Nicholas Jhinkoo
Comp I
6/23/06
The Embodied Soul
The embodied souls are bewildered by the three modes of material nature. According to Vedic philosophy with in this material world we are affected by three modes of nature and the souls called jivas in Sanskrit, are entrapped within a material body. These three modes being goodness, passion and ignorance control the body like puppets on a string. We can however, traverse these modes of nature by the process of Bhakti Yoga or devotional loving service to God.
This is a process by which we must first accept the fact that we are not this body. We are in fact spiritual beings having human experiences. Even within our lifetime a person will go through changes of the body, moving from childhood, to youth and then to old age. Does this change mean that we ourselves change, no we still remain ourselves which is the soul. Can it be that our consciousness is our soul? Yes, it is but it accompanies the soul through its passage through this material world. If, for example you cut off your finger, is that finger you? Do you say I finger? No, the I in this case refer to your true self which is the soul.
One may ask if we are souls then what is our true nature. Every religion tells us that we have a soul but the only scripture which gives full explanation of the soul is the Bhagavad-Gita, one of the books of the Vedic religion spoken by God Himself 5000 years ago. With in the pages of the Bhagavad-Gita God explains to one of His friend and devotee the process by which on can be freed from this material bondage. God says “For the soul there is never birth nor death. Nor, having once been, does he ever cease to be. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain." We can only take this to be the truth, it is the body that dies the soul never dies but it has to go through the miseries of feeling through the senses, disease and miseries which are put before the soul in this material world. The soul is part and parcel of God, we are very much like Him in qualities but not quantity. We have all the qualities of God, blissful, full of knowledge, eternal, undying but we do not hold the supreme status of God as being the creator, maintainer and destroyer of the Universe.
The soul can not be affected by material nature but it is bewildered by it being trapped within the material body. The senses are the reason for this because it is the reason that we wish to be here on this material world to experience the use of these senses. The Bhagavad-Gita gives the analogy of the sense in this way as a passenger on the chariot of the body. The embodied soul is a passenger, the intelligence is the driver, the mind are the ropes controlling the horses which are our sense, sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. If we do not control the intelligence the mind wanders and if the mind is allowed to wander the senses will go wild and then we fall into the eternal cycle of birth, death and misery.
Some may argue that the soul does not exist, but they do not have the proof whether it does or doesn’t. One can not see the soul with in this material world as per the orders of God, but we must understand that it does exist. The only proof that we have is stated within the scriptures of religion. The soul is the life force which allows our body to function and without it the body will be dead.
According to the Vedic Scriptures the soul transmigrate from this body to another at the time of death. "As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death."(Bg 2.13) "As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones."(Bg 2.22) At the time of death the spirit soul leaves the gross body together with the subtle body (astral body-mind, intelligence and false ego) and is born again into the womb of a female body according to the law of karma either immediately or after some time. By its karma the soul can take birth as a human again or degrade it self to lower species of life. For one on the spiritual path the soul will be given human life again to continue where ever it has left off in the previous life. For the liberated soul it is given passage to the Spiritual Kingdom of God from which it never returns. Vedic law says that the soul must traverse through the 8 million or so species of life within the entire Creation before they come to a human life. Only in human life can one be freed from the clutches of birth and death.
The final destination of the liberated soul is attaining the Spiritual kingdom where the soul never returns to this material world. This is the true home of all souls but because we wish to experience and feel these so called joys of the material world we go through this misery over and over again. It takes many births and deaths for one to come to the stage where the soul is liberated but as I said once you get to the Spiritual world there is no return
In conclusion, the soul must go through countless births and deaths within the material body, conditioned by the three modes of material nature and the senses the soul no matter what body it is in always suffer.
Nice HK
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