The dream of the human soul is to live in the real world, with joy and compassion, with harmony and peace and love. The dream of the human soul is to live a human life where life, world, and what is thought of as spiritual aren’t separate. We don’t liberate ourselves by leaving the world. We liberate ourselves by living the world. So it’s as if the shell is redeemed. The shell that is the ego, the empty shell, the fake one, is redeemed as the soul. When we see that the ego is not separate, when we recognize its original sin, the shell becomes connected, continuous with the whole. And that very shell, now made of essence and love and truth, we now realize is the soul. In the Christ perspective, the shell that is the apparent world, the empty world, the fake world, is resurrected as the Cosmic Logos, the true living world, the universal soul. In this resurrected world, heaven is on earth, heaven is the world. Christmas, with its sparkling tree of many lights and colors, is the celebration of this heavenly life on earth, the resurrection of this new body.

We experience ourselves here similarly to the soul, as a flowing and dynamic presence, teeming with energy and pulsing with power. Yet, we are not a limited soul, but a boundless presence that is dynamic and vital, full of life and creative power. We may actually recognize here that the qualities that our soul possesses, those of flow, unfoldment, dynamism, potentiality, creativity, and morphogenic transformation come to it from this boundless dimension of dynamic being. In other words, when we experience our soul as a living dynamic presence we are actually experiencing the dimension of dynamic presence but in a limited and individual way, as related to our particular physical body. Dynamic presence does not dismember itself into individual and separate souls, but simply appears so due to our limited understanding of our true nature. Because of this, the realization of the dimension of dynamic presence challenges our conviction that our souls have to be separate for them to be individual, and brings about the precise understanding of the relation of individual soul to universal soul, or dynamic presence, this way liberating us from this deep and constricting conviction.

Student: If all things are one, then what is a human being? When I experience the unity you’ve been talking about, I still feel that being human and vulnerable separates me from other things.

Almaas: A human being is not a disconnected entity. You feel differentiated from the rest, but not separate. But if you’re feeling yourself as a human being who is a separate entity and vulnerable, you’re still looking at it from the perspective of the body. You’re looking at the soul from a physical perspective. So the soul is limited to the experience of the body. If you allow the soul to be there as it is, without limitation, the soul will naturally fill up and expand and become everything without changing the quality that is the soul. It becomes what is called the universal soul. That’s one way of experiencing the fourth dimension. So when you say, “What is a human being?” it is the same thing as saying, “What is love? What is a house?” You could talk about that. All these exist. I’m not denying the existence of any of these things. I’m saying that there’s no separation between them. That doesn’t mean there are no houses. There are houses, but there are no houses. There are human beings, but there are no human beings. They exist, but not in the way you think.