Young souls exist in every walk of life. It’s fun to pick out cartoon characters and film stars that embody the qualities of the young soul. Young souls have not experienced as many incarnations as old souls and therefore they express a lighter quality than the older souls who have been knocking around on the physical plane for many lifetimes.

Mickey Mouse is a young soul, while Donald Duck is an old soul. Mickey has the optimism that is characteristic of a soul that has not been witness to many adversities in other lives. Donald Duck, on the other hand, has that curmudgeonly character that can be an expression of an old soul who has seen and done it all.

Brad Pitt is a young soul, with that look in his eye of many beautiful empty rooms that have yet to be populated by experience. Angelina Joli, on the other hand, is an old soul, who looks right through you and bores into the core of your being with one glance of her penetrating eyes. She is not lightweight and you feel that, regardless of your personal opinions about her life choices.

Kim Kardashian is young soul, looking to complete herself and create a perfect image within the context of this culture. Her marriages and weddings portray the light touch of the younger souls who do not feel or think deeply. Her sister Kourtney is an old soul, whose observations about life have a wider outlook, often including global suffering and the bigger picture. And also, characteristic of the older soul, she can have a sadly realistic outlook because of past life experiences and knowledge.

Many examples exist in music too. Adele is an old soul. Often there is a tinge of suffering detectable when we meet an old soul that they convey through their words and sounds. Michael Jackson was a young soul. Perhaps that is why he felt most comfortable around children. Elton John is an old soul, John Lennon, and Janis Joplin. All of them had the qualities of old souls. Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, and Madonna are all young souls. Can you tell why?

Gypsy souls are the wandering spirits of the earth. While many people have spent their past lives, or even this present life, in one general area of the globe, gypsy souls don’t settle in one place. They only feel comfortable moving around, with very few possessions. This is why most people don’t understand gypsy souls.

Gypsy souls do not care about the comforts of life. Freedom has always been the most important value in their lives. Living permanently anywhere, settling down, getting a regular job, getting married, all the things that most cultures see as good—gypsy souls find oppressive. They don’t care whether people accept them or not. They know they are just passing through.
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They are difficult to pin down but full of adventure, courage, and independence. They would rather be out in the cold than comfortable in a warm house if it means they have to conform to what other people want of them. Slippery and elusive, they are hard to get to know, but they are colorful, resourceful, and inspiring to be around, even if you can’t ever get them to stay.

​Technology can help us to be mindful. Whether we are a programmers or users, to operate any complex technology requires the ability to be in the present moment. We cannot be scattered all over the place and write a correct line of code. We must pay attention to every comma, every period, every letter and number. One mistake and things go wrong, won’t start, won’t work, and cause chaos. The same holds true for users. It’s usually not the machine’s fault, it’s something the user forgot, didn’t get right, or blanked out on.

So it isn’t that tech makes us mindful, but we must be mindful to operate or build it. In this sense it is very valuable as an example of the need for mindfulness. But on another level, the Internet and all wireless technology, have further shown us that many powerful things cannot be seen with the human eye.
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We can’t see electricity, air, and the world wide web—yet they all exist and we take them on faith. However, when it comes to our Souls, Spirit, or the underlying powers of the Universe, we have a lot of doubters. Many people do not believe in this substratum of existence because they can’t see it. Yet modern technology is bound to make believers of these people as well, as soon as they become conscious of it, for they will then recognize the boundless possibilities of the unseen.

It is difficult to scientifically describe, or define, the existence of Soul or Spirit because in science we must prove them under laboratory conditions. And since we cannot even see the Soul or Spirit, how are we going to make a lab report about them?

Soul or Spirit is the organizing and underlying principle of the Universe. It actually is too big to put under a microscope. And, at the same time, no microscope is highly powered enough to see how infinitesimal it is either. We also know that the very process of viewing extremely small particles/waves that we call atoms, alters the atom itself through the light that shines on it.

A telescope is also useless in this regard. It depends on the human eye, human interpretation, and all kinds of other variables, such as the position of the earth in the vastness of space.

So we will never be able to describe the hugeness, the extreme smallness, or the qualities of Soul or Spirit in concrete physical terms, such as “The Soul is measured to be so high and looks like this.” All we can do is say that there is a probability or a possibility. That is, unless you experience your own Soul and Spirit.

