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The Five Categories of Soul Expression
By Linda Mihalic
The desire to understand the nature of our existence, the world we live in, and the starry universe beyond our planet and solar system, has driven a certain type of thinker among us to ask questions, seek causes, to find reasons for, and to explain what we discern and experience in our lives. The hallmark of such a thinker is curiosity, “a strong desire to discover something unknown, either by research or inquiry; inquisitiveness; a desire to gratify the mind.”–Webster’s American Dictionary. Every pioneering mystic seeks answers to life’s unexplained and seemingly unexplainable mysteries. You found your way to the Via Christa because your curiosity, your desire to know more, has brought you here.
Edna Lister created this word diagram to illustrate our mental/spiritual axes and how they intersect physical science. We may perceive psychology, metaphysics, philosophy and mysticism only through the mind, not the senses. She insisted that we must apply our faith to understand how these categories apply to us. She further emphasized that we must have the faith of God (not mere faith in God) to understand the categories of our personal soul expression: Philosophy aids us in a logical study of psychology, knowing our own soul; applied mysticism aids in intuitively revealing the truths of metaphysics. Pythagoras formalized philosophy as the study of truth as reality; Plato introduced us to the fundaments of psychology, the study of the soul, and metaphysics as ontology, the study of being and the unseen reality in which we dwell. As embodied souls we must use disciplined mysticism, as opposed to unrestrained imagination, to train ourselves to approach metaphysics, the unseen reality of God, as both principle and personality, to speculate and to attain true knowledge as soul illumination and comprehension, to access that mind “which was also in Christ Jesus.”–Philippians 2:5.
Since “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”–Hebrews 11:1, we direct our faith, using science, to learn about the material world, to obtain evidence, the possible proofs of our mystical speculation about the true nature of God, the reality that transcends the appearance of things seen. We use science as a tool to aid our comprehension of “things not seen,” to prove our faith, not to worship science as the object of our faith. Science must assume a logically validated hypothesis; however mere opinions, imagination, suppositions, and assumptions do not pass for reasoned speculation; do not conflate the meanings of these terms.
You can classify everything you learn, experience, and do in life under the five categories of expression. They serve as the invisible framework for your conception of reality and experience of life on earth, whether you are aware of them or unconscious of their existence and impact on you. Within them you can discover who you really are, why you are here, what you are supposed to do, where you are going and how you can get there. A “category,” as a term of logic, refers to a series or order of all the predicates or attributes contained under a genus. The Schoolmen, philosophers of the Patristic era (100–500 AD) distributed all the objects of our thoughts and ideas into genera or classes, basing their work on Aristotle’s ten categories: substance, quantity, relatives, quality, action, passion, time, place, situation, and habit. The act of “expressing” is “to speak; to declare in words; to represent in written words or language.” In rhetoric, expression is “the peculiar manner of utterance, suited to the subject and sentiment.”
A first step in recognizing and reclaiming your citizenship in the kingdom of heaven is to undo the damage and deficits created by your worldly education, which taught you deformed opinions and prejudices as “facts” and “reality.” All Creation lives in accordance with God’s Light expressing through psychology, metaphysics, philosophy, mysticism, and science—with science as the physical hub of a great Wheel of Light. We are the souls God sent into manifestation to become what He meant us to be. You will recognize the truth of this as you realize that the Master based his every statement of truth, the laws of being and doing, on these categories. Thus, Edna Lister said, “If you omit any of these five phases of truth in your study of God as principle and personality, you will have no understanding, you will be unable to properly organize your thinking and your comprehension will remain incomplete.”
As you re-educate yourself in the categories of expression you develop essential critical thinking faculties: logic, reason, discernment, discrimination, and discretion. Each soul’s experience is unique, and learning styles differ—one style does not fit all. No matter whether you are watching visual media, listening to stories, lectures, conversations, or reading, you are constantly experiencing physical sensations and reacting to expressions, gestures, tones of voice, and ambient noise in the area. In short, you are constantly processing far more information than what is being imparted to you by images or words, written or spoken.
