What Is a Soul?

The main reason we don't know what is a soul is that we all tend to overly identify with our physical body, so when your relationship with your body is threatened by illness or aging, it can cause great fear. After all, walking around in your body all your life is the only identity you know, and one day, you won’t even have that! The problem is, you know what you’ll be losing when you die, but you don’t know what you’ll be gaining or who you’ll be … and that’s scary. Of course, it would help if you could remember who you were before you were born, but you can’t because the memories are just “too big” to squeeze into your brain. It’s a little like waking up with amnesia and you can’t remember who you are. Confusing and scary, especially when everyone around you suffers from it, too, and can’t tell you much about what is a soul.

So what is this larger You? Simply put, it’s consciousness. But what’s that? When you go to bed at night and fall asleep, your consciousness is freed from your physical body, and goes off adventuring in the higher dimensions with a bunch of other souls. Periodically, your brain catches snippets of these adventures but has no way to interpret them so they seem chaotic and jumbled, and you call it dreaming.

But those jumbled dreams are very real to your soul. In fact, that consciousness being who you are in your dreams is actually the real you. This is the key point – that entity doing the dreaming is your soul.

Now when you wake up in the morning, consciousness slips back into your body and you are aware once more of the you that you know as “you.” Imagine what your consciousness would be like if it was completely unfettered by your limited brain and your body. It’s hard to imagine being conscious without a body, but you do it every night.

So the first big step is to accept your true identity as part of your soul. It’s not that you have a soul; it’s that your soul has you, the person you think of as you living one of your soul’s many lifetimes. This new way of thinking – knowing your real identity as a fragment of your soul – is the hardest part of this material, and it may take a while to get a handle on it. (It did for me, but then I didn’t have this web site back then.) However, when you “get it,” you will avoid enormous confusion about what is a soul when you do cross over. (The majority of people on the soul plane report back that initially they didn’t know what was going on, where they were or who they were until a soul plane resident explained things to them.) What Is A Soul? is excerpted from "Death Without Fear" by Tony Stubbs