We All Have Souls

We All Have Souls Why Does it Matter?

by Tom Blaschko

Our souls matter because they are our connection to the most profound parts of our living universe. In our culture we may feel cut off from one another, separated from nature, and terrified of our aloneness. Remembering we have a soul gives us a path to reconnect to all the things that matter to us.

I am not promoting a particular religion. Religions are only one way to recognize our souls. Having a soul may not lead to religion at all. But experiencing the world with our souls will connect us to all the glory that is around us.

In my work, I find souls important in three areas. Ideas about souls explain a whole lot of things that Western science currently can’t explain. Souls provide powerful ways for us to heal ourselves and heal our world. They give our lives meaning and purpose.

To start, souls’ ability to explain things helps to prove their existence. So let’s start there.

This soul that I am talking about isn’t a little lump of something sitting somewhere in your body. Actually, it’s the other way around. The soul comes first and coordinates the way our bodies form. It’s a good thing, too, because there doesn’t seem to be enough information in DNA to put a body together. We need souls to get all the parts in the right places. You can check out Rupert Sheldrake and his work on morphic resonance for more information [www.sheldrake.org].

So we each have a soul, which I experience as surrounding my body. It goes far above my head and deep into the earth. It also extends out into the space around me.

In my karate training we had the concept of ki. (The Chinese words chi or qi are better known. In talking about ki outside of martial arts, I usually use the term life force.) Ki is the force moving from my soul into the soul of my opponent. It matters because the person with more ki will win the fight.

Many people have not experienced being in a fight, so this can be a little hard to understand. On the other hand, most people know when someone is staring at them. This is really the same thing. The life force from the person staring at you touches your soul. You feel it. Rupert Sheldrake has studied this also in an experiment he calls the Sense of Being Stared At. After tens of thousands of trials, we know that we are just a little bit better at knowing when someone is staring at us than we would be if there were no souls.

There's also some solid scientific research about souls and reincarnation. It’s hard to imagine anything better at proving souls exist and continue after death than a person who remembers a previous life. The research I find most useful comes from Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker. They work exclusively with children, almost always younger than five. The time between lives is usually only a few years.

They currently have over 2,500 case reports that show links with past lives. In one report, marks on the child’s body reflected wounds that had killed a previously living person. In another, people report memories of having lived someplace that are linked to a person who once resided in the location described. It's fascinating that souls return to the living right away. They want to take care of something that happened in the previous life. The ones that were murdered want revenge. The ones that died in accidents are often worried about their families. The reasons seem so human, which helps make the stories credible.

Then we move into other areas that are not so easy to prove. People know when something has happened to a loved one who is far away. They know who is calling before they pick up the phone. They know when something good, or something bad, is about to happen to them. People see ghosts – I’ve seen one. People are visited by angels and other spirits. They experience the world and each thing in it as having a soul. Saint Teresa of Avila floats in the air during the ecstasy of her religious experience and the dozens of people witnessing it can’t hold her down.

The beauty of all these experiments and experiences is that they all are tied together by the concept of a soul. As single occurrences they can be argued against and explained away. But together, they support one another and present proof.

The soul I am talking about has a structure. On the outside is a container for the self that I call the I‑Am. This is the most basic part. It is probably the part that provides the model for connecting our body with our soul. From a soul point of view, it divides what is outside us from what is inside us by defining self and other. I think learning about this separation is one of the main reasons we take on bodies.

Five regions of the soul are almost completely inside the I‑Am. The first is the Desire region. It deals with what we want to have, what we want to make, and what we want to do. The second region is the Will, which is responsible for powering our actions and keeping us moving forward to achieve our plans. It deals mostly with energy. The third region is the Heart. This is the part that connects us with one another in positive and negative ways. We use this region to choose to whom we will be close. The fourth region is Voice. That is how we transmit ideas and feelings and how we give thanks for what we have received. The fifth region is Mind, which we use for processing information. It works with all the other regions inside the I‑Am to make our plans.

