|
|
|
To search for the
Soul is to seek a meaning rather than a substance or an object. This is the
subtle import of all spiritual seeking. We often make the mistake of
thinking that, when we ask for God, we are asking for a thing, a person, an
object or a substance. While our notions of God or the Soul have some
significance in our search for it, all these notions fall short of the real
and the true, inasmuch as there is something deeper that we are really
seeking that what comes to the surface of our minds. To give certain
concrete examples of what ‘meaning’ is, rather than a thing or a substance:
When we ask for food, for all outward purposes it looks that we are in need
of some substance. When we say, ‘I need some food’, we may think that
perhaps we need some wheat, rice, vegetables, butter, milk, etc. These are
generally interpreted to be food. But there is something in this asking for
food, a meaning behind this asking, which does not always become apparent to
our minds. Truly speaking, it is not these articles of diet that we are
asking for. We are asking for a meaning that is hidden behind these
articles. They are capable of conveying significance in our personal life,
here, in this instance, our physical bodily life. If this group of articles
is not to convey any significance to bodily existence, they will not be the
things that we require.
Whenever we look at an object, we read a meaning into it. It means
something. Now, this habit of reading a meaning is so familiar that we
cannot think in any other manner. We do not think first and then read the
meaning afterwards. The thinking and the reading of the meaning go together:
Or, to put it in a slightly psychological terminology, the understanding and
the feeling work simultaneously in our perception. When we think of an
object, we also feel something about it; in other words, it means the
recognition of an object in terms of the significance it conveys to our
lives. This signification it is that escapes our attention in our search for
values in life, while it is really a set of values that we want and not
objects or things.
The meaning behind the articles of diet is to
appease hunger. That is what we need, and not bags of rice; this is not what
we want. It so happens that a grain called rice, in a certain quantity, when
it comes in contact with our physical body in a particular manner, is in a
position to appease a state of biological reaction which we call hunger. It
so happens that this particular thing can act in this particular manner;
otherwise it would be something else that we would need.
So, it is not any particular object that we
seek. We seek only the value that is hidden in the object. So is the case
with money. It is not the material stuff that we are in need of, but its
capacity to provide us with purchasing power; that is called money. It is
not gold and silver or notes. That is the meaning behind cash value; and so
on, and so forth, with every blessed thing in the world. There is a
significance hidden behind our asking for things, a meaning behind our
relationship with things, behind the way in which we talk, the way in which
we conduct ourselves in society, the way in which we think and feel and act. |
All these things have a hidden significance, a
meaning; and it is this meaning, which we are really in search of.
Unfortunately, we confuse this meaning with the outer form of an object. And it
looks as if we are in search of objects rather than values. Not so. When we
speak even in ordinary language: “What is the Soul of the teaching?”—we make a
distinction between the letter and the Soul. There is a letter of the law and
the Soul of the law, for example. The words that I speak and the Soul in which I
speak are different. So, even in common parlance, we use the term ‘Soul’ to
signify a meaning rather than an outer form that a particular conduct puts on.
As is the case with ordinary life, so in the case of our cosmically relations,
there is a Soul behind our very existence as individuals, even as, in the
example cited, the concrete substances like articles of diet or currency notes
have a significance behind, which alone we are in need of and not the things
themselves. If the meaning is absent, we will not go for it.
There is a Soul, which we have lost in the midst of the clamoring particulars.
And we have heard this word ‘Soul’ many a time uttered. Still we cannot help
contemplating the ‘Soul’ as if it is some object. We have to learn to think a
little bit impersonally when we tread the Spiritual path. We have been too much
wedded to personalities, things and concrete substances. So we have been taught
to think only in terms of these physical entities, as it were. We cannot think
impersonally. It is very difficult. It may be my person or somebody else’s
person; all our thoughts are personal. The impersonal is hidden behind all
personal evaluations of things. And it is the impersonal that we seek, even
through persons. The ‘general’ is hidden in the ‘particular’: the impersonal is
behind in all the forms. The Implicit is present in all the individualities.
There is a gradual rise in our aspiration from lower particulars to higher
particulars, the higher particular for the time being acting as the general and
the universal for the lower particular.
Now, in the search for the Soul of life, we do not search for any existent
object. The Soul is not an object. To come to our examples again, the Soul of
law is not a thing that you can see with your eyes. Yet you know what it means.
The Soul has an intangible significance, which makes itself felt not to the
senses, but to something which seems to have a kinship with our own being. The
Soul of things cannot be seen through the senses. It is not appreciated even by
the understanding, which always works in terms of the senses. We have in our own
individualities something, which can be said to be the meaning of our own
existence. What you call as the ‘you’ or ‘yourself’ or the ‘I’ is the meaning
hidden in what you regard yourself to be or what I regard myself to be. The same
analogy can be applied to our personalities. The Soul of my being is different
from my bodily existence.
When I ask for the Soul, what do I ask? ‘What is Spirituality?’ is the moot
question. Spirituality is that condition of consciousness where it asks for the
Soul of things rather than the forms or bodies of things. You do not interpret
things in terms of objects and persons any more. Your evaluations of life do not
then depend on persons and things. You learn to think in terms of the generals
and the universals rather than the particulars and bodily existences. This would
be Spirituality, whatever be the degree of its expression, even the lowest.
