The Soul, Atam, Higher or Greater Self are different labels for the one Reality. To attempt to explain that Reality I will use the word "Soul". I can only give you a feeling for what cannot truly be defined.

Just as the brain is constantly monitoring every feeling in the countless billions of nerve endings in your body, so the Soul is aware of the experiences and feelings of the countless personalities, plants, animals, birds, fishes and seemingly inanimate objects that go to make up its "totality".

This present personality that you think of as "you" is just that much of your totality than can be actuated in the physical spacesuit that you call your body. There is no physical body that could contain the immeasurable energy of the Soul. It would spontaneously combust or explode into a billion fragments.

Just as we are nerve endings in the brain of the Soul, so the Soul is a nerve ending in the brain of "God". (Please understand that I am using metaphors.) When we say that God know when a sparrow falls to earth we are speaking a profound truth. Of course God knows because God is the sparrow also. Or, to get to the nitty gritty, the sparrow is yet another aspect of God manifesting in the physical plane.

Whilst we hold concepts of God as being one only male form we fall into the illusion of creating God in our image. Whilst we think at all in terms of "form" we fall into the illusion of Pantheism, That which man calls "God" is more than the sum of all its parts; which is in no way a definition, but an expansion of currently held beliefs.

Multi-dimensional personalities are merely parts of your totality. You are far more than this one person that you call "Self". Reincarnation is about the best interpretation you can have of Reality, but that's all it is, a great "interpretation".

The quantum physicists have now realised that time is open-ended. They begin to understand that time is, in some way, a great allusion. The mystics have been saying this for thousands of years. There is, indeed, the illusion of lineal time, but in reality, there is only there "eternal present". Whilst we are so intensely focused within the allusion we will continue to think of one life-experience preceding another. Our "history" is in fact nothing but stage decor.

There is nothing bad about the interpretation of past and future lives except it can lead us into accepting superstitious interpretations of Karma. I will deal with the concepts of Karma in next weeks column.

For now, we must try to remember that beginnings and endings are realities only within our own system of three-dimensional life. In eternity and infinity there are no beginnings, there are no endings.