The Spirit Soul 101

Aum Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya

Yesterday I was in Hamilton, and we were doing a little workshop there, and the workshop was, the title was Mindfulness and Meditation—bringing happiness and peace to my life, something along those lines. And all of the people that attended were, of course, practically newer people, and so I started with a foundational principle of all spiritual life; and it’s the idea that the body is not you. You are inhabiting, you are the person residing within, that you are an eternal spiritual being. The body is not you. And immediately I saw on some faces this bewilderment and reaction, and it’s sort of like—because we run these regular programs, and most people have been coming to them on and off for a certain amount of time, and a lot of the people that come it’s sort of like not a big deal, they can sort of embrace that. But here, it was sort of like, wow, some people were seriously bewildered.

And so I didn’t actually get to talk about the subject I wanted to talk about. We spent more time discussing and talking about our spiritual identity as a spiritual being. And because it was difficult for some people, so I decided that tonight I will just talk on the topic The Spirit Soul 101.

We’re going to try something new. Wow, it’s happening. We’re going to try something new here, and what I’m actually just going to do is to put up some verses from very—they’re very ancient spiritual texts, from the Vedas, and they contain really profound ideas. But in order to appreciate, one needs to spend some time contemplating on these things that we’re speaking of.

The whole process of meditation that we do is for the purpose of self-realization, coming to realize, not just understand or appreciate, but cultivate this deep experience that I am an eternal spiritual being, this is my identity.

So the first verse that I will read from, it’s actually from the Bhagavad-gita. And it was first really stood out in my mind, my spiritual master who (this was back in 1971), he had just been to Russia.  And of course, Russia in 1971 was a whole different world. And he had been invited by a professor of Eastern Studies, and so, it was a bizarre experience for them.

Like, I knew, quite well, one of the people that travelled with him that was like acting as a secretary and a cook, and thinking that, okay, we just go out to the supermarket or the grocery store and buy things and come back and cook.  And they try to go to the place to buy some vegetables, and of course, there’s this massive line, and you have to stand in the line for hours. Then when you get in the shop, each day there was only one vegetable available. That particular day it was cabbage. That’s it! And another day it’s going to be potato, another day it’s going to be beets, and occasionally tomatoes would show up. So, it was like it was pretty austere.

And in the meeting that my teacher had with all of these professors at the Moscow University, he was discussing this topic with them, the nature of the soul. And after speaking at length, he came away, and he simply quoted this verse which I will now read:

“Some look upon the soul as amazing, some describe the soul as amazing, and some hear of the soul as amazing, while others, even after hearing about the spiritual being, cannot understand him at all.” – Bhagavad-gītā 2.29

And that’s just like, okay, this is ancient knowledge. This is a reality. Don’t expect that you’re going to be able to instantly absorb and deeply understand every single thing that we talk about. And also don’t—understand that if you have embraced something, and you go, “Yeah, I get it. I can identify with that. I really do get it,” don’t think that therefore when you try to talk about it, some new discovery, to others that they’re also going to get it. You may have two problems. One is your ability to communicate the idea, and the second part may be that people just don’t get it; because what we’re dealing with, it is states of consciousness.

The Vedas, and all of the yogic texts, talk about how people can exist in such a broad range of states of consciousness. Some people can appear like human beings but their consciousness and behaviour is like an animal, the consciousness is that of an animal even. So don’t—we shouldn’t automatically assume either, that we’re going to totally get it.

For me, some of the things I heard when I first started this journey of mine were striking, in that it was like, “What?! What does that mean?” You don’t necessarily understand, because it requires that you see things in a particular way, there is that clarity. We all become deeply conditioned by ideas, by certain desires, an outlook on life, the idea of what the purpose of life is. There are so many things that can affect and influence the nature of our consciousness. So I just wanted to raise that one first.

Now this next verse we’re going to read, it’s from a very ancient text called the Bhagavata Purana, and in this particular verse it says,

“In this way the conditioned soul living within the body forgets his self-interest because he identifies himself with the body. Because the body is material, his natural tendency is to be attracted by the varieties of the material world. And thus the living entity suffers the miseries of material existence.” – Bhāgavata Purāṇa 7.13.28

So, there is this basic understanding that material life is fundamentally a bummer. Sorry! I’m the downer guy. Yeah, of course, there’s some nice times, there’s some up times, there’s some happy times, but it doesn’t generally—we don’t spend much of our time being actually happy. There are 1720 (? I may get it wrong) minutes in the day. And if I ask you, “In one day, how much time do you spend experiencing great happiness?” And in reality, most people, if they’re honest, and they think about it, “On average, well maybe, uh, 15 minutes, I guess, or something.” And it’s sort of like, wow, that’s not so good, those are not good odds.

