Spiritual Anatomy: Layers of Self
- Shannon Soimes
- Aug 12
- 6 min read
Magick and witchcraft exist beyond our third dimensional reality and, certainly beyond the physical bodies we use to experience that reality.
I know, this is the opposite of a hot take or a revolutionary idea. In fact it would be safe to say it's unnecessary to state at all, as most witches and magickal practitioners understand this intuitively. So why do I bring it up?
Well, one of my innate talents as a witch is reading the writing on the wall, if you will, i.e., understanding the patterns emerging in our shared reality and society.
Sometimes what I sense foretells traumatic periods of varying severity—from torrential rains leading to a flooded basement to a plague-level crisis where I have to fight for years to get a corporation to see the benefits of having a work from home game plan.
Other times I sense the beneficial energy of change, such as the one I believe is currently happening.
This time, we are IN a cultural awakening, a new renaissance as we push against the way things have been especially as those ways have proven they don't work.
Often during these historical moments, the obvious truth needs to be stated so it’s not overlooked or lost: Spirit and spirituality exists beyond the body.
Research has been—and continues to be—done to locate human consciousness within the body. So far, there are zero results or evidence that it is. And yet, our language still uses consciousness, mind, brain, and ego as interchangeable. As if they were the same thing, and this could not be further from the truth.
Ancient civilizations like the Egyptians’ Hermetic mystery schools and the Vedic traditions of India hold these as separate and not synonyms of each other.
At some point between the ancient understanding of the human spirit and body and our modern (stuck in Newtonian physics) times, our society has decided that the body encases the soul, and that the egoic exploration of Self through the body is enough.
Cultural evolutions and renaissances don't come out of nowhere. They awaken within society and the people during periods of what appears as decline, ruin, and limitation.
I offer to our collective Cultural Renaissance a concept I have been growing and find to be part of my truth, the Spiritual Anatomy of Self.
To know our spiritual anatomy, we need to start at the beginning.
Many sacred texts hold Creator (insert your preferred divinity or deity) made mankind in their image and likeness. That "image" has nothing to do with the human body. After all, divinity and deities are not of the third dimension and physical reality.
Even in Abrahamic traditions, the image or tselem—Hebrew word rooted in the concept of acting as the functional representatives of Creator on Earth, like a physical shadow—and likeness or d’moot—Hebrew word meaning in the pattern of—doesn’t emphasize the human form as the connection between mankind and Creator.
So our spiritual anatomy is bigger, more.
With that in mind, I’ll start from the largest, most outer layer of Self in our spiritual anatomy and work my way inwards to the smallest, most fragile layer of Self.
Spirit is the largest Self. I understand it as the Higher Consciousness, sometimes called Christ Consciousness or Krishna Consciousness. Spirit is the layer of Self, closest to Creator within Creation with knowledge and understanding of a bigger picture, a broader perspective beyond the flesh or time-space—or any dimensional measurement—that It constantly tries to communicate to the Selves layered within it.
The next layer, which is still immeasurable, is Soul. Within this layer, an individual can find their own Akashic Records of their “past” lives, or rather their lives lived beyond the current one as past, present, future, and simultaneous can be found there if a lesson is pertinent to the current one. Soul is the karmic and reincarnated Self, carrying the lessons and memories from one life to the next.
The third outer layer is the Receptive Self or the Magnetic Self and it is our Toroidal Field. The Toroidal Field is the energy field, similar in shape to a donut, that everything has—from planet to a violet, and beyond—including each individual person. The Receptive Self circulates energy from the outer layers and Universe down and inner layers and Earth up through the different layers of Self. Through this receptive and magnetic energy, this layer of Self attracts what is needed for this life’s journey and repels what isn't (not to be confused with desires or even what is best for an “easy” incarnation).
Within the center column of the Toroidal Field is where we can find the Kundalini, the Chakra vortices, and the three Mind Seats, as I call them, anchoring the stream of Consciousness down into the inner Selves.
The Kundalini and Chakra vortices are aligned with the spine and vagus nerve, even those that aren’t located close to the physical body.
The three Mind Seats are the literal Brain, Heart, and Gut. All three contain neuron cells, with the Heart and Gut sending messages to the Brain more frequently than the reverse.
The Projective or Electric Self is the next layer and can be seen as the Aura or even the Light Body. This layer of Self uses vibrations and frequencies such as light and color or sound to project to the other layers Selves, the Universe, and the Earth what is needed, wanted, believed, feeling, thinking, etc. Hence why Aura colors are rarely stagnant.
The fifth layer within the Spiritual Anatomy is the Mind or the Expressive Self. The Mind holds and gathers information to pass up to the Projective Self or down to the Emotional Self what needs to be communicated. It has three seats where it stores that information within the central column of the Magnetic Self and within the body—the brain, the heart, and the gut.
The Mind is bigger than the brain just like sentience is more than cognitive intelligence, and takes into consideration what the heart/emotional body as well as the gut/physical body are in need of when it gathers information to express ourselves.
Next is the Subtle Body, the Emotional Self. More than a few occult and esoteric traditions believe that feelings of being at dis-ease, ill-at-ease, and energetic buildups—or sinkholes as the case may be—begin here in this layer of Self before we get physically sick from repressed, oppressed, depressed emotions we aren't expressing or even from stray emotions of others that don't belong to us. The Subtle Body helps express and protect the inner and outer layers through subconscious processing of what and how we feel, whether we recognize it or not.
Nestled within the above layers is the Body, the Physical Self. The Body is the vehicle we use to experience the third dimensional reality. The vehicles differ for each individual Self riding through this incarnation with it as the unconscious mind maintains it—blinking, breathing, pumping blood, etc—as each physical vehicle. Each form, shape, color, and function is equal to any other also experiencing our shared reality in their own flesh suit.
The Thinking Self resides in the brain and the cerebral plane of our lives. The Thinking Self formulates the experienced reality through the thoughts and beliefs it develops based on what it can perceive through our senses: sight, scent, taste, hearing, and touch. Like a horse with blinders on to keep it calm and focused on the way forward, this layer of Self uses these limited tools for the survival of the itself, the Physical Self, and the next layer within to the point where our brains will even change what it perceived, ignoring information if it doesn't fit the reality or narrative needed to keep surviving.
The innermost layer of Self is the Ego. Ego is the smallest, most fragile, and fleeting Self, nestled within the many layers of Self. Ego is a good example of 1 dimensional thinking and being—Me, Not Me—and contributes to the illusion that we are physical beings that need to overcome or conquer Death as Ego is not carried from one lifetime to another. It is only experienced during this lifetime and dies at the end of a life’s journey as a compiled perception of personality formed by all the experiences, emotions, and energies we are able to interact with or reject during its development.
My breakdown of the Spiritual Anatomy of Self is not new or Earth-shattering. The Ancient Egyptians conceptualized the soul in no fewer than nine parts. Celtic lore understood the expressions of the Fetch, the Germanic of the Fylgja, and the Finnish tradition of henki, luonto, and itse, for example.
Before the popularization of materialism and consumerism, humans explored the esoteric and occult with different cultures and civilizations coming to different but similar recognitions that We are not purely physical beings. We are in fact Spiritual Beings experiencing a physical reality.
I invite you to explore this concept as well as our society continues into a Cultural Awakening Renaissance, using the layers above, taking what resonates as Truth, and leaving behind what doesn't.
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