Soul: the mind-body continuum.

Spirit: the narrow portal to our eternal history.

Soul is our religious term for the relationship between the two ends of the mind-body continuum – us, the Higher-Order Conductor’s Signature-Frequency Set at one end, and at the other, the foreign competent minds of our Lower-Order Bodies. Soul is what the Novel Universe Model has been referring to as the LOB-HOC hierarchy – the physical body and brain as LOB, and mind as HOC. Every moment of every day, we perceive the conversation of body and mind as our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations. What might be conceived of as our actual “self” is not the thoughts, feelings, or behaviors themselves, but the experienced awareness and energy required to observe those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Spirit is our religious term for a tenuous bridge to intuition, insight, even otherworldly memory. Access, however, is filtered by our physical bodies and its limited cognitive light cone (the boundaries of our awareness, preferences, and objectives), creating an intentional, voluntary spiritual amnesia. The spirit’s information is filtered through an individual’s light cone – a kind of conversation between our current, corporal selves and our eternal, divine memory. Further complicating this conversation, not everything can be accurately attributed as to who is the actor and whom, the acted upon, at least from our mortal point of view. For instance, we might have a clear memory of being Cleopatra, when in fact, we were merely a slave who interacted with her, and now possess the Complete Information of that incident, able to experience it from either a queen’s or slave’s point of view – creating confusion as to whether we were once master or slave. For many living in a world of social media and its influencer economy, it’s far more valuable identifying as queen rather than subject. With that in mind, a modern life, struggling to comprehend the value and dignity of all life – even that of a slave – may be the point of the memory and its spiritual lesson. To welcome humility, one must first embrace pride. Suffering the indignities of a modern wage-slave will potentially shatter one’s ego, leading to the rejection of pride and experience of humility. In any case, either emotion lies beyond the Hall’s bounds, where there are no social ladders to climb, no dignity to have or be denied.

Severed from so much of our Signature-Frequency Set’s vast library of past lives and relationships, our amnesia isn’t a flaw, but instead, foundational to our mortal and spiritual journey. So much of our own history might distract us, while so much else, help us. Therefore, information that fits our quest is included, while that which does not, excluded. The challenge of spirit is translating useful information from one’s past lives into one’s present life. There are cases where a past life trauma is so salient to a current life’s journey it manifests as a birthmark, cognitive bias, repetitive nightmare, even congenital defect. Whatever it might be, it is intended in order that we might learn from its unique perspective, a lesson not inflicted upon us, but instead, designed by us. This is not to say that one “brought such suffering on themselves,” and some how deserves their lot in life, but that one desires such a perspective to learn what they otherwise do not know, yet want to know. This choice is both deeply personal, and also, impossible for any other to understand, even one’s mortal self, at least in a life born of this spiritual amnesia.

A soul is constructed from the Novel Universe’s informational patterns – energy dialects – what an individual’s SFS tail has accumulated over lifetimes. The soul is the body’s blueprint, assembling and maintaining its function (energy) and form (matter). Energy dialects are, at their root, patterns, and all patterns are information, including the Signature-Frequency Set. These patterns are the algorithms that assemble energy and matter. Energy and matter give shape to the behavior and form of everything. Energy dialects are the blueprints an energy body uses to accomplish its objectives, be it a living creature, metallic crystal, gas molecule, or any other thing. Dialects are assembled by “chunking” the actions of parts (LOB) together (HOC), the way letters are chunked into words, words into ideas, ideas into stories, and stories into the guiding light of our lives – the frameworks of Love or Power.

For instance, the singular goal of picking up a ball is different between a dog, using their mouth, from a human, using their hand. In either case, the action is often generally repetitive, as anyone who’s ever played fetch with a dog will know. However, break down the details, and no instance of repetition is ever exactly the same, even by the same human or dog, even on the same day with the same ball.

All brains encode objectives as neural circuitry – a “paragraph” (objective) made of “phrases” (behaviors) made of “words” (movements chunked together) made of letters (a singular action by a specific body part). To slightly oversimplify the concept, the final two letters in the “grab” word for a dog is “mouth open, mouth close;” for a human, “hand open, hand closed” – different body parts, similar actions, same result. No matter the “letters” or “words” used to fit the exact circumstances, the overall story is “get the ball.”