And then the reality is, you live your entire life, and you reach this point where everything starts going downhill quickly, and it tends to accelerate over time. And as I asked people to consider, go volunteer in an old age home, even for a day, and sit at the bedside or beside very aged people, and see if you can help them in any way. And you’ll see, wow, this is not a desirable outcome. Nobody wants this to happen. In fact we want the opposite to happen. We’ve become convinced that if I have enough plastic and fillers inserted into my body, I can perpetually be young. No, you can’t. It all goes the same way.

When the living being is oblivious to their spiritual existence and are just identifying the body as being the self, then we chase happiness, we chase love, we chase these things that are actually really important and are fundamentally spiritual, and we try to fulfill them through the agency of the body. So this is what happens when we forget our actual self interest, our self interest. We are eternal spiritual beings. We are also in need of what I will call spiritual nutrition, but yet we are utterly focused on trying to fulfill the desires of the body and the mind, which never leave us fulfilled.

In the next verse:

“The soul within the body is self-luminous…”

So, I’ll just talk about what this means for a second. When we talk about self-luminous, in the Sanskrit they are talking about the actual—being cognizant, being aware, being the knower of things. This is the characteristic and the quality of the soul, or the spiritual being, the spirit soul. It is not the quality of the body. When the living being leaves, the body is absolutely dead and cold. It is not aware. It doesn’t perceive. It does nothing.  It’s—that’s it, it’s gone. It’s all over. This is the nature of the body.

But there is this kind of amazing thing that happens, that when you take a particle of life energy, the actual spirit soul, and you connect it to a material covering, the soul itself imparts consciousness, the energy of life to the body which is covering it. And so now the body and the mind appear to be alive. So:

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

So, we’ll just pause there for a second. So, the understanding is that you have two coverings. The spiritual being has two coverings: the gross physical body which you can see; and there is a subtle body. In Sanskrit this word is linga, linga sarira, the subtle body comprised mostly of the mind, and a faculty called the buddhi, or the intelligence, which is the ability to step back and exercise control over the mind, that faculty, and what’s called the ahankara, or the false ego, the false concept of self. So these two are the two coverings.

“It remains [meaning the spirit soul] 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

So, what this statement means is that we all had a baby body. I don’t think anybody here was born the current age! We start out with a tiny little body, within, usually, within a year 98 percent of all the atoms making up the body are replaced. There is a constant process. If I ask somebody if they’ve got a picture of their body as a baby, “Where is that body?” they say, “Oh, this is it. It just grew.” No! Everything has been replaced, even the bones. Even some of the cells in the brain, which last, the molecules making them up are constantly changing. Yet, you remain the same person. It is one individual who is experiencing all these different changes, my childhood, my youth, my young adulthood, my middle age, now my old age. I am the same person experiencing all of this. I am the constant factor within this constantly changing body.

So in these verses what we’re doing is, and the reason I’m showing some of these, is because they actually contain information about the characteristic of the spirit soul.

In the next verse:

“Just as fire, which burns and illuminates, is different from firewood, which is to be burned to give illumination, similarly the seer within the body, the self-enlightened spirit soul, is different from the material body, which is to be illuminated by consciousness. And thus the spirit soul and the body possess different characteristics and are separate things.” – Bhāgavata Purāṇa 11.10.8

It’s a quite extraordinary idea. There’s one word here that we see, the “seer.” In Sanskrit this—the term is drishta, the seer. I mean the ancient spiritual teachers and yogis, they were into this, like in ways that we can’t even sort of fully comprehend. They would examine the nature of sensory perception, for instance, seeing.

If I ask somebody, “How is it that you can see? How do you see?” and people will say, “Oh, it’s because I’ve got eyes.” Of course, if I blindfold someone and put them in a dark room, can you see? The answer is, “No.” “Do you still have eyes?” “Yes.” Why can’t you see? You still have eyes.

We don’t think about things very deeply, but the eye, the eyeball, is just this gelatinous blob, that actually has a lens and a focusing mechanism on it. And at the back of it there are these light sensitive cells. And so, you have light: the reason we can see something is because light enters the eye. The light strikes these photosensitive cells which produce electrical impulses that travel down the optic nerve to the visual cortex of the brain and stimulate the visual cortex. And so my question is, “Okay, well, where is the picture?” If you’re looking at something, and we’re doing this all the time, where is the picture? And who is seeing the picture? It’s like, whoa!

