The Nature of the Soul

Aum Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya

Haribol.

So, The Nature of the Soul: You’ve heard the saying, “The eyes are a window to the soul,” or no? Used to be more commonly used. There is actually an element of great truth to that, because what it fundamentally says is, there is something deeper than the external, the external garment known as the body.

We live in a really horrible time, where things have become so shallow, and there is such an emphasis on the body and body image, and people see this as being the pathway to acceptance, to being loved, to being lovable, to being all kinds of things. And that’s considered a grave misfortune by the ancient yoga teachers, because it’s such a shallow idea, and of course, is completely untrue.

When we think of that term, “The eyes are a window to the soul,” anybody that’s had a close relationship with a pet, they always recognize that there’s somebody in there looking back at me. There’s somebody relating to me, and there’s someone that I’m relating to. You’re not just relating to the external form, you’re relating to, fundamentally, a person.

When it comes to the word soul, I’m really not a big fan of using the term, primarily because it’s vague. People think that they’ve really got a handle on it. If I reference or talk about the soul, we think we know what we’re talking about, but at the same time, there is a great lack of clarity.

If we look at the definition, dictionary definitions of soul, one of the common ones is:

“The spiritual, immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal.”

That’s a reasonably good definition, but it actually doesn’t tell us very much. So before getting into the nature of the soul, we’ll just talk a little about its existence.

Many people, if you question them about a soul—and this is true also—I’ve attended so many funerals where some of the stuff I’ve heard is highly inaccurate on many different levels. If you ask someone to speak about the soul, if they accept there is some such thing as a soul, most people will begin with, “I have a soul,” and it’s sort of like, “Umm, if you think you have a soul, who exactly are you and what is this soul that you possess?” And that question is like almost impossible to answer. Most people just spazz out because it’s sort of like, “Oh, never thought of that.”

The ancient yoga teachings, they say you don’t have a soul. You are the soul. The soul is you. That’s who you are. You are a spiritual being temporarily residing within a material body. And we know that it’s temporary, because since time immemorial, all what people call lives, have ended the same way, in what’s called death. So, we know that it’s temporary, my being in this particular body.

I have a few verses that I’ll share. I’m hoping that it’s kind of like, not too verse heavy. But I wanted to use them just because it’s such ancient wisdom, thousands and thousands of years old, and the way things are presented is so enlightening and so wonderful.

In the Sanskrit language, which was the language used in the Vedic teaching and the ancient yogic texts and teachings, they have a word to describe what most people are referring to as a soul. It’s atma, or atman. This word atma literally translates as the self. So the body is not considered the self. It’s a temporary residence. The one residing within, the actual self, then they use this term, atma, or atman.

So, I’ll read a verse here from the Bhagavad gita:

“O son of Bharata, as the sun alone illuminates all this universe, so does the living entity, one within the body, illuminate the entire body by consciousness.” [Bhagavad-gītā 13.34]

This is an extraordinary idea. I mean this is transformative. This is life-changing, if you actually embrace this understanding. One of the symptoms of the presence of the eternal spiritual being, the atma, is life and consciousness, that because of the presence of the atma, the soul, the body manifests symptoms of life and manifest consciousness. From the tip of your toe to the top of your head there is the ability to be aware, to feel.

And on the other side of things, when that event known as death occurs, the understanding was actually, you do not die. You cannot die. You never die. You leave, and when you leave, what remains behind, the body, manifests as dead, but the living being has not died. It’s just up and gone. And what’s left behind manifests the signs of what people refer to as death. There’s no longer any symptom of life, there is no symptom of consciousness, because those things are not coming from the body; they’re coming from the spiritual being within.

Another verse from the Bhagavad-gita:

“For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.” [Bhagavad-gītā 2.20]

So, this is now really an amazing revelation that the soul is actually not created. There was not a time that it started. It’s categorized as being eternal. We’re not going to go into that right now because that’s a pretty deep philosophical point, but it’s a very interesting point of difference between what many people think.

