The seven layers of human existence:

1.     The Body (Our physical body with all its ongoing activity)

2.     The Mind (In which we experience our sense perceptions)

3.     The Breath (That we cannot live without but which we can learn to control)

4.     The Intellect (The faculty for thought-through decision-making)

5.     The Memory (The library of past experiences from where emotions and thoughts grow)

6.     The Ego (The sense of “I”, that we are individual entities with likes and dislikes)

7.     The Self (Our unchanging core, the link between the eternal and the perishable—the soul, if you like) 

Layers number one to six operates our everyday life — layer number seven, of which we normally is unaware, is our higher self, our soul, unaffected by the turmoil of the six first layers.

Is this a helpful way to describe the human condition? Yes, in a sense we can say that it is.

Undeniably it is so that beyond our personal experience of being separate and limited individuals on a lonely journey in an ungraspable universe — we carry within us something greater, something else, something that is connected to, and even part of, an infinite whole.