Our Divine Essence, the Soul
Hidden in the mortal’s heart the Eternal lives:
He lives secret in the chamber of thy soul,
A light shines there nor pain nor grief can cross.
A darkness stands between thyself and him,
Thou canst not hear or feel the marvellous Guest,
Thou canst not see the beatific sun.
That a person has a body, mind and intellect is obvious, but whether there is something more to a person is debatable. Religious and spiritual traditions assert that there is, and that not-so-obvious entity is the soul. The soul is not only there, it is the only lasting Reality of the individual, because, as the Gita says, neither can weapons damage the soul nor can the fire burn it (2:23). The next question that arises is how it matters whether or not the soul exists if it is not a part of our experience anyway.
To get to the soul of such questions, I have found it handy to go to an episode from a Hindi film, Saath saath. The hero of the film was Farouque Sheikh, and the heroine Dipti Naval. The hero starts off as an idealistic young boy. The heroine is impressed, the hero and the heroine get married, and then they have a baby. Now the hero starts feeling that if he continues to be so idealistic, his family will never have enough money for a physically comfortable life.
As a result, he starts giving up his ideals, starts making more and more compromises. Finally, one day he invites a powerful person home for dinner, and after the meal, hands him over an envelope that apparently had some money. His wife observes that, and after the guest has left, she takes him to task. She says, “What has happened to you? I never thought you could stoop to such low levels.” To this the hero replies, “Look here, I have not created this world; I just happen to live in it. I am merely doing whatever is necessary for survival in this world. And for whom am I doing all this? It is all for your sake, and for the sake of the baby.” Let us analyse this response.
The hero’s mind is drawn towards physical comforts because they feel good. When questioned on ethical grounds, his intellect invents reasons to justify what he is doing. Further, he encourages his wife to use her intellect in a similar fashion by appealing to her emotions: ‘I am doing it for you and the baby’. However, while he is defending himself with clever arguments, there is a faint whisper from within himself that tells him, “You are wrong; she is right”. If his mind wants something, and his intellect his justified it, where is this whisper from? Since his mind and intellect have achieved some sort of an understanding with each other, this dissenting voice is obviously from neither the mind nor the intellect, but from somewhere else. The dissenting voice is from the incorruptible part of the being, the divine essence of a person, generally called the soul. Thus we not only have a soul, the soul is not completely inert either. The dynamic aspect of the soul, which participates in our daily life by speaking to us in its characteristically clear but faint, shy and non-assertive voice, is the psychic being.
However, nothing will go terribly wrong even if we forget the subtle distinction between the soul and the psychic being so long as we remember that we have the most dependable guide to making choices in life within us. But since the voice of this Inner Guide is rather faint, and it does not insist, we have to be sensitive to it, and we have to use our free-will to let this voice prevail instead of getting carried away by the clamour created by the mind and the intellect.
He lives secret in the chamber of thy soul,
A light shines there nor pain nor grief can cross.
A darkness stands between thyself and him,
Thou canst not hear or feel the marvellous Guest,
Thou canst not see the beatific sun.
SRI AUROBINDO (Savitri, Book 6, Canto 2, p. 442)
That a person has a body, mind and intellect is obvious, but whether there is something more to a person is debatable. Religious and spiritual traditions assert that there is, and that not-so-obvious entity is the soul. The soul is not only there, it is the only lasting Reality of the individual, because, as the Gita says, neither can weapons damage the soul nor can the fire burn it (2:23). The next question that arises is how it matters whether or not the soul exists if it is not a part of our experience anyway.
To get to the soul of such questions, I have found it handy to go to an episode from a Hindi film, Saath saath. The hero of the film was Farouque Sheikh, and the heroine Dipti Naval. The hero starts off as an idealistic young boy. The heroine is impressed, the hero and the heroine get married, and then they have a baby. Now the hero starts feeling that if he continues to be so idealistic, his family will never have enough money for a physically comfortable life.
As a result, he starts giving up his ideals, starts making more and more compromises. Finally, one day he invites a powerful person home for dinner, and after the meal, hands him over an envelope that apparently had some money. His wife observes that, and after the guest has left, she takes him to task. She says, “What has happened to you? I never thought you could stoop to such low levels.” To this the hero replies, “Look here, I have not created this world; I just happen to live in it. I am merely doing whatever is necessary for survival in this world. And for whom am I doing all this? It is all for your sake, and for the sake of the baby.” Let us analyse this response.
The hero’s mind is drawn towards physical comforts because they feel good. When questioned on ethical grounds, his intellect invents reasons to justify what he is doing. Further, he encourages his wife to use her intellect in a similar fashion by appealing to her emotions: ‘I am doing it for you and the baby’. However, while he is defending himself with clever arguments, there is a faint whisper from within himself that tells him, “You are wrong; she is right”. If his mind wants something, and his intellect his justified it, where is this whisper from? Since his mind and intellect have achieved some sort of an understanding with each other, this dissenting voice is obviously from neither the mind nor the intellect, but from somewhere else. The dissenting voice is from the incorruptible part of the being, the divine essence of a person, generally called the soul. Thus we not only have a soul, the soul is not completely inert either. The dynamic aspect of the soul, which participates in our daily life by speaking to us in its characteristically clear but faint, shy and non-assertive voice, is the psychic being.
However, nothing will go terribly wrong even if we forget the subtle distinction between the soul and the psychic being so long as we remember that we have the most dependable guide to making choices in life within us. But since the voice of this Inner Guide is rather faint, and it does not insist, we have to be sensitive to it, and we have to use our free-will to let this voice prevail instead of getting carried away by the clamour created by the mind and the intellect.
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