The Soul Fallacy

The word ‘soul’ is everywhere. On television, in article headlines, in advertising slogans. “This is good for the soul.” “A massage for the soul.” “A journey for the soul.” Like 'love,' 'soul' has been diluted into a selling formula — a pinch of salt added to any dish to enhance its savor. And precisely because it is used for everything, it has come to mean nothing.

Which brings me to a book a friend of mine — a medical doctor — once pulled from his library and suggested I read. I have forgotten the title and the author. What I remember is a sentence on the back cover. The writer admitted that he was not sure whether the soul even existed — but that if it did, this is what he believed it was.

I found the statement puzzling. If one is uncertain that a thing exists, on what basis can one confidently describe its nature? Yet this seemed to reflect a broader tendency in modern discussions of the soul: endless theories, definitions and opinions built upon remarkably little direct experience.

I saw the matter differently. By then, Brian Weiss’s Many Lives, Many Masters, countless accounts of near-death experiences, and the Buddha’s teachings on reincarnation had already convinced me that death is not the final destination. Something survives. Something continues. More importantly, I had already spent years working directly with the soul. I knew how to connect with a soul, communicate with it, and heal it. Yes, the soul exists. And so does karma, in the very precise sense of an imprint carried from a past life.

Ibiza: first encounter with my soul

Just before relocating to Berlin from Tokyo, I went on holiday to Ibiza with friends. We rented a large house. After a long day of visits, beach, and swimming, I went to my room to shower and rest before going out. And then, without invitation, everything changed.

As I lay on my bed, I suddenly began to see — and feel — different lives of “mine” passing in front of me without interruption. Not one. Not two. Many, many lives. And in each one, I witnessed and experienced the end of it: the death.

It was not a dream. I was fully awake and wondering what on earth was happening. I saw that I had been a dwarf. In another life, I had had leprosy. Each time, I felt the fear, the pain, the death itself move through my entire body. A ‘friend’ pushing me off a cliff. An arrow passing through my body in medieval times. The newborn girl discarded into a river. Drowning is probably one of the worst deaths. Then, almost instantly, the next life would appear — with its own death — and so on.

I always saw only a fragment of each life, but I always experienced the full death. I don’t know if the whole episode lasted one hour or two. That alone gives you an idea of how many lives — and deaths — I re-experienced. At some point I became so excited — hoping perhaps to be taken to the origin of the soul, to the origin of life itself, maybe to God — that I attempted to take control of the process and go deeper. And that is when it all stopped. At once. No more visions. No more past lives. Nothing. It felt like someone pulling the rug from beneath my feet at the exact moment I had buckled up and was ready for a longer journey. I cursed myself for having dared to even think about controlling such a thing.

But was it really 'me'? Or was it just the history of my soul's past lives? Am I, then, my soul?

Berlin: the asteroid belt

Despite the soul having given me a visceral inventory of its past lives, I was still lost in my life. I had no sense of any particular mission. I had no idea of the role I was supposed to play.

Since childhood, I had always felt a kind of casting error — wondering what I was doing on this planet. You may know that feeling. The sense that everyone else received a memo you never got. I felt like a rabbit frozen on a road in the beam of a car’s driving lights at night.

A psychic friend tried to help by telling me that my purpose was to show people that even after being betrayed over and over again, I was able to get back on my feet and continue. When I heard those words, I thought: great. What a mission. I had clearly not won the cosmic lottery. Fortunately, she turned out to be wrong.

So I threw myself into the work. I spent an hour or more each day identifying emotional blockages in my body and soul, releasing them, testing every technique I could find, seeking out healers, therapists, and psychics out of both desperation and genuine curiosity. I also began teaching workshops — in Berlin, Singapore, Paris, London, Geneva, Belgrade, and online — on raising the spiritual vibration of Oneness to feel better. It helped a lot. But something was still missing.

One day, returning from a particularly powerful two-day workshop in Geneva, I sat down at home and began my usual practice. I was drawn to my chest and saw an asteroid belt of anger around my heart, preventing it from opening fully and me from being truly happy.

But this time, instead of simply releasing the emotional imprint and moving on as I had done hundreds of times before, I stopped. I refused. And I asked — to the Universe — why.

“Why do I have to release yet another emotional imprint, another blockage? This is never-ending. I am sick of it.”
Immediately, I heard a voice say:
“Because it is disconnecting you from your True Self.”

I stopped. The voice did not say 'soul.' It said 'True Self.' So there was a True Self beyond the soul.

The discovery

Using a technique I taught in my Oneness Practice workshops, I turned my attention to this newly revealed True Self. An energy portal opened in the body, activating something I had never encountered before. I felt immense peace and power both at once and of a completely different nature from what I knew. No weight. No duality. No limitations whatsoever. Just pure oneness.

To me, this became another indication that the soul and the True Self were distinct realities. When I measured the vibration of Oneness of each with my pendulum, the results were unmistakable. The vibration of the True Self was much, much higher. Different experiences. Different vibrations. Different locations in the body. Two completely different dimensions.

In the following months, I began opening this spiritual portal in clients. Their response was always immediate and unmistakable: “It’s me.” “I am home.” “All the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.” About 95% of them could immediately sense whether the gate was open or closed — and by how much — without prompting. They always got it right. If this dimension had been distant or foreign to them, such immediate recognition would have been unlikely.

