The difference between the soul and the spirit has a lot to do with “whose” soul and “what” spirit we are actually talking about. Most people refer to the soul and the spirit as being connected to specific people and each of us is often said to have a “soul” or a “spirit” which will live on after our physical body dies. This is usually enough to satisfy those of us with a passing interest in the subject and little more is ever required on the topic after that.  Of course, there are others who become more curious about spiritual topics during their life and they wish to get a better understanding of what these terms mean.
   
If we are talking about a particular person’s “soul” or their “spirit”, we can say that there is a difference between these two things.  Still, if we found ourselves at the gates of Heaven and the question was posed to us “Choose your soul or your spirit”, which would we choose?   In a case similar to this one, we can begin to make sense out of the difference between a person’s soul and their spirit.  The essential difference which gives meaning to these terms can also help us to understand ourselves more readily.
    
Typically, the idea of a soul is something which is more closely associated with a person’s physical body. This is the main essence of what sets these two terms apart. Although the spirit is also associated with the body, the association is not a “necessary” association as it is with the soul. The “soul” of the Buddha, for example, can be said to be associated with the physical man Siddhartha Gautama Buddha who was born in Nepal several centuries before Jesus and who was raised by his father and his mother’s sister. He lived and breathed and ate a lot of food and he was a great teacher for many decades. 
    
If the “soul” of the Buddha were not associated with that physical body that we know from history, then we would not be able to say it was the “Buddha’s soul” at all.  We would need to connect it to that physical body in order to be appropriately talking about his “soul”.  If we weren’t speaking of his body, then we might say it was someone else’s soul or we might say that it was the Buddha’s “spirit”.
    
Now we can see where the difference between “soul” and “spirit” starts to become apparent.  There are many things about the “Buddha” which really have nothing to do with the physical body of the man who lived in Nepal.  What is meant when we talk about these other attributes is that they are part of the Buddha’s “spirit” which lives on today even after all the qualities of his body and discussions about his physical history have ended.  If the discussion isn’t associated with a physical body, then we can’t really say that it is a “soul” discussion. Instead, we can say it is someone’s “spirit” we are discussing because we begin to discuss the term in ways that are no longer associated with the physical body. 
   
In typical discussions about the soul, people often talk about individual lives and the emotions which that person struggled with or is struggling with in their own spiritual quest for happiness.  The soul is said to live on after physical death but it may continue to struggle even after the physical body is gone. The spirit, however, does not usually find itself in the discussion of “emotional struggle” so much as it does in the discussion of “intentions” and “activations” and “influencing” of people and things.  The spirit can be discussed in terms which go beyond the body even more so than the soul. Although the spirit of a person is with them when they are physically alive and the soul is also there, it is the spirit which activates both of these and which goes beyond the soul in many instances.  Everything which has a soul also has a spirit, but everything that has a spirit does not always have a soul. This is the essential difference between these two terms.
  
In summary, we can now say what our answer would be at Heaven’s gate when we were asked to choose between our soul and our spirit?  First we might ask a little question of our own; “Who’s asking me this?” Then if we found that the person who was asking us was a trusted guide such as Jesus or Buddha or St. Peter, we could confidently choose the “spirit” because it is the spirit which gives life to the soul and which gives life to all things even after their physical form has changed. It is in the “spirit” of Heaven that this question would have been posed and giving up our “soul” in order to get into Heaven would surely be the best choice if such a question were ever asked. Goodbye to the soul and hello to the spirit as we move into a new phase of our spiritual growth! Amen.

Because of the fact that spirituality and mysticism are often such vague areas of knowledge, there can actually be quite a bit of confusion about the idea of a spiritual awakening.  One of the most popular places that people hear about a spiritual awakening is in the programs of Alcoholics Anonymous or any of the other 12-step programs. 

The 12th and final step suggests the possibility that a person can have a spiritual awakening and therefore arrive at some kind of final condition wherein their spiritual journey is said to be complete.  The idea of coming to an “end”, however, is problematic in spirituality and this is the reason we need to be clear about what is meant about a spiritual awakening. Great sages like Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Lao Tzu and Sri Aurobindo have discussed these confusions in detail and suggested that the condition may be extremely rare even though it is often reported y many individuals.
    
The idea of “waking up” spiritually might be best understood by imagining that people are all relatively “asleep” when it comes to the reality of their day to day lives. Oftentimes, when you are asleep, you don’t even realize that you are asleep because your dream can seem so real!  This is a similar experience in relation to the spiritual “slumber”. 
    
People who first enter a spiritual recovery program or spiritual group of any kind can all be said to be somewhat “asleep” in terms of their awareness about what is real or what is most valuable in their lives.  They seek out the instruction of other more experienced individuals to help them to “wake up” to the realities of the world around them.  This can often be a very difficult and even traumatic experience as we don’t particularly like to wake up to reality anymore than we like to be awoken from a good dream when we are asleep in our beds.  Nonetheless, if we stick around a spiritual group long enough, we begin to become more aware of certain things and can be said to be “awakening” to a new reality.
    
The full significance of a spiritual awakening, however, is often much more extreme than most of us realize.  We may have experienced certain dreams at night where we thought you had been awake and actually visited many “real” places such as our job, our school or our home but then later we discovered that none of this was real.  We had either fallen abck asleep without realizing it or we had only been going through another dream, very lucid, yet unreal nonetheless. 
   
This “dream” experience is also very common among people who begin to study spiritual truths and become very excited when they feel that they are finally “waking up”.  The reality of this “waking up” as a full blown spiritual awakening, however, is very far from a reality in most cases. As one great sage once said “You are mistaking a crack in the mirror for the full light of noon!”  A spiritual awakening is something that is actually much more profound and comprehensive than most people realize.  These experiences are classically restricted to a very small percentage of the population throughout history and have been discussed in many great books such as the Bhagavad Gita, the Kaballah and the New Testament. 
    
There is wide agreement amongst some of the world’s most notable spiritual teachers that only one in ten million people will ever truly become awakened to the full reality of the spiritual condition of mankind!  Can this be true?   The reason it may be correct is that spiritual work actually requires extreme dedication and effort over many years before a person can typically be said to become completely awakened to their spirit.  Muhammad is known to have spent years in mediation before finally becoming “Enlightened” and certain issues surrounding life and death and the eternity of the soul are very profound and can only be intuited by those who witness extreme tragedies or experience near death transformations in their lives.  Even after these extreme experiences, people often return to their original state and are only changed in a very profound way rather than being completely “awakened” to their spirit. 
   
A spiritual awakening is something more grand than many people have likely been capable of understanding after simply hearing about the subject.  The rarity of the experience, however, can provide great inspiration to those who would choose to devote their lives to that same spiritual quest.  These great spirits have included such names as Muhammad, Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Krishna, St. Paul, Ramana Maharshi, Gautama Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus Christ and many others. 
    
The quest for a spiritual awakening can make a person into one of the most influential figures in history, as th previous list suggests.  If you set your course for the stars, you may just reach it someday! Once you do, there will be no more doubt about whether you have arrived or not.