Edna Lister taught that you must examine your life and reality itself through philosophy, metaphysics, mysticism, psychology, and science. Further, she insisted that unless you address the ways in which these categories affect every topic under discussion, you, your listener, or your reader will remain vaguely dissatisfied regarding the explanation presented. Following are her outline and the transcript of a lecture she gave on the Categories of Soul Expression.
The Five Categories of Soul Expression
Edna Lister lecture outline, November 19, 1957, Cleveland, OH
On the Via Christa we study God as both principle and personality. Principle is “the absolute, unchangeable, undeviating, immutable foundation upon which all universes are based and established.” Principles begin as absolute and abstract qualities and aspects of the Godhead, such as omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence, which are then expressed as Wisdom, Love and the Logos, translated from the Greek as “Word.” Originally, in ancient Greek philosophy, the Logos was identified as “the reason that is the controlling principle in the universe; the divine wisdom manifest in the creation, government, and redemption of the world and often identified with the second person of the Trinity,” the first Begotten Son. Personality we define as “the personalization of the absolute abstract Light manifest as the All That Is; the supernal Light as Being, which we designate as God; the outer individualized expression of the indwelling living soul, an individuated manifestation of God as consciousness.” Beyond the physical body, the “personality” is all that the world can discern or “see” of the invisible soul, embodied though it is.
God, considered as abstract principle, is the universal Mind that thinks and plans, the Substance of which the universe and all things and beings in it are composed, and the Power that animates, motivates and enables all beings and processes to operate. We can observe the apparent operation of these principles through five main categories of expression, namely philosophy, metaphysics, psychology, science, and mysticism.
Philosophy [Greek φιλοσοφία, Latin philosophia] literally means “love of wisdom.” In modern usage, “philosophy is a general term denoting an explanation of the reasons of things; or an investigation of the causes of all phenomena both of mind and of matter. When applied to any particular department of knowledge, philosophy denotes the collection of general laws or principles under which all the subordinate phenomena or facts relating to that subject, are comprehended. Thus, that branch of philosophy which treats of God, etc., is called theology; that which treats of nature, is called physics or natural philosophy; that which treats of man is called logic and ethics, or moral philosophy; that which treats of the mind is called intellectual or mental philosophy or metaphysics. The objects of philosophy are to ascertain facts or truth, and the causes of things or their phenomena; to enlarge our views of God and His works, and to render our knowledge of both practically useful servants to human happiness. True religion and true philosophy must ultimately arrive at the same principle. Philosophy is an “hypothesis or system in which natural effects are explained; as reasoning; argumentation; and as a course of sciences read in the schools.”
Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom intellectually and through moral self-discipline; it is the investigation of the causes and laws underlying reality, and an inquiry into the nature of things based on logical reasoning rather than sensory-based methods. A philosophy is a system of motivating concepts or principles, the system of values by which you choose to live. Philosophy reveals God’s nature as principle, both absolute, the All That Is, and relative, all that physically appears or can be measured. In the study of principle, you must first postulate a Source from which all principles of being flow into existence. Nothing can exist on the periphery of creation that does not first exist as an Idea in its quintessential form at the Source. Thus, we may say that philosophy is all wisdom at the Source and all principle as Creation.
Metaphysics is “the science of the principles and causes of all things existing; hence, the science of mind or intelligence. This science comprehends ontology, or the science which treats of the nature, essence, and qualities or attributes of being; cosmology, the science of the world, which treats of the nature and laws of matter and of motion; anthroposophy, which treats of the power of man, and the motions by which life is produced; psychology, which treats of the intellectual soul; pneumatology, or the science of spirits or angels, etc.” “Metaphysical theology, called by Leibnitz and others theodicy, treats of the existence of God, his essence and attributes. These divisions of the science of metaphysics which prevailed in the ancient schools, are now not much regarded. The natural division of things that exist is into body and mind, things material and immaterial. The former belong to physics, and the latter to the science of metaphysics.”