Energy dialects are experienced as the feelings and emotions underlying our thoughts and perceptions – we see the ball, want the ball, reach for the ball, and feel the ball in our … well, hand or mouth, depending on our body and corresponding dialects. Over many lifetimes, we develop and retain those particular bodies’ blueprints in our Signature-Frequency Set as the language of soul. Learning requires success and failure. Repeated trial-and-error – coupled with attention, interest, and if one’s fortunate, expert guidance – leads to mastery; for the novice, however, interest and effort is generally sufficient to reach proficiency on their own.

When speaking these dialects, who’s speaking? The LOB-HOC hierarchy is a multilevel structure filled with independent, conscious actors, each actor a Lower-Order Body, who is its own Higher-Order Conductor of Lower-Order Bodies. Every atom, cell, organ has its own soul. Our feelings and thoughts are really just our direct, “smoothed-out” experience of the LOB-HOC conversation – a compression of irreducible data into a reducible story, like thousands of chattering voices transformed into a cogent “word cloud” of specifics, meaning, and emphasis. Ideally, this is a productive, back-and-forth process that leads to desirable behavior; however, Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs) are disturbing impulses that come “out of nowhere,” when in fact, they are an inherent, natural feature of the LOB-HOC hierarchy.

How do we recognize the ANTs in our heads? It’s a simple distinction between canny (like home) and uncanny (like home, but somehow off). If the thought runs counter to our preferences and priorities, it will disturb us in ways we may or may not fully understand, but that uncanny feeling is a red flag, telling us that we’ve got an ANT in our head. ANTs arise from our LOB-HOC hierarchy, like a crowd shouting out a diversity of ideas, bubbling up into bizarre, and at times, terrifying thoughts – post postpartum depression, for instance. A mother, in one moment, feeling an impulse to harm the baby, and in the next, shocked by the thought, isn’t a “bad” mother, simply a mother exposed to a particularly nasty ANT. However, the misattribution of such a thought is where things get dangerous, and postpartum depression becomes psychosis. Believing the uncanny thought’s a hidden truth transforms the dialogue into a cognitive-dissident virus, infecting the brain with dire consequences – benign “automatic” becoming destructive “obsessive.”

The solution to this profound problem doesn’t require years of therapy, magic rituals, even exorcism. It just takes recognition and acceptance – “name it and claim it.” Understanding that our body is a hierarchy filled with foreign minds with independent ideas and agendas allows us to separate the maelstrom’s impulses from our own ideas, based on that simple standard – is it canny, does it “feel like home,” or uncanny, does that sense of “home” somehow feel off? Once we recognize the cue, subtle or not, we can challenge or simply ignore the ANTs in our head. However, identifying with those ANTs – believing that we’re somehow the horrible source – only feeds the ANTs, leading to more ANTs.

Automatic Negative Thoughts are generally not born of a single source, but frankensteined together as a mashup of impulses from multiple Lower-Order Bodies. For instance, the stomach rumbles with hunger, the pancreas produces insulin, the eyes spot a favorite source of sugar, the amygdala detects no threat, and suddenly, the impulse to steal candy from a baby crosses the mind. It isn’t the fact the idea arose, but the response that defines one’s character – their true preferences and priorities. The most effective technique is to simply note the uncanny, foreign source and allow the idea to dissolve away. If we try to diagnose or parse its exact origin, the complicated root-ball of various coalescing causes will likely spawn more harm than help. In the end, understanding the general impulse – hunger – is all that need be taken away from such a troubling thought, not the idea that one is a secret criminal on the loose. And, it never hurts to tell those ANTs that they got it wrong, even laugh at the absurdity of their plan – identify the thought’s origin; not with the thought’s implications.

Over lifetimes, we’ve assembled the soul’s embodied library from the ground-up, first becoming quantum particles, then molecules, tissues, organisms, mammals – a personal process of information evolution and acquisition, not Karma. How does one become human? One wants to, prepares to, and takes a leap of faith. How well one does as a human is a matter of proficiency, not quality of character, or even framework. Those with “natural talents” are not more deserving, better people blessed by “god,” while those with deficits are not cursed sinners working off past-life debts. Neither is it randomness. Instead, it’s simply a matter of experience. One might only need more practice with certain “phrases” in order to speak the body’s dialect more effectively.