Even then, you may not be able to describe it accurately, and only give an impression of what you felt. This is why people turn to poetry or art to describe what can’t really be put into regular language. However, some have tried:

• Gary Zukav: The soul is that part of you that existed before you were born and that will exist after you die. It’s the highest, most noble part of yourself that you can reach for.
  
  
• Iyanla Vanzant: The soul, I believe, is the fingerprint of God that becomes a physical body. I believe that. It’s the fingerprint... It’s unique to everybody.
  
  
• Deepak Chopra: The soul is the core of your being. It is eternal. It doesn’t exist in space/time. It’s a field of infinite possibilities, infinite creativity. It’s your internal reference point with which you should always be in touch.
  
  
• DeVon Franklin: The soul is the spirit. It is the connecting line to God. I believe the soul is where the Holy Spirit resides. I believe that it is literally, you know, when you pick up the phone and then you have your 4G network? The soul is the 4G network right to heaven to me.
  
  
• Debbie Ford: To me, the soul is a part of us that never dies. It’s who we are at our core. And it carries all the messages and the lessons that we’ve learned in the past, and will carry all the lessons and the messages that we will carry into the future.
  
  
• Eckhart Tolle: The soul is your innermost being. The presence that you are beyond form. The consciousness that you are beyond form, that is the soul. That is who you are in essence.
  
  
• Michael Singer: The indwelling consciousness that watches the mind come and go. That watches the heart come and go, the emotions of the heart. And watches the world pass before you. You, the conscious, the consciousness, the center of being, is soul.
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• Wayne Dyer: The soul is the birthless, deathless, changeless part of us. The part of us that looks out from behind our eyes and has no form. The soul is infinite so there is no in or out of it. It is everywhere. There’s no place that it is not.

If you are enlightened, then your twin flame is enlightened because you are the same soul in two different bodies. Therefore, twin flames are on the same level with each other in terms of spiritual understanding.

Achieving enlightenment is not the same thing as discovering your twin flame. Meeting your twin flame may cause you to examine the spiritual aspects of life and can then take you both on that journey. But, in general, enlightenment is out of the equation. Bonnie and Clyde were twin souls and they went on a robbing and killing spree that caused a lot of distress. So enlightenment and twin flames don’t necessarily go together.

Most people on this planet right now are not enlightened. They do not look within and see their connection with the Universe or with their Eternal Souls. So wherever they are on the path, their twin soul will be exactly where they are too. The purpose of meeting our twin flames is deeply spiritual. When you feel the wonder of it, that can catapult you into understanding the unseen mysteries of life.
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Maybe you are an old soul, who has incarnated many times. Your twin flame will be on exactly the same level. Even if you live in New Jersey and your twin flame is in Australia, you really are the same soul. So it isn’t possible for one of you to be enlightened and the other one not. Both of you are One, and enlightenment has nothing to do with it. But be sure that meeting your twin flame always shakes you to your roots.

Consciousness is a spiritual thing that cannot be measured or even seen. But yet it does have a material basis when it is tied to the body.

If we stopped eating and especially if we stopped drinking, our bodies would run out of energy and manifest life-threatening symptoms. We die and our consciousness leaves the body. Those who have clinically died and then returned to life tell of their out-of-body experiences, in which they saw their body lying lifeless while their consciousness hovered over it nearby.
They returned to life and became once again the individual personalities that came with their unique bodies, memories, and experiences. But they are never the same, for they are aware of this amazing quality of consciousness. It is tied to the body for a while and then it diffuses into the Universal Consciousness.

A person in a coma is not deemed to be conscious, though reports have shown that they respond to prayer. I have heard of comatose people who were ready to cross over to the Other Side and were held back by prayers from loved ones. The neuroscientist, Holley Alexander wrote an excellent book called Proof of Heaven about his own near death experience and coma. This is what he has to say:
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"For me, it's become clear that the best way to look at it is to turn it around and realize that consciousness exists in a much richer form, free and independent of the brain, which has everything to do with the eternity of our souls and the fact that our awareness, our consciousness, our soul, our spirit, does not depend on the existence of the brain in the physical universe. In fact, it's freed up to a much richer knowing when we're outside."

