Soul = Pujya Gurudev

Soul An eternal entity

=Pt.ShriRam Sharma Acharya

A sincere and serious seeker of Truth, Nachiketa, inquires Yamaraj  The Lord of Death. Yeyam prate vicikitsa manushye, Astityeke nayastiti caike Aitad vidya manushishtas twaya ham Varanamesh varastritiyah =Kathopanishad 1/20

            "Oh Lord! Some people say soul exists, some say this body itself is the soul; while others say that soul does not exist after death. Please tell me  what is the truth? This is my third boon you have promised to grant me". Like Nachiketa, any human being, who has deeply involved himself in Tapa-Sadhana, Yoga or long-term meditation and contemplation practices but has not yet realized his immortal self-identity, remains in this inquisitive state. Does the soul exist or not? It is a question of paramount importance.

Those who are not able to solve this riddle go on groping in dark for a convincing answer but for those who have realized their true  self, life becomes a boon and bliss. In this regard, the concepts of Hindu philosophy are very clear. Leaving aside a few thinkers like Maharishi Charak, who identified the sense of soul consciousness with the physical body, most of the Indian seers have considered the soul as an eternal entity independent of the body.

Complex methods of yoga have been discovered with the help of which it is possible to take the soul out of the body when a person is alive and make it consciously enter the dead body of another person. The following are few instances of such phenomena. 1.During a scriptural debate with Bhagvati Bharati, wife of Mandan Misra, Adi Shankaracharya became answerless on a question that required knowledge of sex.

The latter requested for some time to be able to give a convincing reply. Coincidentally, during the same time, the king of Mahishmatinagar died. Shankaracharya made his soul enter the kings dead body. This process is called Parkaya Pravesh. Daily he used to take out the soul from his body, leaving his dead body lying in the jungle and his soul entering the body of king. During the night when Shankaracharya used to reenter his own body, kings body became dead. The use of two bodies by a single soul amply proves a separate existence of the soul. 2.In 1939, an army commandant L.P. Farrel of the Western Command saw with his own eyes near Assam-Burma border a yogi who came out from his old body and entered the dead body of a young man who then became alive.

 This incident has been published in the May, 1970 issue of Akhand Jyoti (Hindi edition) on pages 29-30. 3.Normally, it is believed that life is based on the process of respiration. But saint Haridas took samadhi for one month in the presence of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and several British officers and established that the relation of the body is related to the soul in the same way as the machine is run by the electrical power. Without the soul the body becomes dead. These are a few of the hundreds of recorded testimonies of souls immortality. Indian philosophers are fully confident in this regard and assert... 

Vyatirekastad bharabharitwannatoopa labhadhiwat. =Vedant. 31/3/54.

That is  "Body and soul are not one and the same. In the absence of the soul, body can not have perception of anything". The principles regarding the immortality of the soul and its independent existence apart from the body that were propounded by our sages are now getting validated on the touchstone of science. In this connection, great significance is being attached to the living cells forming the body. Dr. Stanley and his colleagues of the Rockefeller Institute of America have done rigorous scientific research to find out the difference between a living body and a dead body.
Though they have not yet published their final results but if one considers their tentative findings in the light of Indian philosophy, they seem to be echoing the insights of the hoary Indian philosophy.

These scientists say that the living cells are produced by the various chemical processes automatically; that is, the soul is the bodys chemical consciousness; but these cells are produced so long as they are related to protoplasma (which helps in the making of the body). This means that consciousness is related only to the consciousness. Accordingly soul should be considered independent of body. It is a self-evident truth that after death all the bodily sense perceptions vanish. Why does a creature, which was eating, drinking, walking, sweating, excreting, coughing  sneezing, yawning, thinking, talking, guiding and expressing - love, compassion, pity, or hate, malice and anger, stops doing all such activities after death, even though the body is the same? (Countinue)

Thanks GOD,Thanks Sadguru,

Shiv Sharma