So, I’ll read another verse from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa:

“The soul within the body is self-luminous and is distinct from the visible gross body and invisible subtle body…”

Maybe I’ll pause there for a moment. So, their understanding was that you actually, there are two coverings of the soul, of you, the gross physical body that we all see (this is called the stula sarira, the gross physical body), but there is considered another covering of the spiritual being that is very subtle in nature. It’s called the linga sarira, which means—it is described as a subtle body comprised of the mind, the intelligence, and what’s called the false ego, the false concepts of who I am. Those false concepts are what we live, as if they are a reality, every day.

So, whatever kind of body I have on, I say, “Oh, I’m an old kiwi guy,” that’s how I would describe myself. But actually, that’s not yourself. That’s the temporary residence that you’re currently occupying. I will identify as male or female, short, tall, fat, thin, dark complexion, light complexion—all these kind of things, and I am totally absorbed in these false concepts of who I am. But then, at the end of the period of what we call life, when I leave, all that stuff is left behind, all those labels are gone, that they don’t come with me. I move on.

And so, this is a recognition of these two covering, and the tendency to be so engrossed in the external coverings that we’re disconnected from our real spiritual being.

“The soul within the body is self-luminous and is distinct from the visible gross body and invisible subtle body. It remains as the fixed basis of changing bodily existence, just as the ethereal sky is the unchanging background of material transformation. Therefore the soul is endless and without material comparison.” [Bhāgavata Purāṇa 12.5.8]

And if I ask you to tell me what that means, most people will go, “Uuuh? Sorry.” So, it’s fundamentally saying—there are medical realities that are known and accepted. Within 5 years, every single atomic particle in your body is replaced. Like when you go, and you go hiking somewhere, and you see a waterfall, and you’re standing there looking at the waterfall, and it maintains a consistent form, yet the water in the waterfall is constantly flowing and constantly changing. But we look at it and say, “Oh I’ve seen that waterfall before.” Technically, you actually haven’t, because all the water’s changed. In a similar manner, every single particle making up the body is constantly in flux and changing, even your bones, even the atomic matter making up your brain is constantly changing. Yet there is someone experiencing those changes.

I talk about, “Oh, when I was a child, when I was a young adult, when I was middle age,” and as we get older, as I get older, there’s somebody experiencing all that constant flux that constant change. The person that’s experiencing it is not changing. It’s the same person experiencing the child body and getting caught up in child consciousness, then as the child becomes a teenager and matures to an adult, you get caught up in that state of consciousness and that body as being us. But there is somebody that’s constant—but I can remember all the stuff that went before, as I will be able to later be aware and then remember all of the stuff that is still to come. So, there is some constant principle in an ocean of constant change.

I’ll just read one more because it addresses what happens when a person—you know, self-realization or enlightenment means to not just understand and accept the idea, but to be very conscious of and aware of the reality of my existence. And so, it describes:

“One who is enlightened in self-realization, although living within the material body, sees himself as transcendental to the body, just as one who has arisen from a dream gives up identification with the dream body.’ [Bhāgavata Purāṇa 11.11.8]

So, when you have a very vivid dream, I mean like a really vivid dream, you see that you have a form and stuff, and you go through experiences, and some of them can be frightening, it can be like a nightmare, and you’re like panicking. But the instant that you wake up, then you’re instantly aware, “Oh, that was just a dream,” and actually what I’m doing is then casting off that dream body I had assumed and that circumstance. And they’re saying that enlightenment is like that, that even within this lifetime for a person to grow in spiritual understanding and perception, it means that they develop a whole different way of looking at themself, of course, of the world, and of others.

