved. But since God is Existence infinite and eternal, there is no one for Him to love but Himself.
And in order to love Himself, He must imagine Himself as the Beloved whom He as the lover imagines He loves. Beloved and lover implies separation. And separation creates longing; and longing causes search. And the wider and more intense the search, the greater the separation and the more terrible the longing. When longing is at its most intense point, separation is complete, and the purpose of separation, which was that love might experience itself as lover and Beloved, is fulfilled; and union follows. And when union is attained, the lover knows that he himself was all along the Beloved, whom he loved and desired union with; and that all the impossible situations that he overcame were obstacles which he himself had placed in the path to himself. To attain union is so impossibly difficult because it is impossible to become what you already are! Union is nothing other than knowledge of oneself as the Only One."
Encapsulated in this teaching, is a description of the evolution of the soul that chooses to experience separation (something all of us incarnated are intimately familiar with on a daily basis) through the fulfilment of separating desires; those desires we all have for things, that temporarily give us the feeling of wholeness but at the same time reaffirm our sense of separateness. As the soul cultivates more apparent separateness, the longing for union with All-That-Is becomes stronger. At some point the desire to know Source becomes strong enough that subsequent lifetimes become increasingly spiritual in nature, until a state of full self-realisation is attained. Thank you Meher Baba - beautifully and masterfully said.