This post was inspired by Cynthia Bourgeault’s course Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, especially her commentary in Chapter Three regarding Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence. If you’ve ever assumed that “having a soul” is a birthright—that we’re each issued one like a divine passport—Cynthia’s teaching will stop you in your tracks. She reframes soul not as something pre-packaged, but as something slowly forged through presence, choice, and lived fidelity.
In other words, soul is not what you start with—it’s what your life creates. This subtle but radical shift reframes the entire spiritual path. What follows is an exploration of how essence, spirit, and presence weave together into the fabric of soul, and why your daily attention—not abstract belief—is the real raw material of eternity.
The Comfortable Assumption: Soul as Birthright
Western Christianity has long leaned on the assumption that each of us arrives on this planet with a soul already in place. From Augustine through Aquinas, catechisms and creeds have insisted that the soul is the indestructible, pre-installed unit of personhood. To be human is to possess a soul—immortal, unique, stamped with divine image.
This view has its consolations. It guarantees dignity. It frames each person as irreplaceably valuable. It also explains the role of religious institutions: if every human already has a soul, then the church’s primary task becomes protecting, purifying, and shepherding that soul until death.
But as Cynthia points out in her teaching, this model—comforting as it is—misses the deeper inner tradition. It confuses potential with completion. It risks turning the spiritual life into maintenance rather than transformation. You don’t have to grow anything, just avoid damage. Spirituality becomes soul insurance: protect the package, avoid hellfire, cash in at the pearly gates.
The Inner Tradition: Soul as Emergent
The inner tradition flips this script. As Kabir Helminski explains in Living Presence, we do not start with a fully formed soul. What we begin with is closer to raw material:
Essence: our innate temperament, our gifts and aptitudes, even the stubborn limits of our bodies and psyches. Essence is what we are given. It is possibility, not destiny.
Spirit: that uncreated spark, breathed into us, what Thomas Merton once called the “point of nothingness” at the center of each person where God disposes of our lives. Spirit is the divine charge, the direct line back to Source.
But the soul is not yet present. It is what gradually comes into being as essence and spirit are braided together through a lifetime of choices, experiences, awakenings, and fidelity. Helminski calls this process “the image of the life.” Cynthia underscores it: soul is not a possession. It is a creation.
In this view, the soul is the alchemical residue of a life fully lived in awareness. It is not the thing you protect, but the thing you produce.
Boris Mouravieff and the “Image of the Life”
This understanding doesn’t just appear in Sufi teaching. It shows up in the work of Boris Mouravieff (1890–1966), a Russian émigré philosopher who spent most of his life in Geneva. Mouravieff taught Eastern Orthodox spirituality but also engaged deeply with the esoteric streams of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. His three-volume series Gnosis attempts to recover what he called the “Christian esoteric tradition”—an inner current of teaching about transformation that ran parallel to, but often hidden beneath, the outer church.
In Gnosis, Mouravieff offers a line that distills the heart of the inner teaching:
“The soul is the image of the life.”
For him, soul is not a guaranteed possession. It is the crystallization of what your life has actually meant.
If your life has been dominated by avoidance, distraction, and self-interest, the “image” will be thin and fragmentary.
If your life has carried presence, sincerity, and fidelity, the image will be rich and luminous.
Mouravieff’s phrase echoes across traditions: soul = your life metabolized into eternity.
Merton and the Spark of Nothingness
Mouravieff was not alone in saying this. Thomas Merton, the twentieth-century Trappist monk, spoke of a “point of nothingness” in each person. At that point, he said, “God disposes of our lives.” It is uncreated, untouchable, the pure spark of Spirit. But for Merton, that spark was not the same as the soul. The spark is potential; the soul is what emerges when that potential is lived out in presence.
This distinction is crucial. It means we are not immortal by default. We are immortal by participation. We cooperate with God in bringing soul into being.
The Gateway: Remorse
Cynthia makes clear that the path into this soul-making is not bliss but remorse.
Not guilt, not shame. Remorse in the Sufi sense: the deep ache that says this cannot be all there is. It is the holy dissatisfaction that cracks the shell of automatic living.