They felt so good that they immediately asked how they could keep the gate open in their daily life, since after a few hours or days the mind, the fears, the doubts, the ego and so on would come to reclaim their territory and close it again. I answered honestly: I did not yet know. The answer would come years later.

The soul fallacy

The soul is clearly not our spiritual essence. Living life through its prism is not the recipe for true freedom, authenticity, and self-fulfillment. Its journey is not ours. Our consciousness is not the soul's consciousness. We share the same body — but we are not headed to the same place.

Let me give you an example.

A few years ago, a client came to me — a brilliant woman who had served as ambassador for her country before moving into the private sector. She felt it was time for a change, and she was hesitating between three possible new directions. Knowing I was born with the gift of clairvoyance, she asked what I saw in her future. I told her I use my gift solely for healing, and that her future would be the result of her own choices. Instead, I offered something else: to check whether any of the three options were aligned with her True Self.

After she described her three job offers, I replied: “You are facing this dilemma because you are caught between your soul and your True Self. Your soul wants power. The senior managing role at the multinational NGO — the one with the $400,000 salary — is what your soul wants. Money and power. Option 3 is what connects you to your True Self, but the salary will be a fraction of Option 1, and you have mentioned your high cost of living, your children’s education. Option 2 is a compromise that satisfies neither.”

She said nothing. Neither did I.

This is the conflict most of us live inside unknowingly. The soul pulls toward what it has always known and wants. The True Self pulls elsewhere.

The soul is conditioned. The True Self is free. And because we have never been taught to tell the difference, we obey whichever voice is louder.

So what is the soul?

This is a huge question and my purpose here is not to answer it academically or pretend that I have all answers. I only choose to address this question with a lot of humility from the perspective of healing and freeing oneself from the karmic chains of past, pain and suffering.

The soul is two things at the same time. A body. And a being. Another body that the Hindus rightly call the karmic body — trapped in the memories of all previous lives and governed by the laws of karma. From that perspective, the soul is a life-log.

Think of it like a computer. Unlike a new machine that comes with a clean hard drive, a newly born human inherits an old, used one — the soul — already loaded with programs, junk, and malware accumulated over countless previous lives. Every time you access that hard drive, you are pulled back into the same architecture: old pain, open wounds, unfinished business. The same loops. The same suffering — dressed in new clothes.

The soul is also a conscious spiritual being whose mission seems to be to return to the original light — God — through as many incarnations as possible until it regains its original purity by manifesting God's love itself — if you believe Christian scriptures and the extraordinary revelations of Maria Valtorta.

A noble and beautiful mission. A hard one for sure. But still its mission — not necessarily yours. A soul striving toward divine purity has its own agenda, distinct from yours, and may pull you in directions that serve its spiritual evolution rather than your current life. It may ask of you sacrifices and choices that make sense from the perspective of eternity — but not from where you are standing today.

Left unchecked, the soul can quietly shape your choices, your compulsions, your emotional patterns — drawing you toward what it wants rather than what you want or need.

A house has many rooms — a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen, a cellar. The soul is one of those rooms. For most of humanity, it is the cellar. By seeking to align with your soul, you may believe you are following your highest spiritual path. In reality, you are simply living in the cellar — and missing the rest of the house.

The cellar is not where you want to live. And even with the finest wine collection in the world, do you really want to spend your whole life down there?

It can be cleaned. It can be lit up. But compared with the pure light of the True Self, the soul’s light is a false light. Beautiful at times, yes — but corrupted by thousands of years of human darkness, and fragmented by duality, pain, and time. Even the most luminous and beautiful souls carry the weight of incarnating into a deeply primitive race, one that has relentlessly been feeding on violence, war, lies, and brutality— struggling hard to hold a high vibration in such an environment.

What to do

The cellar has its gifts. Enjoy them. Clean it when it needs cleaning. That is the first thing I address in a private Reset session. And that is where it stops.

We have the power to decide from which drive we want to retrieve information and live our lives. And we have better drives than the soul. Drives with no malware. No duality. No past. No pain. Nothing to heal. The True Self is one of them.

And we don’t have to ignore the soul’s suffering. Love heals. So does forgiveness. As we manifest love for ourselves, our life and others, the soul’s vibrations will rise — helping the soul to heal itself and get closer to the original pure love of the Creator. We will feel better and so will the soul. We rise together.

In parallel, we can also train our consciousness to grow into the higher and broader dimension of Spirit — a vast dimension with many places, many rooms, where vibrations are free from duality, past, and pain. By anchoring our consciousness there, we can gently reprogram our body, short-circuiting the soul's suffering and limitations — while bringing it pure light.

In Reset Live, my weekly online class, this is precisely what we experience — not more archaeology of pain, not another cycle of healing but direct connection with our essence that was never wounded to begin with and that holds the key to true freedom and power. Each session is unique. If what you have read here resonates, come and join us.

In conclusion, Julien Musolino and I have one thing in common: we both believe there is a soul fallacy. While he argues that the soul itself is the fallacy, my experience suggests something very different. The soul exists. The real fallacy is believing that the soul is our deepest spiritual identity and that its journey must be our journey.

By appointment only · Tuesdays to Saturdays

Privacy Policy.

reset@lionelgougne.com

© 2026. All rights reserved.