Lost souls.

The phrase has always scratched away at me.

I hear it in movies, television, news reports and songs. An aircraft crashes, a ship sinks, there is a fire, a war, a natural disaster, or someone is killed by another human being and, sooner or later, we hear about the souls lost or all those lost souls.

My response is usually an eye-roll and, depending on who is within earshot, Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Lost where? And how?

We use these words so easily that I wonder if we ever stop to hear what we are actually saying.

People lose their lives. Lives are lost. Souls are lost. There are lost souls. Aircraft carry souls on board.

But these are not necessarily different ways of saying the same thing.

If two hundred people die in an aircraft crash, something very real and very human has happened. Two hundred human lifetimes have ended. Families have lost people they love. Partners have lost partners. Children may have lost parents; parents may have lost children. There is grief, shock, devastation and the sudden absence of someone who was there and now is not.

That loss is real.

But did those who died lose their lives, or did their lives end?

There is a difference.

And when lives lost becomes souls lost, we have quietly crossed another line altogether. What exactly happened to the soul? Apparently, somewhere along the way, it got lost.

We Tell Ourselves Stories

Movies haven’t helped.

Take The Sixth Sense. Its dead walk among the living. Some do not know they are dead. Others remain caught in trauma, anger, fear or unfinished experience.

That idea doesn’t bother me particularly. I have my own understanding of the Near Realms and of those sometimes called earthbound ghosts. Through DreamWalker® Death, I also understand what it means to walk with someone as they leave the human experience. I have dreamwalked others, including my father.

There were no grand pronouncements, no saving and no instructions about where he should go. I simply walked with him, without words, showing him the way to the bridge of flowers.

Something remaining close to the earthly experience is not, in my understanding, the same thing as a soul being lost.

Then there is Meet Joe Black.

Now, I am perfectly prepared to suspend a considerable amount of disbelief when Death arrives looking like Brad Pitt. There are limits to my spiritual discernment.

But there he is: Death himself, arriving for William Parrish and eventually accompanying him from this life.

It is a beautiful human story, and frankly, swanning off with Brad Pitt has a certain appeal all of its own, especially as he ages like fine wine.

Yet underneath it sits another very old idea: when we die, something has to come and get us.

Why? What exactly needs collecting?

The body clearly isn’t going anywhere, so presumably it is something else. The soul?

And once again: lost where, and how?

Our songs aren’t much different.

We sing about saving souls, awakening souls, selling souls, surrendering souls and finding souls. Mumford & Sons sing Awake My Soul. Others ask for their souls to be saved. Stories have souls captured, stolen, damned, redeemed, released or returned.

The soul seems to lead an extraordinarily precarious existence, which is rather strange for something we generally describe as eternal.

What Are We Talking About?

When I was very young, I used to wonder about colour.

I would say that what I see as yellow might be what somebody else sees as purple. We were both taught to call it yellow, so we would never know.

I didn’t have the language of consciousness or philosophy. It was simply something that seemed obvious to me. How could I possibly know what another person was experiencing simply because we had learned to give it the same name?

I find myself wondering the same thing about the soul.

We use the word as though we’ve agreed upon what it means.

Have we?

Ask ten people what a soul is and I suspect you may receive ten different answers. Yet humanity has somehow managed to become remarkably confident about what can happen to it.

It can be lost, saved, damned, redeemed, stolen, claimed, possessed, awakened, sent to heaven or sent somewhere considerably less pleasant.

Religions have spent centuries telling humans what must be done to save it, often with very specific instructions about which beliefs, behaviours, rituals or authorities are required.

And beneath all of it sits an assumption so familiar that we rarely question it: the soul is somehow in danger.

What if it isn’t?

Something I Knew Before I Had the Words

Perhaps the strangest thing about my understanding of death is not that I came to it. It is that I remember having it before I had the words to explain it.

As a young child I would say things that, looking back, must have sounded rather odd.

I remember saying something along the lines of, Well, you may come in as an axe murderer and I as the one you murder. It doesn’t really matter later, you know.

Apparently childhood me wasn’t particularly interested in easing people gently into metaphysics.

But I wasn’t saying murder didn’t matter. Of course it matters here.

Pain matters. Cruelty matters. Grief matters. What humans do to each other matters enormously within the human experience.

I was seeing something else. The roles were not the whole story.

Somehow, even then, I understood that the experience and the soul were not the same thing.

That understanding has remained with me.

I understand that humans ultimately make their own choice about leaving. That may be extraordinarily difficult for those who remain, particularly when someone leaves very young. From the human perspective, the grief can be almost unbearable.

But I don’t measure the value or completeness of an incarnation by its length.

There are many reasons for coming, staying and leaving. In my understanding, some find the density and gravity of human life extraordinarily challenging and leave earlier than those around them expected. They may choose another incarnation, another experience, another time.

I don’t expect everyone to share that understanding. How could I?

Perhaps my yellow really is your purple.

Experience

Looking back over my own life, surprisingly few of the people I journeyed with were what I would now describe as loving.

Some experiences were extremely difficult.

I don’t need to make the people involved into heroes. I don’t need to pretend cruelty was kindness. Nor do I need to rewrite what happened so that it fits neatly inside some spiritual explanation.

The experience happened.

My understanding today includes what I know as the trinity of the human, the Master and the I Am.

Marlene is the human. She is here for the experience.

Saint Parousia is the Master.

And the I Am is the pure consciousness of my soul.

These are not three separate beings competing for control of one life. They are dimensions of who I am.

The human experiences. The Master brings the wisdom. The soul receives the experience.

For me, the Master also allows something wonderfully ordinary: I can laugh openly at myself and just as freely award myself a well-deserved accolade when one is due.

There are no illusions anymore, and thankfully no more bobbing up and down at altars on Sundays requesting forgiveness.

Forgiveness for what?

For having the experience I came here to have?

None of this means the human experience is always comfortable. The human can hurt. She can become frightened, bewildered, angry or completely immersed in what is happening.

But perhaps the question is no longer how I rescue myself from the experience.

Can I love myself enough to just be in it?

That is where my understanding of love has changed profoundly.

Love, as humans generally describe it, tends to mean affection, tenderness, protection, attachment, approval and care. All of those can be beautiful.

But there is another love I have come to understand: Love 2.0.

A love spacious enough to allow experience without requiring the human or the soul to be rescued from it.

The human can hurt. The human can forget. The human can become so immersed in the experience that, for a time, it appears to be all there is.

The Master brings the wisdom.

The soul does not therefore become lost.

Perhaps that is why the phrase lost souls has scratched at me for as long as I can remember. It begins with an assumption I have never quite been able to make.

Perhaps nobody needs to rescue the soul. Perhaps no religion owns the route back to it. Perhaps Death doesn’t need to arrive, even looking remarkably like Brad Pitt, to collect it.

Perhaps the soul has never been somewhere else.

We have spent centuries singing about it, preaching about it, writing stories about it and mourning it; saving it, finding it and fearing for it.

And perhaps the simplest question is still the one that makes me roll my eyes whenever I hear those familiar words:

Lost souls.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Lost where? And how?

— Saint Parousia

DreamWalker® is a registered trademark of Crimson Circle IP, Inc.