Somebody may ask, “Okay, well if there is this spiritual person or this energy, whatever, where is it located in the body?” And when you ask most people, most people will somehow think it’s up here somewhere. [Indicating head] And that’s only because you have a number of sensory organs located in this area—the eyes, the nose for smelling, the tongue for tasting, right? Ears for hearing—they’re all located in this area. And so, it gives us the impression that maybe we’re located up here somewhere. But the actual reality is different, and it can be experienced in certain types of meditation.

They describe that the living being is actually situated in the region of the heart and is sitting floating within five kinds of air, of prana. Each one of them is named and serves as a different function. And it is through these very subtle channels and these subtle airs that are moving through the body, that consciousness is spread, and awareness arises.

So it describes in the Mundaka Upanishad,

“The atma, or the self, is atomic in size and can be perceived by perfect intelligence. The atomic soul is floating in five kinds of air (prana, apana, vyana, samana and udana), and is situated within the heart and spreads its influence all over the body of the embodied living entities. When the atma is purified from the contamination of the five kinds of material air, its spiritual influences exhibited.” [Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 3.1.9]

So, it’s kind of like a technical subject, but it’s basically saying that when one becomes purified by the meditation process, and engaging in these chanting, one will begin to perceive their actual spiritual identity as being completely different from the body which we are occupying.

So, what is the nature then of the soul? One of the—some of the basic characteristics, it’s described in Sanskrit as sat, chit, ananda. And this means that we are eternal; that the fact that we are aware and can know things—that quality is a quality of the soul itself. It’s not a quality of the body. And we know that from when the living being leaves the body, the body doesn’t perceive anything. It has no knowledge. It has no awareness. And when we think about that, then it gives us an increasingly clearer picture of the nature of the soul.

But one of the qualities that’s mentioned here is ananda. Ananda means great, not just happiness, but extraordinary and ecstatic blissfulness. This is part of the eternal nature of the soul, and explains why it is that we desire to be happy. Everybody has a desire to be happy; nobody wants to be on a bummer. Or no? Am I wrong there? No, we want it, we want it really bad, and even if we have one miserable experience and one let down after another in different ways, I still have this desire for something wonderful, a happiness that I aspire to, that I want and desire. And the reason that desire exists is because it is part of the nature of the soul itself, to exist in a state of happiness.

And so, when we are not experiencing that, we feel uncomfortable. We feel disoriented. We feel like I’ve got to seek for it somehow. And so, you’ll see everybody is on a constant search for happiness. And if you ask how many people achieve it. Well, really? Practically, well, not practically, actually no one.

We may attain fleeting glimpses of happiness that are actually not lasting and are not utterly fulfilling, but we desire lasting happiness. I always use the example, used to be all the kid’s books always ended with, “and they lived happily ever after.” That is actually a spiritual desire, and that is connected to our—I don’t know the right word. I was going to say like birthright, but it’s not, it’s not sort of like, if we understand the concept of birthright as it’s applied in this world, from the beginning of your life, you have an entitlement. We have an entitlement because it is part of our nature to be extraordinarily and joyfully blissful. But we just can’t seem to find it.

Many decades ago, (oh my God), like a long time ago, Rolling Stones, “I can’t get no satisfaction, and I tried, and I tried and I tried.” Anybody hasn’t heard that song? Just checking. And here you’ve got guys that are the ultimate hedonists. They had every opportunity to exploit all forms of experience and so-called enjoyment, and this is a song that they’d write that comes from a practical experience.

At this point I just want to mention, it’s really, really important to understand and appreciate that one of the important characteristics of the soul—it’s not just an energy. I mean when people think of energy, they generally think of something impersonal—the sunshine, electricity, you know, who knows what, different kinds of energy are considered impersonal. And so, when people refer to the soul as being like a spiritual energy, the concept that people have when they use that kind of term is that it’s impersonal.