For some, remorse takes the shape of disillusionment with religion—realizing the rituals and doctrines you were handed don’t touch the hunger in your heart. For others, it comes as disgust with culture—seeing that the rewards it dangles (money, status, likes, vacations) taste like junk food. For still others, it appears as nostalgia for the divine, a homesickness for a country you can’t name.
This ache is not a mistake. It is the ignition point of transformation. Cynthia compares it to entering the “City of Separation” in Helminski’s teaching: the place where you realize you are spiritually homeless, wandering, restless, unable to go back to the old securities.
The novelist William Styron captured it in a prayer: “Give me a new universe, Lord. This one isn’t large enough.” That’s remorse speaking. Not pathology, but prophecy.
Presence: The Tool of Construction
Once remorse cracks you open, the real building material is presence.
Helminski draws on the Sufi psychology of attention to describe three levels of human energy:
Automatic energy: conditioned responses, habits, unconscious routines. Ninety percent of life runs here—autopilot.
Sensitive energy: absorption, intensity, being “in the zone.” It feels ecstatic, creative, even spiritual. But it narrows attention and consumes us.
Conscious presence: the rare but possible state where we notice, see ourselves, and stay awake. This is the energy that builds soul.
Presence is costly. It requires attention, which always feels like work. It is easier to stay distracted. But every act of presence, no matter how small, lays another stone in the architecture of the soul.
Here Cynthia connects Helminski’s Sufi teaching with Christian contemplative practice. Thomas Keating described the difference between “ordinary awareness” (thoughts, reactivity) and “contemplative awareness” (a spacious seeing rooted in God). Presence is the bridge.
Ego in Its Proper Place
A common temptation is to vilify the ego. But Cynthia, following Helminski, insists that the ego is not evil. It is simply a tool that has usurped the throne.
When the ego is mistaken for identity, it becomes the false self—a stitched-together mannequin of roles and reactivity. But when it takes its proper role as servant, not master, it becomes an instrument for translating essence and spirit into expression.
Here again Merton helps: he distinguished between the “individual” (the egoic construct) and the “person” (the soul, connected to God). The individual is obsessed with differentiation—how I am unlike others. The person is revealed only in communion—how I am myself only in relation.
The task is not to kill ego, but to relocate it. To demote it from CEO to assistant, freeing soul to take the central seat.
The Alchemy of Death
So what happens at the end? As Cynthia puts it, what endures is the alchemical residue of your life.
The body falls away. Personality dissolves. What remains is the density of being forged in presence—the soul as the image of the life.
This is not a new idea. Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century German mystic, spoke of the “birth of the soul” as an ongoing event, not a finished fact. The Orthodox tradition of theosis—becoming by grace what Christ is by nature—says much the same: soul is not pre-installed. It is what emerges as we cooperate with divine life.
In this view, death is not a thief but a revealer. It strips away what was temporary and leaves behind only what was real.
Why This Matters Now
This teaching matters because it speaks directly into our cultural condition. Helminski writes of “the rubble of former beliefs.” For centuries, church and culture reinforced one another. But in the modern West, that scaffolding has collapsed. Many live without any sense of cosmic order or coherence. Life feels accidental, fragmented, absurd.
Against that backdrop, the claim that “you already have a soul” feels thin. People intuitively know it doesn’t match their experience. What resonates instead is the idea that soul is something you must actually cultivate. That presence matters. That attention is currency. That meaning emerges from participation, not entitlement.
In this way, Cynthia’s reframe is both ancient and startlingly contemporary. It draws from Sufi and Christian mystics, but it also speaks to the hunger of our secular age.
The Invitation
Cynthia’s course presses the question: what if your soul isn’t guaranteed, but built?
If that’s true, then every hour of your life matters. Every scrap of attention becomes mortar. Every “this can’t be it” ache is the beginning of the path. Every act of presence is another stone in the eternal architecture.
The good news is that it’s never too late. Soul is not about where you started. It is about what you are building now.
So perhaps the real invitation of the inner tradition is this: stop guarding a pre-packaged jewel. Start creating a living one.
✦ Before You Slip Back Into the Illusion ✦
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Credits
Thanks to DALL-E for the cover art
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Thank you so much as always. I think this helps me to understand why I was bothered by a bumper sticker recently. That said “not perfect, just forgiven”. Like you just snap your fingers and everything is groovy.
Heartfelt thanks for your brilliant writing.✨🌞✨