Friday, April 5, 2013

(Apr 5, 2013) Spiritual Message of the Day: Modern Man in Search of a Soul by Swami Krishnananda


Modern Man in Search of a Soul

From Divine Life Society Publication by Swami Krishnananda

What is it that we are seeking in this life; what is it that anyone is searching for through the vicissitudes, the works and enterprises in various walks of life. We hear only the noise of human activity and desire, and a moment required for considering the motive behind human enterprise does not seem to be available.

A machine works very hard and works continuously in a very systematic, precise, mathematically operated manner, without being conscious as to the very nature of the output. The stuff ejected out of the machine is as unconscious of itself as is the operating mechanism behind it. We say that a machine has not a soul, in the sense that we understand a soul to be operating within ourselves.

Is man searching for a soul, or is he searching for anything at all? We cannot say that we are searching for money and status merely, though it may be one of the things that we are searching for. There is something that everyone is missing, whatever be the acquisition of a person – physically, materially, economically, politically. So, one would like to search for an answer to this insecurity and this restlessness. No one seems to have got what he wanted in this life. When the time comes for us to leave this world, it appears very few will go with the satisfaction that they have got what they wanted. We are a hollow, a vacuum, empty inside in some mysterious way in spite of our material possessions and social status.

What man misses in life seems to be something which keeps him in unison, harmony, and in a state of cohesion - the invisible unified force defined as the soul, without which the organization cannot function. "My soul, my conscience, my Atma speaks," we go on touching the chest. This Atma, we are indicating within the location of this physical body, is not what we are seeking – though it is present there also – because it is an influence, it is a force. Our life is an abstraction; it is not a concrete thing. For instance, when we touch money, we are not touching a substance but are touching a value, a conceptual evaluation which is in the head and not in the hands.

When a person has lost his power – he has resigned or retired from a very powerful position – he has lost something. The retired man is the same man that he was while in position. This position that he has lost is not physical but a concept, which he cannot see with his eyes, but it can make him utterly restless and put him out of gear.

So are we living in a physical world, or are we living in a world of concepts, ideas, notions, evaluations and aspirations? We will slowly open our eyes and find there is some truth in what  Sankaracharaya and others have said -  the world is Maya (illusion). We are seeing a table, we are seeing trees, this building and this beach, and the world is there so hard and solid – how do we call it, Maya or an unreal thing?

The people that are around us are not our people. The things that we seem to possess, we have really not possessed, and we have not been searching for them. These friends of ours, these associations, these family members, this money, this status, this power, this authority, this land, this building – these are not the things we are asking for. We will realise one day that the world is unreal and it is only an idea in our heads – it does not exist physically, if we go deep into the matter.

Is man in search of a soul or the soul?  
Is there such a thing called 'soul' independent of the body and yet existing within the body, illuminating, vitalising, energising this body which we sometimes mistake for what we really are?

The soul is a force, not a thing, that is keeping in cohesion the limbs of our body, and in that sense we may call it a soul. The soul may be one, but it does not always reveal itself as one in our lives. So there is a larger soul than our own soul, yet we are searching for our own meaning.

Occasionally we think in terms of the welfare of many other people, and we are serviceful, which tendency in us cannot be explained if the soul is only inside our body. There is  a necessity to keep in cohesion the organization, we call the entire humanity. We can extend this concept of the meaning of life, the spirit of existence – into wider circles until it reaches the furthest limits of infinitude itself. That one meaning that we discover in the whole creation, may be said to be the soul.

When we reach a larger dimension, it appears as if it comprehends the lower levels, so it absorbs the existence of the lower categories of soul in the higher one; yet the lower ones exist in their own capacity, notwithstanding the fact they are subsumed by the operation of a higher soul. So there is a soul, and there is also the soul.

The soul is not a person, because one person cannot control so many other people. It is a pervasive influence, a larger immanence of an invisible something – call it meaning, call it authority, call it soul, call it intelligence, consciousness, whatever we like. When we search for a soul in our lives, we are searching for a meaning in our existence - the soul of life.

Continue to read:
Modern Man in Search of a Soul” by Swami Krishnananda
Where is the Soul” from your questions answered by Swami Krishnananda
Discrimination of Reality” from Chap1 -The Philosophy of Panchadasi by Swami Krishnananda

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