When we learn to be Spiritual, we live more and more as generals rather than as
particulars, which means that we begin to comprehend other values in our own
existences that we were unable to do earlier. In our present state of bodily
existence our bodies are restricted to our own physical needs. My hunger, my
thirst, my sleepiness, my difficulties, my problems, etc.—these engage my
attention so much that I cannot exceed the limits of my bodily needs. That is
the lowest aspect of human life where one’s thoughts and feelings get so
restricted to the bodily encasement that there is no thought and feeling beyond
that. But when one becomes capable of recognizing the significance of the lives
of other people, in their Soul rather than the form, and learns at the same time
to associate one’s personal values with the values which appear to be external
at present, then the self of oneself becomes enlarged. What we call the self is
nothing but the Soul behind ourselves and behind all things. When we talk of the
Self, or think of the Self, we are likely to think of it as a kind of substance.
Philosophers have defined the soul as a substance many a time. But it is not a
substance; it is not a substance in the sense of anything that we can
understand. It is not a tangible object. It is supersensible, as our scriptures
are not tired of saying. Supersensible is the meaning of our personality; the
meaning of all creation. That it is supersensible means that it cannot be seen.
The hand cannot touch it, it cannot be smelt, it cannot be heard of, it cannot
be tasted; one cannot have any kind of intelligible relation with it. Such is
the Soul of things.
Now, who is to understand the Soul? What do you mean by the Spiritual aspiration
at all? If Soul would mean the meaning of life, and this meaning is so abstract,
then it cannot have any value to the senses that meaning would appear to be
meaningless to the sensory operations. The Soul of life is present in our own
bodies. It is not far from us and so it is possible for us here to reach out to
the Soul of the cosmos as a whole; not through the senses and the intellect, but
through something, which we are. That which we are is the meaning that is in us.
We convey an eternal meaning. That eternal meaning which is hidden in us is what
we are. It is not the temporary meaning, which we seem to exhibit in our
day-to-day life that we can call our own self. These are tentative, local
adjustments that we generally make, but these are not our real meaning.
If we are divested of all associations, physical and psychological, what do we
remain as? That would be our true meaning. If we have no body, if we have no
mind to think, what would be our condition? What would be the sort of
relationship that we might establish with other existences? We may not be in a
position to contemplate such a possibility. How can I exist without a body, a
mind? How can it be?
This mystery is the significance of life. This is what we call the Soul of
things. One may wonder that on a careful thought bestowed on this Soul of
things; it looks like an abstract concept, not anything substantial. It appears
to be a psychological interpretation rather than a physical contact, due to our
habit of coming in contact with objects, beyond whose existence we have not
learnt to see. But the Soul is not abstraction; on the other hand the so-called
concrete objects are an abstraction from it. When you contact the Soul, you do
not contact an air or an empty space or a non-existent something. The mind is
unable to think IT; that is why the mind reads an abstraction into it. The
‘existence’ of all things may be regarded as the Soul of all things. Divest all
things of their existence, and what do you see in them? When the mind tells you
that Soul is only an abstraction and the objects are more concrete, try to tell
it: “My dear friend, my mind, the Soul is the ‘existence’ of everything that you
regard as concrete.”
Minus existence, what are these concrete substances? Free all things from their
existence; there is, then, only non-existence. Their concreteness vanishes. The
so-called concreteness, tangible ness, hardness, substantial ness, solidity,
etc., is a way of sensation. It is the way in which the senses react to the
Soul. That is what you call tangibility. There is no tangible object in this
world. We are deluded. We are touching the Soul even when we are touching solid
objects like a table. But it looks that we are touching some other thing
altogether. That so-called thing which attracts you, and which makes you feel
that you are contacting a tangible object, is the Soul itself. And the
substantiality and the solidity of the object is due to the mutual reaction of
the Soul within and the Soul without, falsely differentiated by space and time.
The world is the drama played by space, time and causality. If these three
things are not to be there, there would be no such thing as the world. There is
no such thing as the world, objects, persons and things, apart from the trick
played by the union of space, time and causal relation. It is not possible for
the mind to understand how the world can be equated to these three; because we
see again and again the solidity of things. Apart from space and time we see
solidity in objects, but the solidity is due to the Soul masquerading in space
and time. And if it were not to be there, there would not be any solidity. This
substantiality of the Soul is more solid (if you could use such a term) than the
most solid things. And the reason why this substance behind all substances, the
meaning behind all meanings, appears as an object outside, while it is really
not, is because here space, time and causal relation play havoc.
The mind is torn into two pieces—the seer and the seen. The seer is the Soul,
and the seen also is the Soul. The Soul sees itself in all perceptions. But it
looks like the differentiated perception of an object on account of the
intervention of space and time. Divest meaning of space-time value, and you will
behold the Reality of the cosmos. The hardest thinker will recoil on thinking
along these lines, because the mind is not taught to think by freeing itself
from the relations of space and time. Vedantins and philosophers have been
telling us that God alone is. The world is not! The world is nothing but God’s
Face. How could it be? It can only be possible if the very objects in front of
us can enshrine the Soul of God in them, even now in their sensory externality;
and if God had not been so near to us, and was not so real, it would not have
been possible for us to think of Him, ask for Him or aspire for Him.
What is
Soul Healing?
|