Mold spore energy dialects differ from houseflies, whereas the dialects of houseflies and whales are more similar to each other than either are to spores. All three move about in three-dimensional space (floating, flying, swimming), but only houseflies and whales consume nutrients, produce offspring, and are self-propelled. If one’s goal is to become a blue whale, having only been a mold spore does not prepare one as well as having been a housefly – better yet, in the interim, become a cod. Each moment of every life we live fills our Signature-Frequency Set with these blueprints, these energy dialects. Each time we’re born into a new form, these dialects reassemble through the wisdom of spirit and effort of soul. However, the job of our spirit is more than simply bridging our current body with our SFS tail’s long history, but also, providing proper context for a valuable life.

The concept of Akashic (Sanskrit for “ether”) records is that the universe holds a history of all experiences, thoughts, perspectives … all data in one “place.” The Novel Universe Model tweaks the concept – the Instrument, not the universe, contains such records, and not only for this universe, but for the Concert Hall, each Spiral, and every other Novel Universe that has existed or will exist. Instead of a spirit accessing such records, it accesses its own version of such records, its SFS tail. While part of our insight and intuition is the timely revelation of spiritual information, the “spiritual amnesia,” created by a human body, is both intentional and valuable – full access to our personal “Akashic” records are, in fact, undesirable, even problematic. Knowing everything we’ve learned from every past life would certainly change things – how seriously might we take death if we all knew for certain what lie beyond?

Many destined to return to the Concert Hall have chosen, on purpose, to live difficult, costly, precious lives – not those of storied “saints” or “legends” of myth; not great leaders of society or inspirational artists of renown; not kind healers or energetic best friends. Such aspirational lives appear most valuable from the living’s perspective, but for many in the Concert Hall, they offer shallow insight and little opportunity for growth. Instead, the crude, gritty, “wasted” lives of suffering are sought out. Why? These are the lives not otherwise possible in a place where Love connects all in Complete Information. It’s important to realize that for some human monsters, there are wonderful, compassionate, loving people buried deep inside. Without first becoming that monster, at least for that moment, there’s no other way to learn those tough lessons, lessons impossible in the Concert Hall. This is not to excuse such behavior, but to understand its origin, its meaning.

In the Concert Hall with Complete Information, it is as impossible to “lose” a loved one as it is to lie to a friend, making the elation of reunion and reconciliation simply unknowable. These profound emotions require a different kind of place with a different kind of paradigm, one where a person might wholeheartedly believe the absence of their loved one might be permanent – a belief the spirit knows not to be true. Second, the person not only must lose track of their friend’s point of view in favor of their own, but hide their true intent and willingness to do their friend harm if their desires are not met – again, an impossible point of view in the Hall where Complete Information makes all views equally and instantly known to all in communication. For example, Dave cannot cause Hana pain without simultaneously experiencing that same pain from Hana’s point of view. In the Concert Hall, it doesn’t matter if Dave would like Hana to, say, slap him in the face, because he’s into that sorta thing. This is not the Golden Rule – what’s right for oneself is not necessarily right for another. Just because Dave likes a good slap does not mean he’ll like this one. What Dave experiences is Hana’s actual experience, not Dave’s own predilection for such a sensation. On the other hand, should Hana slap Dave in the face, it would not only feel good to Dave, but would also allow Hana an experience of pleasure she would otherwise find painful – a truly novel perspective.

In a Novel Universe, permanent loss and secrecy are possible. Here, death might take those loved ones from us, their absence permanent, at least from our mortal perspective. Without Compete Information, one must act in the mist of silence, and worse, disinformation. It is only through this fear, this loss, this betrayal, a broken friendship might be repaired – a joyful experience impossible to create in the Concert Hall. Instead, these true heroes’ journeys might only be retold in the Hall, inspiring their audiences through the emotional stories of time spent in a perilous Novel Universe.

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