Here is an extract from my latest project From Logic To Enlightenment, which is going to be a kindle-only booklet of spiritual inspiration, with 100% royalties being donated to Cotswold Care Hospice. I’m hoping to publish by the middle of November at the latest.

What we are all seeking is closer to us than our very skin, but most of us are still ignorant of this most basic of spiritual truths. The secret garden of the soul is within us. Yes, contained within us is a boundless ocean of love and bliss with unlimited possibilities. As we go through this life and become more and more aware of who we really are, we are able to access our “God-Self” more readily. Some people achieve this via spiritual practices such as meditation, but it is also possible to reach God by the action of selfless service. Swami, Sri Sathya Sai Baba once said that the easiest way to serve God is to serve your fellow human beings; because God is resident within the hearts of all beings, therefore to serve humankind is to serve God. When you serve the Divine you are taking steps towards Self-Realisation, because with every step you take towards God, God will take ten steps towards you.

We are here in this realm of matter simply to have physical experiences. The body is nothing more than a vehicle that gets us from A to B. It is impossible to die. Even the physical body does not die; it simply changes form and continues to exist. Anyone who does not believe this should understand, and I recap, that all is energy. There is nothing that is not energy. You can neither create nor destroy energy; it is eternal. When the life-force leaves at so-called death, the body reverts back to inanimate matter. If you bury a physical body, over time it will break down or decompose, and merge once again with the earth. If you cremate a physical form, the cremation process causes the body to evolve into heat energy, which in turn is absorbed back into the total energy mass. So, the body does not die; in fact death is mythical and only exists in the mind.

The soul is indeed a secret garden of unlimited possibilities. But before we go any further, I want to ask a question; are the soul and the spirit one and the same thing? My personal view on this is that like everything else in this realm of the relative, the answer is paradoxical. In other words, yes they are and no they are not. Like the perfect Divine dichotomy, both answers are true. The way I see it is like this, at our deepest and purest level of being we are pure consciousness, which is the soul. At the first level of creation, where Divine thoughts start to materialize as form, we are spirit (energy). However, everything without exception is energy; there is nothing in any realm of existence, anywhere, which is not energy.  Therefore we can say that the soul and the spirit are not the same thing because one is pure consciousness and the other is energy, but on the other hand they are the same because consciousness is energy in its most subtle form. You could argue that it doesn’t really matter, but I threw it into the mix as a kind of food-for-thought exercise to kick-start this little series of thought provoking articles.