What is the soul and how may I approach it?

[Black Dragon]

  
I'm curious, what about that model of consciousness do you find appealing?

Personally, I find that it segments the self rather than unifies it the way the energy center model seems to do.  That is, expansion of consciousness is encoded in the body and is available through the balancing of the impulses and gyrations of the lower centers.  Maybe it's just a personal thing, but I have found this other model more detached (one part from another) and so harder to work with.  Have you found it to be otherwise?
  

I am curious about your personal curiosity.
I want to understand more clearly your explanation. Are you saying consciousness segments the self rather than unifies it? And, the word, "encoded" I find interesting.

We're sort of looking at apples and oranges here. The sort of Gnostic model of cosmology and the explainations of the structures of the "demiurgic illusion"...none of that in and of its self even provides a real model to even "work" with in regards to the energy centers. Gnostics(who were later known as Cathars in the middle ages), as far as I know, went down a bit of a rut of denial of self and the physical body and hardcore asceticism(followed by martyrdom/extermination by the Catholic church), but to my knowledge, never had a functioning model of working with the energy centers. While this Gnostic model does not include that concept, it doesn't explicitly exclude it.

Gnosticism is not a spiritual roadmap in and of itself to the self in the manner that some other systems are. It kinda goes "this, this and this and those dirty Archons" and then you're like "well yeah but what do I DO with that? How do I relate to it all?"*crickets*. It's like a view of the topography, like the overview of the structure of the "game". It warns about the obstacles and pitfalls a lot, but yeah...no "road map" around them. I'm 50/50 with Gnosticism and its various interperatations, in that I see a lot of truth in it, but also a lot of distortion and too much focus on certain things and not enough in others that could be more expansive and useful.