But the reality is the spirit soul is a person. It’s not this garment here. This garment is not a person. All you have to do, if you’ve had the opportunity to be with somebody, particularly somebody that you knew well, who passes, who dies—it’s like one friend was telling me, they were holding their mother when their mother passed, and it was like instantly there was an awareness that that person is no longer there. Instantly there was this perceivable change to the body. Now you are just holding a body. It may have been the body that your mum used, but it’s nonetheless just a body, and it’s no longer attractive, and it’s no longer manifesting any characteristics of being a person. It’s become an object.

The nature of the soul is that we are spiritual persons. They have a term in Sanskrit, it’s called purusha. Purusha literally means the person. And so, they address the atma as being purusha. Patanjali, in his Yoga Sutra, he would frequently use two words to describe the nature of the soul. One is the seer, drsha, or drishta. The seer, it means like—(are we going to go into this one?)

I mentioned earlier if you have a pet, and you look into the eyes, or you consider that saying that “The eyes are the window to the soul.” Yeah, it’s just a window. It’s just something that allows light to move through. But there is something deeper going on.

Okay, just a little one: when you ask people. “Okay, how do you see anything?” Everybody goes, “Because I’ve got eyes.” And you go, “Okay, what about if I blindfold you and put you in a dark room, can you see anything?” They go, “No, stupid how could I see anything?” ‘Do you still have eyes?” “Yeah.” “So, can you see anything?” “No.”

So it’s kind of like, oh, so what is what is sight? What is seeing? It’s simply light entering through this gelatinous blob called the eyeball, and it stimulates the photosensitive cells at the back of the eyeball that then send off electrical impulses up the optic nerve to the visual cortex of the brain which then causes more electrical activity in that part of the brain and some biochemical reaction also.

And okay, so then my question is, where is the picture that you’re seeing? Where is the picture, and who exactly is seeing it? And that’s just like What!? People just don’t even think of that. We go through our day. We do so many things. We’re just unaware of so many things.

And so, in the ancient yoga teachings they talked about an actual perceiver residing within the body. And when all that sensory information, whether it’s sound—I mean we can do the same thing with sound. It’s just—you end up just having these vibrations on a membrane that causes a little hammer to move, and then that sets off electrical impulses, it goes to another area of the brain and sets off a whole bunch of reaction there. And it’s kind of like, okay, well, where exactly is the sound that you’re hearing? And who is the one hearing it? And it’s kind of like, “Whoa! Never thought of that.”

And so, he would use this term drshta, or drisha, meaning the seer; that it is because of the presence of a spiritual being one has this capacity. But because we are so disconnected, we’re so absorbed in the outer garment ,it’s like we’re unaware of a lot of these kind of things. So, he would use this word the seer or the purusha which literally means the person.

I can’t remember what time I started. I could go on for hours, as you probably figured out.

So, I’m going to read another verse from the Bhagavat Purana. And again, this is probably quite philosophical and quite—this is like, oh my God, all these things we’re talking about now it’s kind of like a— it’s mind-blowing, if I was actually aware of these things all the time.

“As long as a living entity is not completely self-realized – as long as one is not independent of the misconception of identifying with one’s body, which is nothing but a reflection of the original body and senses – one cannot be relieved of the conception of duality, which is epitomized by the duality [for instance] of a man and woman. Thus, there is every chance that one will fall down because one’s intelligence is bewildered.” [ Bhāgavata Purāṇa 7.12.10]

So, big subject, but it’s basically this idea that we become so absorbed in the body as being the self even though it’s not. And while we’re absorbed in that, it becomes not just difficult but practically impossible to be in touch with our true spiritual being, who we really are. But there was one part describes here that the external reality is like a mere reflection of the original body, meaning the spiritual form and senses.

So, part of the characteristic of the soul, the atma, is that there is such a thing as spiritual form (We’re not going to talk about it. It’s a big subject.), and that the perception, perception happens in the body because that is part of the nature of the soul. It’s part of who you are as an eternal spiritual being.