I have seen people’s personalities change after they became meditators.

Many years ago I was a high school English teacher in an inner city school. Two of my most difficult students, who acted wild and hostile, began to change before my eyes. They became mellow, they smiled with glowing friendliness towards me. I felt a completely different vibration coming from them—a loving inclusion that stunned me.

Soon after this personality change they came to me and told me about Transcendental Meditation. I went with them and was initiated. After that, my bond with these two young men was completely of the heart and of the Soul. It was such a drastic change and showed me how important it is for us to be still and get into contact with our deepest Selves. Not the mind-stream that never stops its fearful antics, but our deepest, eternal Souls.
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If I had not seen the complete personality change, I could not attest to the fact that meditation changed both of these students. Interestingly, it also changed me and my attitude towards the students in general. Whereas before, I had been hostile in my own way, I was able to soften up and still maintain a quiet learning environment. Though many years separated me from these two students, they brought me to a humble understanding of how much I learned from them.

Descartes Meditations are definitely worth looking into if you want to see a philosopher’s mind at work. Here we have a French man, who in 1641, sat down by the fire to contemplate how he can prove the existence of God and the Soul—without relying on scriptures and past philosophies. He decided that he was going to get to the root of the problem all by himself and not rely on anything he had been told or had read about.

This is what all philosophers do—they sit down in silence and contemplation and think deep questions through to their conclusion. Then they communicate their findings and break through old, preconceived ideas. In this case Descartes, reasons through a lot of questions about the nature of God and the Soul.

How many people can sit still for seven days and meditate like this? It is Descartes who said: “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
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He found it was very difficult to keep the old philosophies of life that he had learned, out of his head. He wanted to come up with something original and new. So to really understand Descartes, you would also need to know the philosophers he was trying to erase from his mental patterns, such as Aristotle. But you can still get a lot out of this work and feel the joy of an original mind who dared to be “out there” and continues to add much to this world.

The enlightened person is not escaping anything. Being enlightened does not mean having a free pass out of pain or the difficulties of life. Being enlightened is a vantage point from which we view our obstacles, find a way to resolve them, and return to peace. It is not running away from them.
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Taking drugs and getting drunk can be escapism. We can’t face whatever is happening at the time. All kinds of entertainments, social media, sex, distractions, can all be temporary escapes. But enlightenment is staring our difficulties right in the face without fear. It means having trust in the perfection of the Universe and how it is put together. Even if we falter in our human error, enlightenment is not temporary. It is permanent.

Once we know that we are Eternal Souls which cannot be destroyed, we have the context in which we view all of life. It doesn’t mean that we are exempt from challenges. All the great Ascended Masters had to leave their bodies, most with illnesses. They didn’t complain or carry on as if the Universe had it against them and had singled them out to suffer.
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Enlightenment is plunging right into life and appreciating all its aspects. Not trying to stamp out all the stuff we don’t want and making every adverse circumstance into an enemy. Enlightenment welcomes every experience and does not seek to run away.

f we didn’t suffer in our bodies and our minds, we would not seek the answers that only the Spirit can bring. When we get to the point, as Eckhart Tolle did, where we just can’t live with ourselves anymore, we are forced to find a better way.

We can see that the ego-mind, with its inability to live in the present moment, is constantly seeking something to give it relief. But it can’t find it because it is the very structure of the ego mind that is the problem. This survival-based mind, with its defensiveness, desire to prove itself right, and need for more, more, and more—cannot be still.

This is how all the great thinkers and spiritual masters have evolved. If they were all living in a state of Pure Positive Energy 24/7, there would have been no impetus to leave that state of bliss. But the ego mind does not comprehend the bliss of peace. It struggles, suffers, can’t stand the present, thinks something in the future might do the trick. For a state of bliss, we need a combination of the Soul and the heart that bypasses the mind and its natural state of fear.
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Each bit of suffering we undergo can be transmuted into something profound and meaningful, if it leads to our further discovery of the truth of our Soul. That is where peace abides and nowhere else. As difficult as suffering is, it is an indicator that we can find a way out—it is not permanent and we don’t need to get lost in the misery of it. It is not the end of anything, just the beginning of our search for who we are as Eternal Souls.