What is the soul and how may I approach it?

[Black Dragon]

I don't know if this is food for your mill, peregrine  

As presented, this paradigm feels like artificial or artificial-like intelligence having fun with itself.  I'm wondering how Transcendence, Love or Service to Divinity might be tied in to it.

I'm just curious by nature. that's all.
   

Without derailing too much into Gnosticism...what you are referring to is what I've seen usually called the "Matrix" or "Demiurge". It's like a program that converts code into an actual web site you can go to, if you will. It is very much like a machine. It translates the "code" from the higher source into the illusion-at least of physical reality(but I think maybe the greater illusion of the whole octave). This thing, being very mechanistic, I don't think is capable in and of itself of awareness of "Transcendence, Love, or Service to Divinity". Those things are not directly tied to the Demiurge, they come from beyond, they are part of the "code" that gets filtered through, and all though the Demiurge itself doesn't understand them, they still make their way into the illusion.

Now there's a whole nother thing about how a portion of this demiurge is seen as "corrupted"-as the adversary, the source of the power of the STS path. I'm not going to go into all the doom and gloom stuff about that, but suffice it so say, some of the left hand path mystery schools(from what I've heard), have a tendency to model their structures and practices after "nature", or "natural law". What they are actually modeling it after, is the law of the demiurge, of the illusion(you know, survival of the fittest, predator/prey, all that wonderful stuff). This is what they assume is "natural law", because they are either unaware of or in open rebellion to the greater law which lies beyond the illusion/Demiurge.

Hopefully, I did not get off topic or derail. Just some thoughts I might share from my own seeking along the same lines of curiosity.