A soul is not a thought. The soul is the spirit, the immaterial prime cause of life, the impalpable but true principle that animates the whole man and lasts after man. That is why it is said to be immortal. It is so sublime that even the most powerful thought is nothing in comparison with it. A thought comes to an end. The soul, instead, has a beginning, but has no end. Whether blissful or damned it continues to exist. Blessed are those who know how to keep it pure, or to restore it to its purity after making it impure, in order to give it back to the Creator as He gave it to man to enliven his humanity.

But is it within us, or above us, like the eye of God?

In us.

Imprisoned in us until death, then? A slave?

No. A queen. In the eternal thought, the soul, the spirit is what reigns in man, in the animal created and named man. The soul was created as queen, with the authority and destiny of a queen, as it came from the King and Father of all kings and fathers, His breath and image. His gift and right, and its mission is to make of the creature named man a king of the great eternal kingdom and a god in the hereafter, a “living being” in the Abode of the most sublime only God. Its maidservants are all the virtues and faculties of man, its minister is the good will of man, the thought of man is its servant and disciples. It is from the spirit that thought acquires power and truthfulness, justice and wisdom, and can rise to regal perfection. A thought deprived of the Light of the spirit will always be lacunose (empty) and obscure, it will never be able to understand the reason for truths that are more incomprehensible than mysteries to those who are separated from God, having lost the royalty of their souls. The thought of man will be obscure and dull, if it lacks the basic point, the lever indispensable to understand, to rise leaving the Earth and dashing upwards, towards the Intelligence, the Power, the Divinity, in one word. 

If the soul is a queen, why then does it not reign and subdue the evil thought and evil flesh of man?

Subjection would be neither freedom nor merit; it would be oppression. 

But thought and the flesh overwhelm also the soul and they enslave it too often. That is why I asked whether it was in us in the form of a slave. How can God allow such a sublime thing – You called it “breath of God and His image” – to be degraded by inferior beings?

According to the divine Thought the soul was not to be aware of slavery. But are you forgetting about the enemy of God and of man? The infernal spirits are known to you as well.

But shall I be able to become a child as to go back to the purity of my childhood? Is it possible to go backwards in time?

It is not necessary to go backwards. You would not be able to do it. Bygone days will not come back, one cannot make them come back or go back to them. And it is not necessary. 

Some of you come from places where the theory of Pythagoras’ school is known. A wrong theory. Souls, when they end their stay on the Earth, do not come back to it again in any body. Not in the body of animal, as it would not befit such as supernatural being to dwell in a brute. Not in the body of a man, because how could the body be rewarded when it is reunited to the soul in the Last Judgement, if that soul had been clothed with many bodies? Those who believe in that theory say that it is the last body that rejoices, because the soul through successive purifications, in successive lives, reaches the perfection deserving a reward only in the last reincarnation. An error and an offence! 

Error and offence against God, as it admits that God was able to create only a limited number of souls. Error and offence against man, as it considers him so corrupt that he deserves a reward only with great difficulty. The reward may not be granted at once, ninety-nine times in a hundred a purification will be required in life to come. But purification is preparation to joy. So he who is being purified is already saved. And once he is saved he will rejoice, after Doomsday, with his body. He will have only one body for his soul, as he had one life here, and with the body that his parents made for him, and with the soul that the Creator created for him to give life to his body, he will take delight in the reward. It is not possible to be reincarnated, as it is not possible to go back in time. But it is possible to be re-created through one’s free will, and God blesses and assists such will. 

Each of you has had that will. And then man, who was sinful, vicious, filthy, delinquent, thieving, corrupt, corrupting, murderous, impious, adulterous, revives spiritually through the purification of repentance, he destroys the corrupt kernel of the old man, he dispels the mental ego which is even more corrupt, as if the will to be redeemed were an acid that attacks and destroys the unwholesome case concealing a treasure, and after laying bare his spirit, purifying it and restoring it to health. He clothes it with a new mentality, with a new, pure, good juvenile garment. Oh! A garment that can go close to God, that can worthily cover the recreated soul, protect and assist it until its supercreation, that is its complete holiness, that in future – perhaps a remote future if measured with human mind and means; very close if contemplated with the thought of eternity- will be glorious in the Kingdom of God. 

A every man can, if he so wishes, recreate in himself the boy of his childhood, the loving, humble, sincere, kind boy, whom the mother used to press to her breast and the father looked at glorying, whom the angel of God loved and God admired with love. 
 

(Source: Poem of Man-God Vol 4 pages 694-696)