So, just now talking—just a few more examples of the nature of the soul: Every single living being experiences fear. Correct? In different ways, so many insecurities and fear. And it’s understood that all fear originates from fear of death, if we look at it very deeply. This is where it arises from. And if I ask the question, “So why do we fear death?” I’ll give you the spiritual explanation. The spiritual explanation is that we are eternal. We cannot die. We do not die. That’s our nature. When we become utterly confused by this body, the experience of being embodied, and identify the body as our self, seeing a dead body or being aware of dead bodies or what’s called death freaks us out, because it goes completely against the grain of what is our true nature which is to be eternal. And that is why we have fear of practically any type, but most definitely because of death. We desire permanence. We want things to stay the same. We get disturbed by impermanence. But again, that’s just part of the nature of material existence.

So, I mentioned happiness already, that’s part of the nature of the soul itself. But the really big one that we’re going to just touch on is the desire for love, the desire to love and to be loved. And I’m not talking about just the idea of a life partner, a husband or a wife. We’re talking about between parents and children. We’re talking about siblings. We’re talking about friends. We hunger for these relationships. We know that they are desirable. If we watch a movie or something, we see something, we look at people that are supposedly engaged in different types of loving relationships with some envy. Not—I don’t mean it in a bad way. It’s kind of like, I wish my life was like that. I wish I had the perfect love. I wish on so many different levels.

That desire both to love and to be loved is part of the innate nature of the spiritual being. That is not arising from the body and arising from the mind. It is actually a profound spiritual need. And we all have it, all living beings. A person may ask, “What about, you know, you mentioned living beings, are you including animals?” And I’m going to go out way out there and say, “No, not only animals, anywhere that you observe life it is because of the presence of a soul.”

Life is a symptom of the presence of the spiritual energy that is called the jiva, the atma. It is only this [indicates his finger] that is alive. The material energy is not alive. At one time this [indicates some wooden thing] was a body that was occupied by another living being in the form of a tree, and while a living being occupied that body, you had growth, you had maturity, you had reproduction, you had dwindling, and then you have death. Those are the stages that manifest when a soul inhabits any material form. We will see that cycle taking place. And so, all living beings possess—or there is a presence of a soul, a spiritual being.

But different types of bodies provide—it means the soul is less visible. If you look at a bird, you can’t make out the existence of a person. If you have a pet that’s a bird, and you keep it in the house, and you’re feeding it and relating to it, and you see it starts relating to you—my daughter, one of my daughters, when she was young, she had a budgie. And she had three different ones at different times, and all of them were completely different characters. They behaved differently. They responded differently. And there was this one that was like really affectionate, really liked to be caressed. And if you put on chanting music, a kirtan, it would get there in front of it, bob up and down in time with the music. And it’s like—and it would relate and call it, you know what I mean, and it would repeat the name, and would come to you, and everything. And it’s kind of like—if it’s just flying around the trees, you don’t recognize that there’s anybody home. But when you develop a connection, you can begin to see there’s actually someone in here.

But according to the nature of the material body, the grosser the body is, the less visible is the presence of the soul. The human form of life is considered the most subtle covering, because the characteristics of the soul are more readily visible and apparent. But still, that’s not who you are. That’s simply the nature of that body.

One may question, “So, where do we come from?” And like I mentioned before, there is no—in the Vedic teaching, the soul, the spiritual being is considered eternal, although it has what may be regarded as a source. So, in one of Upanisads, the Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad, they have this—they would present things just in a way that people could kind of begin to grasp a little bit.