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, fact and value. As the study of the science of being, metaphysics investigates that which lies just beyond your fingertips, just around the corner, just outside your field of view. Metaphysics restates the principles of philosophy and dilutes absolute principle into relative laws modified to meet man’s needs and intelligence. For example, a metaphysician would restate the philosophical statement, “God is All,” as, “God is everywhere evenly present and available.” Even orthodoxy admits that a mystical divine spark exists within everything.
Psychology [Psyche is Greek for “soul”] is the doctrine of the nature and properties of the soul. The term psychology means “the study of the soul,” but its modern definition has been degraded into nothing more than “the science that deals with mental processes and behavior; the emotional and behavioral characteristics of an individual, a group, or an activity.” Psychology is better defined as “the branch of metaphysics that studies the soul, the mind, and the relationship of life and mind to the functions of the body.” Thus, psychology studies the universal Mind of God as it operates in man.
Psychology further studies the personalization of God as man, functioning in three phases to suit man’s needs and requirements. As the phases of mind, we know them as the subconscious mind, conscious mind and super-conscious mind. As the phases of soul, we speak of them as the appetitive soul, the rational conscious soul, and the Oversoul. Because you are an individuated personalization of the Mind of God, you may remain in tune with that Mind and in harmony with the will of the Absolute, which creates perfect timing in your choices and life. It does no good to consider yourself as some broken-off fragment, for you are part of the whole of the All Good God.
All your interpersonal difficulties arise from misunderstandings and unmet expectations between and among personalities. To conquer these tendencies, you must lift the appetitive soul’s urges in desire and will to cleanse them of the thousands of negative impulses they can and will intrude into your consciousness. When you have disciplined and trained the appetitive soul, you will have freed it of past limitations and it shall be alive, alert, and aware to present you a thousand beauties instead.
Mysticism is “the doctrine of the Mystics, who profess a pure, sublime and perfect devotion, wholly disinterested, and maintain that they hold immediate intercourse with the divine Spirit.“ Mysticism is “the immediate consciousness of the transcendent or ultimate reality or God, and the experience of such communion as described by mystics. A belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible by subjective experience.”
Mysticism reveals God’s hidden nature as being personalizable as individual personalities, what we would call God the One expressing as God the Many. A mystic is one who communes with God directly, as the source of all personality. Thus, we say that God speaks as personality through personality to personality. You may contact God, personalized as the Father, the Mother, and as the Son, in no other way. Mysticism deals with that which is mysterious, unknown, obscure, invisible, and veiled from mortal eyes.
Science, which deals only with the physical universe, is utterly and completely materialistic, and is therefore unable to “prove” the mystical truths of the eternal reality perceptible only by the mind as personal experiences and observations of the soul; science regards all this as illusion or delusion. All your difficulties in life stem from your incomprehension of the full relationships you have with God, with your own soul, and with your fellow man, each expressing through soul as personality.
Science (Latin scientia, from scio, to know) is knowledge, or certain knowledge; the comprehension or understanding of truth or facts by the mind. In philosophy, science is “a collection of the general principles or truths relating to any subject. Pure science as mathematics, is built on self-evident truths; but the term science is also applied to other subjects founded on generally acknowledged truths, such as metaphysics; or on experiment and observation, such as chemistry and natural philosophy; or even to an assemblage of the general principles of an art, such as the science of agriculture or of navigation.” However, the science of God must be perfect. Science is one of the seven liberal branches of knowledge—grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.
Since the Age of Reason, the so-called “Enlightenment” (the 18th century in England and France), the definition of “science” has changed drastically to mean “the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena; methodological activity, discipline, or study; knowledge, especially that gained through experience.” Science relates to outer physical facts, principles, and laws that are subject to demonstrable physical proof through the five outer physical senses. Simply stated, science can prove itself by physical measurements based in the senses of touch, feeling, seeing and hearing, etc.
