August 18, 1999

• The soul responds to God’s loving light as a plant responds to light

• Reincarnation

• Soul compared to a window that transmits God’s light

• The relationship and interaction of body, mind, soul, spirit, and guides

• The nature of the soul

God blesses each of you and bathes your souls in loving light. Each of your guides is joined together in that light, reflecting its brilliance upon all souls.

You spoke together of your perceptions of the soul, of what it may be, how it functions, what it does. Each time you are assembled, these communions of the spirit begin with a reference to God’s light and love and the connection between that light and love and your own souls. It is intentional that you are greeted this way by us, for the one great influence that God exerts over each soul is the spreading of a loving light.

Plants respond to light. In the same way, your souls respond to God’s light. That light is not just an illumination. It is an energy. It is a force. It is a strength. It is an overwhelming presence that is characterized by what you refer to as love. It is true, there are many terms for love related to the many modes of expression, but the love we speak of is indeed the love of commitment, the love of compassion, the love of caring, the love that generates giving, the love that allows one to receive graciously. It is obviously not a physical love but much more encompassing.

God’s overpowering presence is best understood when you understand that you are loved, period. Only three words, very simple, carrying enormous significance, but absolutely, undeniably true. You are loved! Your connection to that love is the soul. The soul responds to the love that is offered, and it responds in kind, returning that love, but also carrying it forward.

You learn in your human lives to accept the love that is this light of which we speak. Your response is a learned response just as you learn a language. You become aware of the implications of what is being said, and gradually the connections are made that give those sounds meaning. It takes time, but ultimately those sounds carry with them specific importance, profound meanings.

So it is with love. You learn to be receptive. You learn to understand what it means that you are loved. You learn those meanings through your experiences. You cannot learn the importance of being sustained until you have been sustained. You will not understand what it means to have been sustained until you recognize what life is without sustenance. You most intensely appreciate the importance of food when you have experienced hunger. Water takes on great significance when you have known thirst. Even when you are not intensely thirsty, you know what it meant to receive the water when you were thirsty. Water, as a result, takes on great significance in your lives.

It is exactly the same with love. You don’t understand the benefit of God’s love until your life experiences bring you to a recognition of its necessity. That learning requires human life. That is the kind of spiritual learning, spiritual nourishment that we spoke of most recently. Your soul is the window through which God’s love impacts your life. You could draw shutters across that window. You can deny your soul’s existence. That does not diminish the light outside those shutters. That light is always there. Sooner or later the shutters open and the brilliance shines inward. But your soul is the means by which you receive the loving light of God.

It is active and passive. A window is passive. It allows to shine through whatever comes through. It just is. The soul serves as a window, but it is not entirely passive. A clear window has no effect on the light coming through. A window filled with colors and shapes does affect the light coming through, and therefore can be said not to be entirely passive. It has an effect. Your soul has the effect of the window filled with colors and shapes, but those colors and shapes themselves are not static. They change. They take on different shapes. They change their hues, and the light that passes through is altered. Your human lives provide the energy for these changes to take place.

Your soul is indeed forever present. It changes. It evolves. It becomes richer in color, more dynamic. It grows. It reflects the human life that has nourished it. When a soul does not receive enough nourishment in human form, it may then reincarnate to continue its development. You, as human beings, have an enormous influence on whether or not your soul takes on additional human life, for these developments, these changes in shape and color, must ultimately be complete. When they are absolutely clear, when they fully transmit this brilliant loving light of God, they are no longer visible per se but become a part of that light. So in a sense, your soul’s growth and changes are a matter of becoming more transparent, of becoming a clear vehicle that transmits without interruption the incredible intensity of God’s light.

Your soul is not the same as your mind. Your mind is physical, but your mind also has a connection to the soul. When your mind willingly seeks that connection, then your awareness of the soul will affect the activity of the mind. There are, of course, times when your mind is not able to appreciate the presence of the soul. That lack of appreciation, that lack of awareness will be reflected, understandably, in the behavior of the individual. The soul affects the nature of human life inasmuch as the mind is aware of the presence of the soul, but it is the human experience that shapes the soul toward eternity. In a way, it is a two-way street, but both directions are not entirely equal. An individual who denies the presence of the soul will behave in one manner or another that may be in opposition to the behavior resulting from a bonding of the mind with the soul. You might say the mind is the bridge that connects the awareness of the soul to the manifestation of the human life.

