From a biblical/apocryphal point of view the semitic creation story speaks of three qualities of creation- That is, everything created has three characteristics to it- Power, Wisdom and Spirit. Power is seen as Male (the OT God who is jealous and smites here and there) Wisdom, who is Sophia, who balances out power, and Spirit is the Divine quality given to creation that is in everything.
So, you have Power/Male/God, Wisdom/Female/God's Wife or Goddess, depending how far back you go) and Spirit, or Quintessence, which is a result of Divine Creation.
Jesus said he would give us the Holy Spirit after leaving- I don't know (but I suspect) he was speaking of the awareness of this Spirit. Spirit is genderless, because Power and Wisdom are already dual components which balance each other out, and Spirit is something other than dual, it's what unites in Divinity.
It is possible that this threefold quality is what inspired the catholic church to institute their own trinity, substituting the Son for Wisdom and making it male.
In some parts of the bible (Psalms? I forget) man is described as having a Spirit and a Soul (binary soul theory) and speaks of the spirit separating at the moment of death and going back to source (when the vessel breaks, IIRC) giving me the impression that the Soul is a more 'earthly' version of yourself while the Spirit is the eternal spark that possibly reincarnates. But this is only speculation, of course.
This is my take on it. Very similar binary interpretation however I feel the soul and spirit are in the opposite roles.
The Astral body is the spirit body. In ancient Egypt the mystics spoke of the KA and the Ba, Ba being the Celestial Soul Body; light body template and KA being the Soul essence or seed of consciousness. When one is unaware or fragmented to some degree in awareness of the spiritual reality, the two operate independently. When they are unified they become the Merkaba light body or otherwise known as the Astral Body, the vehicle of aware consciousness.
Initially the BA (celestial soul body) runs on auto pilot processing the unyielded spiritual insights overlooked in daily life whilst one is asleep and dreaming. It does this by producing dream experiences symbolic of whatever is in need of being addressed. The KA also goes on auto pilot as dreaming awareness, and can sometimes actually enter alternate realities (parallel universes etc.) In such cases it can attach itself passively to the alternate body of oneself. This I feel is what is experienced as dreams which are vivid but which have no tell tale sign as being a dream until upon waking up. These other realities may be related to learning lessons without having to actually reincarnate into them. Times contrast of flow between two universes is not necessarily relative. So a whole entire lifetime can occur within a nights sleep in an alternate cosmos and never be remembered due to the non relative time dilation/retention factor. Its also possible that one has many alternate bodies existing in infinite universes parallel to this one which all follow the same synchronised passage of time yet which are experienced singularly as either waking life realities or dreams via the non linear 4th dimension. Sometimes an individual may only exist in another cosmos as a conduit to serve as a lesson deliverer for others whereby they dream that role from another cosmos and the rest is set in motion as auto pilot by the Akashic records < look this up if you are unsure what it is.
By the same token the Akashic Records are the 4th dimension which enables the Lucid reality to function. Whereby all possible things from all the existing base physical realms are recorded/exist as static eternal blueprints (the records are more so the imprint of how many times a soul experiences a certain possibility i.e. deja vu) These possibilities become accessible to the lucid adept as a linear stream of events strung together in the 5th dimension which is independent of physical cosmoses i.e. the Astral realm. One can train themselves to experience the astral Lucid realm at will, however this may bypass learning some of the necessary lessons if they use external props, thereby rendering a greater amount of lessons the next time they dream non-lucidly. Its possible to have lucid dreams before all lessons are learned, this occurs during the intermittent period between the orchestration of the wider linear context relevant to ones growth. If one manages to clear all lessons and become a lucid master they have spiritually ascended. Whereby every night they astral project naturally with full awareness.
There is however the total ascention of the flesh still left to aspire to. This occurs when one is sprtually ascended as well as totally enlightened of the holographic nature of the universe. At this point ones body ascends to the 5th dimension of infinite paradise possiblities derived from the Akashic Field of the entire spance of all possible existences. There are even some reincarnated masters out there who are emanations of this ultimate reality, whom come to balance their objective cosm (of which they ascended from during it's final phase of linear potential at the end of the cosmic cycle in which they lived. This is so that the innocent souls whom would have otherwise ascended form that degrading cosmos, can be harvested via the 5D extension (the master) of the Akashic field into a cosmos of higher potential. This will be experienced as a event of positive deja vu whenever an individual is transferred.
I feel the final cycle of the local Yuga of ones objectve cosm concluded last year (we can all be in very similar cosms which overlap as a consensus reality in the present, yet the past histories may differ greatly i.e. some individuals my have past histories in their past life records that do not add up with the current life's history...even the past of this very life too because any event and choice is ones way of navigating through alternate timelines which can diverge and converge at various points along the path its like one big family tree of events and possibilities the consensus is very closly related however... I guess what I'm saying is, for instance: some people may live in version of reality which overlaps with the consensus of another individual in the same present which to that other individual is a separate cosmos. Both occupy the same reality-projection-space. Because the present moment of both cosmoses are the same they occur simultaneously as one shared cosmos-moment. Thus the two cosms pasts however may be entirely opposite in as much as one may have a history which is fake - made up, written in books where everyone was lied to, at the same time the other cosmos may have actually had a great deal of those past events actually occur for real. Now apply this in a multi variate manner of multitudes of individuals all converging into the same present...this is what I think is happening, so essentially the multitudes of varietions of the multi-verse family tree (of past events in various cosms) are erasing each other, cancelling out so that all truth and untruth are seen to be equally so truth and untruth and irrelevant... the only truth is that there is no universal truth other than the law of oneness and its sub laws of cause and effect within "perceived duality".
Now I think we are aproaching the convegrence point of all possible timeliness concluding into the sigularity. this will occur sometime this year and one will either ascend physically to the higher realm of oneness or they will move into an alternate timeline either of higher or lesser potential according to the sum total of choices throughout the great yugic cycle. No one is condemned for eternity (at least I cant imagine that that would be the case) but I do feel some will have to repeat the lessons if they cannot make the grade...An essentially all the alternate cosmos are somehow non linearly converging so it appears to those who ascend that all others ascend simultaneously anyway...to those who have to repeat the grade they go back and the time dilation allows compression of their cosmos (of relearning lessons) to pass a greater amount of time than what is passing in the ascending convergence point...kinda like replay and to those on the ascending path the replay of those relearning is in fast forward so as to catch up and converge, all the whilst to themselves objectively those cosmoses seem to be playing out as slowly as the last round...Time is relative.