They were really into this, and they would examine all of the different channels of sensory perception and question. And this question: “Who is this seer? Who is the one observing this?” And so this is what is referenced here. It is the actual spirit soul, or the Sanskrit word atma, which means the self, that is actually the seer, is the one witnessing things.

You find this interesting, or no? This stuff blows my mind. I think it’s really, really awesome. I mean every day I do this: I read these spiritual texts, I engage in the process of meditation, because what it does, there is this massive shift then in your consciousness, in how you see yourself, how you see the world, how you see others, the idea of what is the purpose of life. Everything changes when we become more immersed in this awareness. But if we don’t engage in this process of cultivation of spiritual knowledge and experience, then all we are left to is all of this, actually insipid (is that the right word?) [insidious] influence of what’s going on with the internet.

It’s sort of like, when the internet came out—I don’t know if anybody remembers dial-up computers? Yyywumcrcrcrcr (imitating the crackle of dial up) In the early days—and everybody’s going to say, “Oh, the internet is going to be just amazing! It’s going to transform things for good.” My Gods! The latest figures out is that PornHub gets more than double the amount of visits than both Google and Facebook combined on a daily basis. And you’ve got kids as young as eight years old being exposed to such things that young kids were never exposed to before, and it’s warping them. And their teachers report all this bad behaviour, violence, speech things, learning difficulties, and they find out people have been immersed in watching this stuff. And it’s just like mind-blowing.

If you do not engage in the cultivation of spiritual life you are left to all of the influences in this world that you are simply absorbed in, which is categorized as ignorant.

So, next verse, and the final one:

“One who is enlightened in self-realization, although living within the body, 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, if you’ve had a vivid and intense dream, you have a body in that dream. You’re engaging in activity. Sometimes it’s pleasurable, sometimes it’s painful, sometimes it’s wonderful, sometimes it’s scary. People have nightmares, and as soon as a person is awakened from sleep then immediately it’s like they shake it off, especially if somebody’s having a nightmare, they’ve been attacked by some animal or something, and they’re “No, no,” and then somebody wakes them up, the instant they wake up it’s like, “Oh, phew,” and it’s like, I’m saved from that situation. And what was happening, and what I was witnessing, I shake it off. I realize that wasn’t actually me.

And so that example is used for one that is progressing in self-realization. There is a constant awareness of my spiritual being and that this body is a vehicle that I am using and utilizing. And now, instead of my mind and all the desires there that are often fed by so many different things, instead of me chasing all of these things hoping to become happy, I, the living being, become the driver of the bus. I determine what I’m going to think about. I determine what I’m going to feed into my mind. I determine. Instead of reacting impulsively and due to the heightened state of emotions, I decide what I am going to say, how I am going to deal with others. I take charge of my life. I become very conscious and aware, and what happens is my life becomes wonderful. It becomes wonderful. I can produce—you have the power to produce wonderful outcomes in your life. But you need to be in control of what’s going on.

Okay? So, you like this kind of stuff? Or, no it’s too…? It’s easier when I we project it, and you can read along, or what? I think it’s easier to absorb. Most people are not so trained to just hear anymore. We’re losing the plot. They say that we have now developed the attention span of a goldfish. That’s pretty bad. And so even 15 minutes of, 20 minutes of talking, it’s kind of quite exhausting already.

But, of course, apart from the cultivation of knowledge, it is the process, the spiritual cultivation that is what meditation is. Meditation means one thing. It’s not stilling the mind, calming the mind. Those are considered pre-meditation activities. Meditation means to become absorbed in transcendence, in that which is transcendental. Beautiful word, “transcendental.” Transcendental means to rise above, to rise above material existence, to have contact with that spiritual reality, that spiritual realm. And so, when we chant these sacred mantras, what we are doing is immersing our heart and our mind, our body also, in these sacred waters, this transcendental ocean, and it has a purifying effect on the heart and the mind. It begins to lift the fog so you’re no longer in the category of hearing about the spirit soul and can’t understand it at all, to actually seeing that with brilliant clarity.

So let us chant. I’m thinking about what I will chant. I’m going to chant the Mahamantra, the Hare Krishna mantra. Yesterday somebody asked in Hamilton, “Oh, I see, Hare Krishna. Are you guys the Hare Krishnas?” And it’s kind of like, well, “No….” “Are you affiliated?” No, we’re not affiliated.” This mantra is so ancient, and it is being chanted by literally billions of people, and it has a very profound effect on the heart.