What Is a Soul Exactly?

In the wisdom of Kabbalah, a soul is called "a part of God above."

In our world, where we perceive reality through our five corporeal senses, we currently have no soul.

The soul is a force that Kabbalists call "light," which is above our earthly sensation of reality. We develop in our world until we start feeling a lack of this soul, which is expressed as a desire to discover the meaning and purpose of life.

Kabbalah calls the surfacing of such a desire, "the awakening of Reshimot (records)." These Reshimot urge us to seek their fulfillment, eventually leading us to develop a well-clarified, genuine and strong desire for the revelation of our soul, and through this developed desire, called a spiritual “vessel (Kli)” in Kabbalah, we attract the force of light from above our earthly sensation into our lives. The more people who undergo this process, the more lights and vessels gather together up to a point where they start revealing the soul.

If we combine the desires of everyone around us, then in the place of the initial desire for spirituality that urged us to begin this process, i.e., the Reshimo, which is also called "an individual soul," we discover a greater, collective soul.

Then, in that collective soul, we start feeling our true spiritual life. That is the spiritual work we have been given in our lives: to connect with all kinds of desires outside of us, together creating a system that is called "a soul," which increasingly grows until we acquire the sensation of the collective soul in its fullest power—a state where we sense the complete connection of us all together.

If we wish to rise to the sensation of our soul, we should seek the connection of our innermost desires—those lacks within us for discovering genuine meaning and purpose above all of our corporeal desires for food, sex, family, money, honor, control and knowledge—and ask the Creator, i.e., the single upper force of love and bestowal, to fill those lacks with the soul.