OK, now I have a question for people of varying backgrounds. Having grown up Catholic, I have also grown up using the words "soul" and "spirit" interchangeably.

Normally, that stance doesn't really impact on my current path of being a spirit keeper, or a psion, or a magick user.

But there was a recent post from CH itself that spoke of doing bindings-to-spirit, not bindings-to-soul. That's what reminded me that for some other belief systems, there IS a distinction between "spirit" and "soul".

So, in the absence of being able to search the forum (since the results will yield countless threads unrelated to my question), I will pose the question directly to the membership: if you make a distinction between the concept of "soul" and "spirit", what is that distinction? When you astral project, which of these aspects of yourself do you perceive as being the part that's doing the traveling? Or do you have an entirely different name for the part of the self that travels during AP?

I started life as a Catholic psion, and operated in that realm for years, so these were never things I needed to consider before. In that mindset, you had a physical body and a non-physical body that got described by a whole slew of words: spirit, soul, astral body, etheric body, and I'm sure I'm missing a few names. But when you're self-taught, in the days before the internet, you could only get information based on your ability to get to bookstores and both find and afford the books, or you could go to the library and depend on the proficiency of the person or persons who built that library's collection of occult (now "new age") books.

Now we have the internet, and I can access tons of info for free. But I'm also on here, where people discuss concepts and cultures that I hadn't been introduced to before taking up spirit keeping. Right now, what I'd like to do is get information from people rather than relying solely on websites. So I'm interested in hearing what others have learned in the course of their own development. Spirit vs. soul? Either of these vs. astral body? Etheric body? If you have different definitions for these various terms, what are they?

The ancient Chinese believed that, instead of having one single soul, every human being housed 3 souls and 7 spirits which woud go their separate ways after death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hun_and_po

Possible definitions are, soul is the one that is given and will return to the Source or Creator or anything one believes. It is what makes sages consider me, you, and everyone else as the same thing.
Spirit on the other hand is the one that grows during life until death. That's why there's child spirit. After the soul departs, the spirit might stay in this realm, or go into spiritual/astral realm.

I personally believe that the soul and higher self are basically the same, and that they = who you are deep down, the composite of all the different yous from all the different lives. Like, the combination of all the different you's that have been. The spirit being your current you. The soul influences the spirit, and you are still 100% YOU in each life...but obviously you don't have all the memories and experiences of all the past yous currently and have to flail around for quite a while until you truly "find yourself" so to speak. I believe we all realize who we truly are eventually, that the soul sort of passively influences the spirit to be more like itself over time. I am unsure if I have all the processes down properly, but I believe that this type of this happens on some level or other via one method or other, that you always become yourself in each life and do not truly lose yourself.