Recognize the difference between Spirit and Soul.

The soul is Spirit´s “cognitive” power and knower of all things.

Where it needs to perceive and know as a demon, it perceives and knows as a demon. Where it needs to perceive and know as a man, it perceives and knows as a man. Where it perceives and knows as a god, it perceives and knows as a god.

Mara, the Evil architect of all bodies and abodes, can only deceive and ensnare the soul´s partial, or complete attention, but never Spirit itself. Where the nature of the soul is not holy, the absolute nature and reality of Spirit is, and hence Mara always strives to demean the latter by deceiving the former. This is the great sin of evil by which it thrives until Spirit fully realizes the extent and illuminating power of its Buddha nature.

The awakened student of the Unborn Mind intuits that the empty illusions of Mara can never enslave Spirit through the virtue of  Spirit´s own true body which is a deathless luminosity. Yet it should be known that it can indeed fool the student’s soul by means of distorted perception and its means of differentiation, mind. Both discerning functions of the soul.

By putting a Spatio-temporal veil before the soul´s abilities of perception, and dimming its mind through differentiated ideations and views of assumed subject and object caught in a Spatio-temporal continuum of repetitive existence and suffering, the soul suffers but Spirit remains untainted.

This means that the “reality” perceived and experienced, is never the true reality that should be perceived and experienced by merit of direct gnosis.

Upon self-awakening to its true nature, Spirit uses its soul to perceive and know as a Bodhisattva through ten different stages, until finally, Spirit fully self-realizes its Buddha-nature. It is upon that spiritual awakening the soul is NO MORE because Spirit is now omniscient; heavenly free through the grace of its perfect spiritual virtue known as the undifferentiated [Unborn] light of Noble Wisdom.

A light that always permeates the all with its absolute truth, leaving no room whatsoever for the presence of actual illusion once it is fully acknowledged. This grace is also known as Nirvana, and when fully embraced as such with no more outflows, be it a desire, a fantasy, a dream of another kind of existence, or a distorted perception which gets taken as the truth, finally Pari-Nirvana.

Tozen