These categories of soul expression describe ways by which you may understand how you use or invest soul substance, wisely or unwisely. Psychology and metaphysics teach you to conquer the devils of self, not just to control self. The devils of self include all afflictions of the subconscious mind, including impressions, repression, suppression, complexes, illusions, delusions, hallucination and obsession.
Metaphysicians call such mental-emotional demons products of the little self, the creature soul portion of soul. Psychologists call this the subconscious mind, which they might also refer to as the storage bin of illusions and delusions. Only your self-created demons can bedevil you. These include the dweller on the threshold of consciousness, the aggregate substance of your past negative thoughts, words, emotions and actions. Lifting all self-created messes is part of your responsibility in earth life. Lifting is declaring a person or situation good, imagining the subject on a cloud continent of Light, perfect before God. You are personally responsible to declare that what comes to you is good and very good, opening the way for God to move in and make it so.
The Five Categories of Soul Expression
Edna Lister transcript, Ruth Johnson, scribe, November 19, 1957, Cleveland, OH
Except for purely physiological phenomena, you may categorize everything that happens, everything you experience in daily living under one of these five headings—psychology, metaphysics, science, philosophy, or mysticism. You must train yourself in your thinking and reading to fit what you learn and experience into one of these categories. By doing so, you open whole new memmory storage areas in the brain, one for each category. This topic, the five categories of expression, is a challenge to open new brain cells. The basis of eternal youth for the body begins in the mind as a rather “mechanical” mental process of continually expanding your brain activity by opening your mind to new ideas and limbering your thinking in an emotional climate of enthusiasm, joy, and fervency.
Start from this premise: You can answer any question and understand any process if you know where God is. If you extend your mental antennae arising from the nerves your brain, then look up and ponder, Divine Mind will answer you. However, unkess you can fit everything into these categories of expression, you will remain limited in your ability to organize your studies and the results of your speculation as you live life, regardless of whether you choose to travel the Via Christa.
Mysticism is belief in the possibility of union with divine nature, trust in spiritual intuition as a means of acquiring knowledge of mysteries inaccessible to intellectual apprehension. To us, mysticism is the study of God as personality. Mysticism is that which is mysterious, obscure, unknown, veiled, hidden, unprovable by general science but revealed by personal experience and observation. A mystic is one who communicates with God directly, with God as personality, for God is the Source of all personality. All your difficulties in life are traceable to your relationship with God and your fellow man through personality. Mysticism is the study of God’s personality. Mysticism also deals with Heaven as a place. You can and probably do go there to classes every night. You have photographic memory cells that are always ready for you to open and use. They record everything that happens on the inner amd outer, and can bring the pictures to us here, later unfolding the memory cells of all we have seen and learned over there. This is one important form of mystical revelation.
Philosophy consists of an entirely different approach to God. Instead of dealing directly with God as Personality, we are dealing with God as Principle. Imagination and photographic memory cells may open the shutter, but cannot be used in the study of God as Principle. Rather, you must postulate a Source and proceed with the tools of logic, reason, discernment discrimination, and discretion insofar as you can apply them for balance, for Philosophy is the study of the Wisdom of God. Principle is the absolute, universal, unchangeable, undeviating, immutable foundation upon which all universes are based and established. Philosophy is all Wisdom at the Source and all principle as creation. It is the love of Wisdom and the study of abstract principles. Philosophy is the love, study, or pursuit of wisdom or of knowledge of things and their causes, whether theoretical or practical; it is the study of all Wisdom at the Source and of all principle as God’s Creation.
