Oversoul...

History
The essay [Ralph Waldo Emerson/ 1841] includes the following passage:

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only
prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the
earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul,
within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all
other; that common heart. [1]
For Emerson the term denotes a supreme underlying unity which transcends duality
or plurality, much in keeping with the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. This
non-Abrahamic interpretation of Emerson's use of the term is further supported
by the fact that Emerson's Journal records in 1845 suggest that he was reading
the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke's Essays on the Vedas. [2] Emerson
goes on in the same essay to further articulate his view of this dichotomy
between phenomenal plurality and transcendental unity:

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man
is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every
part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in
which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only
self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing
seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see
the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the
whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul. [1]
Over-soul has more recently come to be used by Eastern philosophers such as
Meher Baba and others as the closest English language equivalent of the Vedic
concept of Paramatman.[3] (In Sanskrit the word param means "supreme" and atman
means "soul"; thus Paramatman literally means "Supreme-Soul".)[1] The term is
used frequently in discussion of Eastern metaphysics and has also entered
western vernacular. In this context, the term "Over-soul" is understood as the
collective indivisible Soul, of which all individual souls or identities are
included. The experience of this underlying reality of the indivisible "I am"
state of the Over-soul is said to be veiled from the human mind by sanskaras, or
impressions, acquired over the course of evolution and reincarnation. Such past
impressions form a kind of sheath between the Over-soul and its true identity,
as they give rise to the tendency of identification with the gross
differentiated body. Thus the world, as apperceived through the impressions of
the past appears plural, while reality experienced in the present, unencumbered
by past impressions (the unconditioned or liberated mind), perceives itself as
the One indivisible totality, i.e. the Over-soul......from Wikipedia