Thomas Moore

"Daphne Michaels: What is the difference between spirit and soul?

Thomas Moore: It is very difficult to dispel the difference quickly. It took me a number of years of thinking through and meditating to feel comfortable about the distinction, but I can tell you a few things. Normally, the way we understand spirit is that it is something within us and within a culture that, first of all, is interested in the future and moving ahead. It might be interested in speed and getting things done quickly. It is interested in knowing as much as possible, so spiritual people like to have the answers to what happens after death and what it means to be a moral person. They want to answer the big questions. The spirit is big, it’s vast and tends to move upward. Spiritual organizations are often thinking upward. Churches have steeples pointing to the sky. People look to the sky when they think about God or Heaven or things of that sort.
The soul is different; the soul is more interested in the past. I notice in psychoanalysis that Freud is very interested in the soul. We are interested in finding out what happened in the past. I think if we had a soulful culture, we would want to honor the past. We wouldn’t want to just constantly build into the future, but rather to preserve old buildings, preserve the stories of the past. We may want to tell the stories of our own families. That’s a very soulful thing to do. Also, the soul tends to be deep rather than high, so we use metaphors and images with a downward movement—going down deep into life and down deep into yourself, deep into whatever you are doing. This idea of soul and depth has been around for at least 2,500 years, so that’s not a new idea.
The other thing is that the soul is more interested in connection, to tying people together or to connecting us to something that were are interested in or to our homes to have a strong sense of the place. So soul and spirit are quite different, yet both are necessary. Both are extremely valuable—equally valuable—and the trick is to be able to take care of both at the same time.