You
The soul is by nature sat cit ananda, which means eternal (sat), full of knowledge (cit) and full of bliss (ananda). Fearfulness, confusion and misery are not your nature. These simply show you that you are disconnected from your natural state. You are meant to be happy. You are the soul.
You are different from your body and also from your mind. This is the first teaching in self-realization.
“As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, similarly, the soul accepts new bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.” (Bhagavad-gita 2.22)
Our body and mind may feel good, miserable, or so so. The self-realised soul always swims in sublime happiness.
The body has a beginning and an end, the soul is beginningless and eternal. All living entities fear death, because it is not natural for the soul to die. If death was natural, if life was just a combination of matter, why do we lament when we are confronted with? It is natural for the body to vanish, but the soul is eternal. Due to identification with its body the soul is confused.
In one sense the body is always dead. It is the soul who gives life to the body, and thus the body seems to be alive as long as the soul is present. After the soul has left its body all living symptoms disappear.
The body has value as long as the soul is present, otherwise it is just a lump of ignorant matter.
The soul is conscious and is sentient. This consciousness and liveliness cannot be produced by any combination of matter.
Once you have realized you are different from your body, these questions may come up: What is my identity as a soul? And what intrinsic qualities do I have, which are not born from my contact with the material world?
All my present characteristics and qualities seem to be intimately connected to my body and mind. I have developed my personality due to the material atmosphere, which I have grown up in. Or I might have brought some of it with me from previous lives, but in any case it has developed in contact with matter.
Bhakti answers this question in a different way than most spiritual paths. In fact, in many traditions the soul doesn’t even have an individual spiritual personality, or it is not very clear what it might be.
Bhakti’s answer is twofold. The first part is that all souls have general qualities that we all share. You can find some description of those in scriptures like the Bhagavad-gita:
“For the soul there is never birth nor death. Nor, having once been, does it ever cease to exist. It is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying and primeval. It is not slain when the body is slain.” (Bhagavad-gita 2.20)
“The individual soul is unbreakable and insoluble, and it can be neither burnt nor dried. It is everlasting, all-pervading, unchangeable, immovable and eternally the same.” (Bhagavad-gita 2.24)
“It is said that the soul is invisible, inconceivable, immutable, and unchangeable. Knowing this, you should not grieve for the body.” (Bhagavad-gita 2.25)
“Some look on the soul as amazing, some describe it as amazing, and some hear of it as amazing, while others, even after hearing about it, don’t understand it at all.” (Bhagavad-gita 2.29)
The second part of the answer is that you are a unique spiritual person with a unique individual personality. Only you yourself can find out what your individual spiritual personality is. Every soul is unique. There is no one like you. It is up to you to discover yourself by applying a spiritual process like bhakti-yoga.
The bhakti process generally is the same for everyone (although it also gives a lot of room for individuality). It works by cleansing the dust from the mirror of your mind, and then you can not only see who you are, but also let the glorious beauty of your personality shine through for everyone to see.
In a liberated state you will feel unity with all existence and are full of love. Feelings of lust, greediness, envy, hatred and fear are all alien to the soul as they belong to the world of duality and identification with body, mind and the struggle for existence.
The spirit soul is sentient, it has spiritual feelings, but in the material atmosphere its original feelings are covered and thus experienced pervertedly.
The process of neutralization of all feelings and appliance of detached consciousness towards all experience, which is applied in many spiritual traditions, is only an intermediate step.
We want spiritual feelings and activities in a spiritual atmosphere. It is ours. It is our nature. What are we waiting for???