Our biggest responsibility of all is a spiritual one. We have many responsibilities: personal, family, civic, social, employment, spiritual, and others. Spiritual responsibility is the most important…
We are not physical bodies with souls dwelling in them. We are soul beings dwelling temporarily with physical bodies.
This is a very important point. It is difficult to prove it for you; only you can prove it for yourself. But it can illustrated.
What is Spiritual Responsibility?
Consider what our physical body is. It is a collection of chemical elements, configured as molecules, cells, tissues, fluids, bones, and so on. The scientific community generally agrees that every one of the nearly ten thousand trillion trillion atoms in a typical human body, comprising around one hundred trillion cells, gets replaced over the years—often cited as seven years. But at the very least, we know that skin can be scraped off and it regenerates, hair drops out and more grows back in, blood may be lost and it gets replaced, and so on. Yet, through all of this physical change, we still maintain a sense of self; indeed, we know our identity and we know that it persists over many changes over many years. We are still ourselves.
So clearly, we are not our physical bodies. Even if a leg or arm is amputated, we still know that we are the same person. Our memories reach in one continuous sweep back to childhood (and sometimes earlier, to previous incarnations) even though our physical bodies have undergone many changes.
So what are we? If we are not physical, then we must be non-physical. Such a state of being or form can be described as spiritual. We are spiritual beings. Our essence is often referred to as the soul, or the spirit, or the spirit body, or the psychic body, or other such terms. As C. S. Lewis wrote: “You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.”
My own preference is the term “soul personality”, following the Rosicrucian teachings. I am a soul personality. So are you. So is everyone.
