http://www.world-religions-professor.com/atman-brahman.html
All the evidence to me seems to indicate the Great Spirit is an individual being [there are breakdowns of a deity with three composite personas and two composite personas, both of which seem plausible to me]. Some of those who maintain S/He is not one spirit IMO replace S/He with another concept...World Soul (Animus Mundi), possibly "Over Soul" too. But this World Soul consciousness I believe is not that from which we emanated (not the "Great Spirit"). I believe the concepts or theology tagged on to this particular metaphysical concept (World Soul) were derived from ancient concepts of something Jung wrote a lot about in our era (the collective unconscious), the result being these ancient allusions along with Jung's notion having been taken as the metaphysical absolute. If we've made any progress in our understanding of what this latter phenomenon amounts to, I believe Jung took us there...though I am cautious regarding any mechanistic shades he attributes to, or Rupert Sheldrake attributes to, the collective unconscious (not sure either really meant to go too far with any such mechanistic attributes). In my concept of the phenomenon I also include memories or vestiges of memories...dervived from sojourns of non-human consciousnesses having experienced bodies here on Earth (the cumulative "history" of their experiences also). OTOH, the World-Soul-As-Atman-Idea is represented in definition 3 here for example (which I believe mistakenly assumes the collective unconscious as the end goal of individual souls...IMO they already participate in same)...
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/atman
IMO it's not that Brahman's "Yin" side does Her thing only amidst the phenomena of limited dimensions we discuss in everyday conversation (those we understand well in the "4 dimensional" sense (common parlance))..IOW not only amidst phenomena of the manifest "every day world." IMO Brahman has a Yang side and a Yin side. The Yin side or nature, for all I know, is perfectly content to sit observing in her time just as quiescently as the Great Spirit's Yang side [there were views that placed Brahman somewhat apart as observing all, the observer; that view sort of sounds or reads as connected to the adjective "impersonal" which the Advaita school often pinned on the Absolute. When some westerners desperately want to square some particular New Age outlook with ancient India, there is often evidence of some confusion regarding what was what in the subcontinent]. I don't conceive Mother God as an aura of a more fundamental Yang Brahman Body, and I don't conceive "Nature" (Prakriti) as the actual "body" of Brahman's Yin side....but I conceive Nature as a panoply of individual and individuating consciousnesses (or pilgrim consciousesses if you want to bracket out the sometimes unspecific notion of "individuating"). Jung's collective unconscious concept is both similar to the World Soul concept and even my notion of Nature; many entities are contributing and have contributed to the collective unconscious, and many consciousnesses are plugged into the World Soul.
I need to read more about Whitehead's "actual entities." [see Amit Goswami on: do electrons have free will? old New Dimensions show] Of course in my notion (as in most peoples' notions) the contents in the collective unconscious don't interact in a deterministic manner as is the case with desires/decisions in the 4D realm. And, of course, the collective unconscious is conceived to operate "acausualy"...so one can't help but imagine the contents sort of frozen, though this word isn't perfect as we can also intuit the nature of situations that arise by way of things that emerge from the collective unconscious...as with dreams. In terms of World Soul the collective unconscious concept in some contexts (in some works) seems mostly to refer to past experiences of humans...the past I also think is something Nature participates in (see Rupert Sheldrake's idea of templates). Perhaps Nature's present is enough to delve into for the moment. For me both the collective unconscious and the "World Soul"/Atman concepts are in some ways similar to my idea of Nature [one aspect being entities are joined by the collective unconscious; the collective unconscious has been said to be governed acausualy and we sometimes picture it as more static]; though, again, I don't think the collective unconscious is the final goal of souls.
The panoply of consciousnesses (constituting the World Soul or Nature) I believe is most significantly a matter of cumulative experiences in the present [conscious human entities are limited in their comprehension of individual consciousnesses other than their own, of course, so there are barriers; but remember Jung termed his version of the World Soul as a collective unconscious]. In the present, as I wrote above, I liken all these concepts to Nature, while there's a "memory" storehouse for entities and for groups of entities [souls, groups of souls, and evidently in terms of biology too--eg of species and of morphological phenomena/developments [I know, but if adaptations are derived from templates, then how do new ones develop?]]....which I believe can be, and usually is, referred to as the "collective unconscious." It may be true that "Nature" as we think of it on Earth exists predominately in a set of dimensions governed/created by Divine Shakti or Kali...but when I think of "Kali," before and apart from Her creation (a form I prefer to name Mother God or Divine Mother)...She, in such form, to my mind, is not an emanation of the "masculine" Brahman (not some "glory of Brahman" or aura of Brahman in turn projecting another aura from which the physical world or Prakriti emerges). She is instead "half" of Brahman's very own being...or half of Brahman's nature. God is one, but our perception dictates alternate personas of God. Her nature shares in the nature of the Great Spirit just as Brahman's does. It's Her nature that's unconditioned, not her handiwork [and I heretically embrace the notion that Brahman could inaugurate some handiwork of His own]. No doubt, from Brahman's viewpoint there is a merging or oneness of these Yin/Yang personas; but for some humans the places of the merging cannot yet be understood (me included).
In case you're wondering who else might be concerned with such minutae these days...something from the amazingly exhaustive site http://www.kheper.net/ . The quotes below are from kheper, but lest you think it's only kheper and me concerned with what may appear to you now as fine points...see also http://www.sacred-texts.com/tantra/sas/sas19.htm
"Theistically, Panentheism differs from Pantheism in that according to Pantheism God is all things, whereas according to Panentheism God is in all things. One description of panentheism is that God has the same relationship to the world as the soul has to the body. Panentheism is not recieved very happily in modern Christian thought. However it serves as a venerable current in Hinduism, in that the Qualified Monistic Vedanta of the great Hindu theologian Ramanuja is Panentheism through and through
Monistically, Panentheism differs from Acosmism in that Acosmism e.g. the Advaita Vedanta of Shankara , denies the ultiamte reality of the phenomenal World and affirms that the Absolute Reality is transcendent only, whereas Panentheism, such as the monistic Tantra of Kashmir Shaivism affirms the Reality of both the Unmanifest Absolute and the Phenomenal World in all its diversity. To me this is a far superior philosophy"
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