Science includes those branches of study relating to the phenomena of the physical universe and its laws, a connected body of demonstrated truths with observed facts systematically classified under general laws; the study of relative, modified principles which can be proven through physical measurements and through physical senses. Science is knowledge for its own sake. It is the study of the exact nature of things and their operation. It can prove itself by physical measurements and through the physical senses.
Metaphysics, from the Greek meta ta phusikais, is the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space; theoretical philosophy as the ultimate science of being and knowing; principle modified into livable laws and statements of truth suitable for finite consciousness. Metaphysics studies the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, and potentiality and actuality. Metaphysics means “beyond that which is measurable” and is concerned with the investigation of what lies just beyond the fingertips. That which we see with higher vision is there, in the air, but cannot be proven to the satisfaction of science. That is where metaphysics begins. We can see the results of cosmic-ray-healing prayer, for example, but its action is metaphysical.
Metaphysics studies the science of being. Metaphysics establishes principles of philosophy as axioms or statements of Being, and in restating then, modifies them into laws that suit the intelligence of man. For example, to convert the philosophic principle, “Reality is all truth,” into a metaphysical healing statement for the one who is ill, it must become “God-substance is truth, which enters in and heals.” “Faith manifests through truth.” The Master based all his statements of truth on these five categories of soul expression.
Psychology is the science of the nature, functions and phenomena of the human soul or mind; mystically, the personality of God expressing as man, the Mind of God functioning as man in three phases subconscious, conscious and super-conscious. Psychology is concerned with the universal Mind of God in man, as man, and with the Personality of God as the personality of man. This is a statement of principle, therefore a philosophic statement: Man is both personality and principle even as God is. Yet we are more than just broken-off pieces of God, lost and lonely. We are conquerors of the self through the strength of Christ Jesus, our Lord. “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”—Philippians 2:5. “We have the mind of Christ.”—1 Corinthians 2:16.
In psychology, the Personality and Mind of God are separated in expression. The soul, in an ascending consciousness, expresses as the appetitive soul (subconscious mind), the rational soul (conscious mind), and the Oversoul (super-conscious mind). The Holy Spirit is the overall divine Personality, embodied in the Son. In the creature state of instinctive intelligence, under psychology, we classify impressions, both pre-natal and post-natal; repression; suppression; complexes; illusions; delusions; hallucinations; obsessions and possessions.
repression is like putting a lid on a pot of boiling water. As the lid represses the steam, a repression can become a suppression, and a suppression, buried deeply in the subconscious mind, can become a complex with its cause unknown. Every repression carries the potential for explosion. Illusions are imaginary, but seem real to the one who is experiencing them. When you see something that is not there, you are experiencing a delusion. A hallucination is similar to an illusion, but is based on fact. Some idea or experience hidden in the subconscious creates the hallucination. An obsession is a fixation.
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Edna Miriam Lister
1884–1971
The original Pioneering Mystic,
Christian Platonist philosopher, American Idealist, Founder, Society of the Universal Living Christ, minister, teacher, author, wife, and mother.
Etymology of category: from Late Latin catēgoria (“class of predicables”), from Ancient Greek κατηγορία (katēgoría, “to show, to demonstrate”). Synonyms: (a group to which items are assigned): class, family, genus, group, kingdom, order, phylum, race, tribe, type.
Etymology of expression: from Late Latin expressionem “expression, vividness,” in classical Latin “a pressing out, a projection,” noun of action from past participle stem of exprimere to “represent, describe,” literally to “press out.”
References
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia. New York: The Century Co., 1896.
The Holy Bible. King James Version (KJV).
Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “Logos,” accessed October 31, 2022, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Logos.
Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, “Age of reason.” Merriam-Webster.com. Accessed May, 20 2021.
Turner, William. “Scholasticism.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 13. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912.
Webster, Noah. An American Dictionary of the English Language,. New York: S. Converse, 1828.
Related Topics
Psychology: coming soon
Metaphysics: coming soon
Science: coming soon
Philosophy: coming soon
Mysticism: coming soon