When the mind is damaged through illness or accident, the soul cannot be nurtured from the human. But as we have said, the soul does not wither and diminish. It remains as it is. It receives strength through the loving light of God, and it is sustained in that way. All life requires sustenance. If that nourishment cannot come from the human form, then it is received from God’s light and it remains alive and vibrant and healthy. But the lessons to be learned, the clearing of the window, still must be completed, and therefore at an appointed moment, the soul will become part of another human life.

The soul receives God’s light, no matter what. The soul receives God’s love, no matter what, but it flourishes and evolves toward its destiny through the love that you provide the soul. The fact that you are aware of that soul and want to provide nourishment in itself enhances and strengthens and directs your human efforts. Awareness of the soul benefits both the individual and the soul.

The spirit is the bond that unites each soul to God’s light. It is a kind of thread, not literally but in function, that serves as a bond for all souls. Your guides are together as you gather through the presence of spirit, through the presence of these bonding threads. There is one Spirit. All these threads are connected, but each soul has a uniqueness to it. It emits its own light. This light is the light that is transmitted through the window, through the glass. What ultimately comes through is the differentiated light of each soul. Of course, you cannot identify the soul in specific terms. But the soul may be understood as a window.

We are windows upon your soul. God’s light passes through us and is focused upon your soul, so we have an effect on the nature of the light striking the glass, striking the window, striking your soul. We benefit when you pray for us, for your prayers have a direct effect on our ability to focus God’s light upon your soul.

It is enough for you to pray for us, for our ability to guide you, without knowing our names or who we were. The fact that you are aware of your guides is all that is necessary for the prayer to be beneficial.

It is exactly the same with your soul. You do not need to know every detail that accurately describes all subtleties, all colors of your soul. But your awareness that you have a soul and that that soul brings the light of God into your lives is all that is needed to benefit.

You see, the soul has no shape. Even the analogy of the window is faulty, for you all imagine a window with a shape. It has dimensions, width, height, but there is where the analogy of the window and your soul is no longer sufficient. Your soul has no defining shape. There is no shape. There is no border. There is nothing that we can see of your soul that says this is where your soul stops and where another soul starts. There is no defining point. It is a continuing entity whose borders or identity are not defined.

Your soul is like the wind. It exists. You cannot define the shape of the wind. It is there and then it ceases. It may be windy in one place, and you move to another location and it is not windy. But there is not a specific point within which the wind can be fully defined. When does the color green become a kind of yellow? When does it become blue? You can look at the spectrum of light and see that a change takes place. Eventually you may say, “That’s clearly blue, that’s clearly yellow,” but where does that actually happen? Individuals will differ in their determination because there is no absolute determination. So just as colors are not absolute, just as the wind is not absolutely defined, your soul exists within an undefined limit.

We are aware of your soul because of the colors that come from that soul. Every soul has a different array of colors and there is the individuality, but there is no line which separates one from another. They are just different. It is a difficult concept for each of you to understand when you learn of something that exists with no defining borders, but in truth, that is what occurs. Your souls respond to light. Your souls respond to love, for love is a component of that light. The soul transmits that love to the human form. The human form transmits that love to the soul and changes the soul, and thereby the soul evolves, ultimately to perfection, to an absolutely clear transmission of God’s light, and becoming, in truth, one with that light.

We close as we often close by blessing you with God’s light, by blessing you with God’s love. We are transmitting God’s light, we are transmitting God’s love to your soul. It is by that transmission, it is by that focusing of love and light, that we have our impact on your human lives. Our love is God’s love. It is a part of God’s love. When it is fully the same as God’s love and light, then we become that love and light. That is our destiny and yours.

Be joyful as you go forward in your lives and be sustained in the knowledge of your joyous reunion. You are blessed as we are blessed. Open yourselves to the light. Take it in and spread it to many areas of your lives. Let that light emanate outward. Be as transparent as possible in your transmission of this loving light.

Amen.