When I think about these regions, I usually stack them up from the belly to the head.

Outside the I‑Am I believe there are two more regions. One, which I call the Energy region, connects to the energy in the world. This is like the roots of a tree that extend into the energy around us. It is not contained inside us and is definitely not completely under our control.

The last region connects to the structure of reality. I call it the Form region. It is also outside of the I‑Am and connects to information outside us. Some of that comes from connecting with powerful souls far away, reaching above into the mysteries beyond the stars. It is not entirely under our control.

The last two regions spread into soul reality. How far they go depends on where we want them to go and how much power we have to send them out. People who journey through what shamanic practices call the lower and upper parts of soul reality are using these two regions of their soul.

The life force we talked about earlier powers the soul. Life force moves energy and information from one place to another. Some regions use information more than energy. These are the Mind region and the Voice region. The Desire region and the Will region are more effective with energy. The Heart region seems to use an even balance of information and energy.

Another reason that souls matter is because they provide many ways for us to heal ourselves. Life is difficult and we all get banged and bruised. Western medicine is usually pretty effective at healing the body. It is not nearly as effective at healing the Mind or the Heart or the Will. Techniques that rely on soul reality can be used to heal these other parts of us.

There are some practices recognized by Western medicine that seem to be best explained by soul reality. These include eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), Emotional Freedom Techniques (tapping), Rolfing, and other deep tissue massage. Other techniques that seem to use both body- and soul-related ideas include acupuncture, acupressure, Reiki, and qi gong.

Other techniques take us deep into soul reality. Shamanic healing techniques come from a variety of traditions, both modern and ancient. These focus on healing the soul. Earth magic, including witchcraft and herb lore, can be used for healing, too. When people who work in healing look at these traditions, we find that they work for all souls. It isn’t only humans who can be healed by these techniques. They can be used to heal the soul of the world and the souls of everything the world contains.

In our culture we get in the habit of thinking only about the physical. When we experience the world through our souls, everything changes. We are connected to one another, and if we are open to the experience, we are connected to everything. An act of kindness can resonate throughout a community. Even people who don’t know what has happened can feel a positive change. We know that what we do makes a difference. We know that we are alone only if we choose to be. We can connect with others in our community because souls are designed for just that purpose. This meaningful connection is the third reason that souls matter.

I believe our physical existence is a great experiment to create something new in a universe of souls. There are places where the glory of this creation can be felt. Some say the wilderness is best. But I find the same kind of joining together can happen with art or music. Think of the joy you see in videos of a flash mob music and dance performance.

So having souls lets us heal and grow. Souls let us be part of something that is important and know that the effort we put into our lives will make a difference. Souls let us feel our connections to others even while we are in bodies that separate us. Deep inside us we want meaningful lives and loving relationships and the knowledge that we matter. It’s work to get all those, but having souls matters because souls let us accomplish all those things.

I want to end with something you can do right now and every day to make your life and the world better. It’s called The Cloak of the Angels, which I learned from Orion Foxwood. The physical movements for the first two lines are raising your hands up above your head and – in soul reality – bringing a cloak down out of the sky. In the next two lines place the cloak around the shoulders of a person (or a community, or the world or even yourself, if you need it). Fill in the blank with the recipient of the blessing. You can do this in person or at a distance.

I call down the cloak of the angels.

Fall down as a waterfall of light.

Guiding, guarding, blessing __________,

By day and by night.

Tom Blaschko has studied karate since 1970. He has experience in using shamanic practices and Emotional Freedom Techniques for healing. He saw the ghost of his uncle when his uncle died and had other experiences that just can’t be explained by Western science. But his real passion is sharing information about souls, especially practices that help us to heal and grow. He wrote "Calculating Soul Connections" as a first attempt to look at soul reality. After learning a lot more, he is writing "We All Have Souls and I Think I Can Prove It." It will be available in 2016. You can follow his work and sign up for his newsletter on the website WeAllHaveSouls.com.