The Advent of the Soul

EVOLUTION OF THE JIVA AND THE SAD PREDICAMENT OF THE EMBODIED JIVATMAN

    “Thou art woman, Thou art man; Thou art youth and maiden, too. Thou as an old man totters along on a staff; it is Thou alone who, when born, assumes diverse forms. Thou art the dark-blue bee; Thou art the green parrot with red eyes; Thou art the thunder-cloud, the seasons and the seas. Thou art the beginning-less and all-pervading. From Thee all the worlds are born.” [Yajurveda, Shvetashvatara Upanishad, Part I, Chapter IV, 1-4]

    “He, the One and Undifferentiated, who by the manifold application of His powers produces, in the beginning, different objects for a hidden purpose and, in the end, withdraws the universe into Himself, is indeed the self-luminous- May He endow us with clear intellect! That Supreme Self is Agni (Fire); It is Aditya (Sun); It is Vayu (Wind); It is Chandrama (Moon). That Self is the luminous stars; It is Hiranyagarbha; It is water; It is Virat.” 

  “I know this un-decaying, primeval One, the Self of all things, which exists everywhere, being all-pervading and which the wise declare to be free from birth. The teachers of Brahman, indeed, speak of ‘It’ as eternal.” [Yajurveda, Shvetashvatara Upanishad, Part I, Chapter III, 21].

 “The Self is identified with desire alone. What it desires, it resolves; what it resolves, it works out; what it works out, it attains.”

  “He who desires is reborn. But the man who does not desire is not reborn. Of him who is without desires, who is free from desires, the objects of whose desires have been attained, and to whom all objects are but the self- the prana does not depart. Being but brahman, he is merged in brahman.”

  “He who knows the Self is liberated. The knowledge of the Self liberates a man from desire, fear, and death”.

     According to the Upanishads, “Liberation is not the result of the Knowledge of the Atman; it is that knowledge. It is not affected by the Knowledge of Atman; but this Knowledge is itself Liberation in its fullness. Desire is death. Desirelessness is Liberation. He, te jivatman, who has realized himself as brahman, the Infinite and All-pervading, and he who sees the whole universe in himself and himself in the universe, cannot desire anything.” “What can he crave who has attained the fulfilment of all desires?”

  As long one is living, nobody would understand the ‘hereafter’; one may even return from death but would not remember what happened in the mean time! There are many accounts of people who have had ‘near-death experience’ (NDE), and some who had ‘out of this world’ experience. Gautama Buddha is said to have taken almost 35 diverse forms before he finally attained nirvana, the Buddha state (Jataka Tales) and clearly remembered several of them!

     It is stated im the Upanishads that the 'soul', Atman, is set on an adventure and that which reached the Planet Earth in the solar system has taken embodied states in different forms! It is the nature of the Atman to take any form and perform functions according to its desire! This Atman is nothing but the manifest aspects of paramatman, the supreme soul. What this supreme soul is evident from the Energy aspect that manifests as nebulae, stars, and the like! It is evident that the sunrays are the storehouse of all knowledge, intellect, technological skill that can create, sustain, destroy or manipulate what is created! The same solar flares cooled and condensed into planets like the earth that contain elements, compounds, minerals, soil, food and life forms! The soul, the Atman is the core of these substances. The sunrays contain everything that one can imagine! It is the source of all that exist. It moves and there appear time and space! The effect lies within the cause! Thus the soul is set on its journey. One of the aspects, rather the manifest forms is that of humans who can think, imagine, create and destroy what is created! This is the mystery of man!

    Thus, one way of looking at this mystery of man is to trace his origin to the distant stars. This is indicated in the Birth Charts (janmapatrika/Jataka). this indicates how a stellar particle, a photon, embodied itself in the earthly existence. This is clearly stated in the Rk Veda. The ‘Purusha’, is the one who dwells in all as the Self, Atman, It is a spark of fire, angiras; The term ‘amrutasya putrah’(immortal souls) is used here to indicate the true nature of the soul. The soul is embodied in the earthen shell (like the Ganapati made of clay by Gouri) and the jivatman goes round and round in a never-ending cycle of births and deaths. Almost all the jiva are bound to exit some time or the other. However, to realize the true nature of existence in the mean time, in the Vedic context, is the most important one. One need not wait for the dooms day for emancipation and the jiva can surely attain individually liberation, instantly (sadyomukti). This is possible with the ‘attainment’ of the ‘Knowledge of the Self’, Atmajnyan. In fact, this realization of the Self(Atma sakshatkara) is the most important objective of human beings on this planet. This is the objective of this study.  This compendium of selected Upanishad doctrine will help us in this task of attaining to ‘enlightenment’.