By Dr. J Das
Since birth people around us, parents, teachers, priests, peers, etc. teach us that we are physical beings. Hardly does anyone teach us that we are the soul. Even when we go to religious teachers, they do not teach us that we are the soul. They may say we have a soul. But we do not have a soul. We are the soul. They could say that the soul has a body, but they reverse it and say that we, as a body, have a soul, yet the body could not exist if the soul were not there. What comes first is the soul, or the creative energy of the soul that then enlivens a body from conception onwards. We can properly say that the soul has a body, but not that we have a soul. This is why we have to differentiate between these two “I’s,” the real “I” which is the soul (reality, divine, eternal, infinite) and the little “I” that is born and then dies.
We cannot exist physically without the real Self, the soul. The soul has to be there for the physical body to form and to be alive. It is very important in spiritual life to identify the real “I” and the false “I.” The more that we are able to remove ourselves from the false “I,” the better will be our understanding of the real “I”.
If I say, “I am” as a body, it is a relative statement because even though I am now, I will not be after death. But the soul that “I am” now, will always be because the soul is indestructible. Now we can say that the body also survives in some way. It does not go into nothing, because matter cannot be created or destroyed, but changes from one form to another. The physical body can be changed into water, carbon dioxide, iron, calcium, and other minerals. While matter and energy can be changed from one form to another, the soul is not a physical energy that can be changed. It is, perhaps, the subtlest or the most refined form of “energy”, from which all other physical or gross forms of energy manifest. But the subtlest energy will remain the subtlest energy. It cannot be anything else. It is just as if you had reduced an element to its purest form. Once you purify gold, you cannot make it more pure. Just so, when all the gross physical forms of energy have been transformed, if we are able to do so, to the subtlest, most refined form of energy, we are left with divine energy, i.e. God energy. We then cannot get anymore refined than that. The ultimate is God, the Supreme Being. Ultimate reality is the most refined form of “energy”. It exists as the soul that we are, and it cannot be changed into something else. Soul energy remains as soul energy as it is always pure. Whatever we see as impurity in life applies to the non-spiritual aspect of our being—the body, mind, and emotions acted on by desires, passions, ego, and perceptions.
We must use our spiritual understanding to know that there is something within us that is eternal. We have a temporary physical body that we think of as real, but when we understand it from a transcendental point of view, the body is not real. That is the false identity, because we have not realized our true Self, the soul. Meditation and spiritual study make us understand what we are in truth. And to know that, we have to remove the false identities – the false coverings of the mind such as attitudes, feelings, wrong conceptions, wrong teachings, etc. Remove them all, and what we are left with is the purity of our own Self. We will then realize our connection with God and be free – the state we call Liberation!
