The Difference Between Mind, Spirit, and Soul
The following is an adaptation of one of my answers on Quora, which asked what was the difference between Soul, Spirit, and Mind. You can see the original answer here.
The Soul is the portion of you that retains the highest possible level of consciousness and is closest to Source. It’s the part of you that is purely formless and it is unaffected by experiences in matter, other than the act of learning.
The Soul acts as the top-guidance factor in your existence by determining the fundamental traits of your lessons and what you’ll want to be experiencing, although it doesn’t infringe on your own free will. So in that sense you are your Soul, but at the same time the two of you can also be considered two independent beings. The Soul sets the broad “goals” or interests it would like to explore; and now you are here exploring them.
The Spirit is the intermediary between the Soul and the physical human. It’s like its translation. It’s made of energy, but it also has interests and desires related to things of physical matter. While the Soul is close to unattached from, and little involved with, your dealings in matter, retaining its pure level of awareness, one could say your Spirit is the real “you”, that is exploring matter and living your life. Your Spirit is not unbiased or far away. Is the part of you that is the most truthful, in relation to dealing with things from your life and personal circumstances.
Your Mind is a projection from within your Spirit that is (or originally was) intended to deal with the development of the focus of the individual self. It assists you in your incarnation process by anchoring your focus on a single, individual perspective (yours) rather than experiencing reality all the time from the broader spiritual perspective, or from everyone else’s point of view, for example.
The mind can be compared in many ways to a computer. It is programmable through stimulii and repetition, among others, and has the ability work relatively autonomously, meaning, without any direct command or direction. If you sit down and proceed to observe your thoughts, what you are observing is the autonomous functioning of the mind. In a general sense and under normal circumstances you can’t control your mind directly (at least not in a long-term manner), rather you indirectly manage its functioning and balance, such as the stimulus you provide to it.
The Mind, in this case the subconscious, is responsible for handling all your seemingly automatic biological body functions, such as your metabolism, digestion, and so forth. It’s designed so that in a way you can temporarily assume command of some of these biological functions, such as the act of breathing, but when you abandon or forget that control they return to their ‘automatic’ functioning. That’s one of the reasons the Mind needs to work autonomously – so you, the spiritual being, are free to abstract from the minutia of such things.
The conscious Mind in its current state is not fully developed to its own potential, but if it was you could technically take full control and directly affect your body functions, metabolism, immune system, reproduction, and even termination.