“As tiny sparks fly from a fire, so all the individual souls have come from the Supreme.” [Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad, 2.2.20]

So, it was a way of just—and in another Upanishad, in the Mundaka Upanishad, it says:

“And this is the truth: As sparks of similar form spring forth by the thousands from a strongly blazing fire, so from the Absolute Truth are produced the various living beings, O gentle one, and there also do they go.” [ Mundaka Upanishad 2:1:1]

So, part of the exploration of the nature of the soul and this capacity and desire for love, it exists because we have an eternal soulmate, but we have become disconnected. We have become cut off. There is a—in some of Upanisads, but also in the Bhagavat Purana, they use an analogy to try and help people grasp this idea. They speak about the soul as being like a bird in a tree. So, this is a verse:

“By chance, two birds have made a nest together in the same tree. The two birds are friends and are of a similar nature. One of them, however, is eating the fruit of the tree, whereas the other, who does not eat the fruits, is in a superior position due to His [own spiritual] potency.

“The bird who does not eat the fruits of the tree is the Supreme Soul, who by His omniscience perfectly understands His own position and that of the conditioned living entity, represented by the eating bird. The living entity, on the other hand, does not understand himself nor the Lord of his heart. He is covered by ignorance and is thus called eternally conditioned…” [ Bhāgavata Purāṇa 11.11.6-7]

In the Upanishad it describes that the bird is busily trying to eat and enjoy the fruits of the tree but is always feeling morose.

So, what they are speaking to is when the living being becomes embodied, when we have a material body, we have this tendency to identify with that as being who we actually are. And then I set about trying to fulfill my need for love, my need for happiness and all these things, through bodily experience, mental and physical experience. But all the time it’s not fulfilling me. It’s not touching me in the deepest part of my being where I become truly fulfilled and happy. It’s always lacking. It’s not enough.

Even when I have wonderful relationships, I hope for something, I dream of something more wonderful. I enjoy love stories and things of something more perfect and extraordinary, because what we experience is not completely fulfilling. And it describes that when that bird no longer is jumping from branch to branch busily trying to enjoy the fruits of the tree, but turns and recognizes their eternal friend, then they experience complete peace and happiness.

So, this is an extraordinary idea, and it’s something that everybody finds—they, we all experience that life is not enough. I want something more perfect. And that’s okay to want that. We shouldn’t suppress that. Sometimes there is a tendency for people who are not finding great fulfillment with all the activities in life, they think they have got a mental health issue. And it’s not true. The reason that you’re not completely happy and fulfilled is because you’re eternal spiritual being. You actually do need something more, that these temporary experiences are not going to fulfill you, and to experience that reality is not a bad thing. That’s actually a really good thing, because it can become an impetus for us to seek something better, to seek something more wonderful.

This reference to a Supreme Soul that we are all intimately and perfectly connected to but we have turned away from; and in the reactivation of that connection and of that relationship, one will attain the highest form of happiness, they will experience the greatest form of spiritual perfect love, they will be lost in an ocean of great ecstatic happiness and love which then begins to overflow. It overflows from that person having that experience to others that they encounter. This is the motivation for the great spiritual teachers because of their experiencing this perfect and wonderful reality. Their heart breaks wanting to help others regain that which we have turned our backs on, that we have turned away from, to regain our original position.

So, I hope that you find this encouraging and hopeful and attractive. The ideals that we’re speaking of are tremendously attractive. It’s what’s attracting everybody anyway. But we’re trying to find perfection in that which is not perfect. We are trying to find permanence in that which is temporary. We are trying to find fulfillment in that which is not fulfilling, and so it leaves an emptiness within.

Anybody have any question? Did I go too long? A little bit? What’s, what’s the time? A little, okay.

If you’ve got a thought hang on to it. We’ll chant a little bit. And then while we’re having some refreshment, if you wanted to ask anything, I will try to answer. You know it’s through this process of meditation, of absorption in spiritual sound, that the heart and the mind become purified, that the fog begins to dissipate, that we begin to have clarity. This is what the process of enlightenment is.

So, I’ll chant the mantra Haribol Nitai Gaur. Do we have that one out? No? I think a lot of people know it. If you don’t, do we have any little mantra card, or? Okay, I’ll tell you what, I’ll chant the Maha Mantra. A lot of people know that one. It’s used by a lot of different people. So, I’ll chant it once then you follow.