Instead of believing or disbelieving this or that, adherents are urged to have an open mind and take postulations even from the best of Mystics as mere working hypothesis or concepts for our individual research. This is for the fact that man doesn’t really know by being told. For a man to know, he must be part of what he knows.
This should apply more to the attestation herein (although garnered from experience) that our mind supplies the body with intellect, while the soul energises both the human body and the mind. Without the soul and mind, human body is at best a cadaver, or simply a mass of matter. To believe this is relying on the experience or account of someone else. We too should make our individual research and be convinced of the veracity or not.
The body of man is considered very sacred to an extent. Christ said in John 2 vs 19: “Pull down this temple, in three days I will put it up, but defile not your body for ye are the temple of the Living God.” That was plainly telling us no temple of man anywhere in the world, however expensively built, finished with gold and the best of marbles, as we will find respectively in the Golden Temple in Amritsar and Taj Mahal in Agra-India, and irrespective of reverence we attach to these man-made temples, no one of them anywhere, be it in Jerusalem, Mecca and whatever holy place we know of, equals the Temple of God: The human body.
The reason for this is that the SOUL, which is of Divinity, is the real man. Our individual soul is a spark from the Infinite Light, a drop of the Mighty Ocean of the Supreme Lord. Ironically, the soul having strayed off from its pristine Abode, has completely forgotten its origin and is now identifying itself with its cloak: the human body.
Were it not for the soul’s sojourn in the earthly field, there wouldn’t have been any need for the physical body, likewise the mind. Owing to the extreme finesse of the soul, it cannot contact or transverse the coarser worlds without an intermediate instrument. This explains the necessity of the human body.
For this same reason, The Supreme Lord, being a constant God and of orderliness, HE Himself cannot manifest on the material plane or physically appear to men and give instructions. A material body is needed in all cases. This should explain the necessity of the Lord made flesh and also for the Lord to have been sending to our level His anointed to guide us back to His Court, whenever we are dissatisfied with what the earthly life could offer.The biblical story of the prodigal son captures the plight of the soul appropriately. In another breath, the soul is compared with a beautiful queen who wandered away from her palace. In no time, her mind became clouded. She laid aside her royal robes, clothed herself in rags and became an associate of the lowest of the low.
This is the situation with men and women in this world generally with very few exceptions. We have forgotten that we are children or projections of the King of kings. With minds befuddled, perception dulled and warped, we no longer have the least awareness of our innate powers and possibilities. We wander about for ages, occupying ourselves with what wouldn’t avail on the day of reckoning, when we will have to account for every breath taken and morsel swallowed.
The good news however is that it is not a tale of woes altogether. HE who has created hunger has simultaneously made available what we need to appease our hunger. After all, there is a concurrence that God is the One who has made man and the creation the way they are. HE is the one who has given soul to every being and to the creation. It is the same Lord that infuses the primal urge for the soul to seek experience in the diversity of the creation, instead of resting in love in the lap of the Eternal Lord.
It is the Lord Himself who in the fullness of time will draw the soul back to Himself, anytime HE chooses to end His play, that is all the worlds HE has created. For now, salvation is an individual thing and for the chosen few who are no longer thrilled by the shadow shows of the phenomenal world.
To such few, I address: The soul being of Divinity is the cohesive energy or force that binds together all the five elements that the body is made of. These elements are earth, fire, water, air and ether. The same soul vitalises both the male “seed” and the woman’s egg right at the conception stage, providing what is referred to in the euclidean geometry as the third point of the phytagorean law of triangle, otherwise known by the mystics as complete cycle or full manifestation.
This soul of man does not die. It is an inseparable part of the First Cause that has no beginning nor an end. Thus, we are all with God before the Lord projected Himself to the world and now we are spiritual or God beings in the world undergo human experience.
We are not just human beings we imagine ourselves to be, who have come to eat, drink, procreate, die and then lowered into the grave or sepulchre for all manners of maggot and earthly insects to feast on our lifeless bodies. What a wasted life that would be if that is the end purpose of human beings, who pride themselves as image of the Lord and flaunting homosapiens status.
It is advanced further that at the expiry of our allotted time in this world, the soul simply gets disengaged from the human body. This will naturally happen when our body has been ravaged by disease or enervated by old age, accident and any other thing that will make the body not conducive for the soul to inhabit the human body any longer. Yet, there is no haphazard in all these, if we perfectly understand the karmic law, which we will take up in subsequent series.
The real man, which is the soul, only sheds the mortal coil, being the human body – vehicle – the soul uses to transverse the earthly field. This compares with the manner a diver drops his diving suit having finished his assignment beneath the sea. The diving suit doesn’t reduce the diver to a mere fish, much as the body doesn’t make us just human beings.
We are all imperceptibly souls or spiritual beings now in the world undergoing human experience. Our true home is not in this world and it is for this reason we wouldn’t find anyone whose life is full of undiluted joy, devoid of any challenges.
Our body itself suffers no death, it merely undergoes a metamorphosis once the soul that energises it has left it. The body at the so-called point of death merely returns to its five kindred elements as explained above.
Our mind is also deathless. It returns with all the impressions of the recent life to its abode – the causal plane – the seat of the lesser god from where the soul took the mind in its decent from the soul realms into the world, for the purpose of supplying the soul intellect it needs to operate in the earthly field of physical phenomena.
The moment the bedspread is rolled over us to signal to our family members that it is over for us, the soul, being of God and inextinguishable Divinity, happily flies back like a bird that has just been released from a cage – the human body – which has imprisoned the soul all the while, to one of the souls’ planes it has merited, for a given period, awaiting to return to the world by the means of a different body it has merited, with what it occupied the mind with in the previous life.
This is what Jesus meant when He said: “I will go and prepare a place for you; In my Father’s House there are as many mansions and where it not so, I would have told you.” As the soul is of Divinity, the mind belongs to the gatekeeper of this world and there is no escape for any uncleaned soul to pass its domain because of the cosmic law that to reach back to the Court of the Lord, we must be shorn of sins, earthly cravings and attachments.
All these will be made clearer when we take on the issue of karma, which our ego is resisting us to believe. Yet without the karmic law, nothing explains the imbalance that pervades in the world unless we have an unfair God who is kinder to some and unkind to others. An utter impossibility of course!
We will take on mind fully next week. In wrapping on the soul, the takeaways are as follows:
There is only one Supreme Lord and He is the Foundation, the Source of Life and Support of everything both sentient and insentient.
Our soul is in essence a drop from the Great Ocean of the True, Eternal, Inconceivable Lord, without beginning and neither an end: The Source of all Bliss, Energy, Life and Love.
Our true unchanging reality is the soul or spirit, not the physical or the mental. Soul or spirit is our real nature of what we think as: “ME.”
Anyone who is able to get in touch with his/her spiritual essence, the life-giving, life-sustaining Word of God, otherwise referred to as the Creative Energy and which is resonating ceaselessly within all beings and all through the Creation, will naturally be led to its Source: The Supreme Abode of the Lord, which is beyond limitations of time and space.
For this purpose, the Creator has so constructed man that he is able, when properly informed and trained, to place himself in conscious communication with the entire universe. This may at first appear to be a fanciful thought, but it is literally true. It can be done. All advanced meditators will readily attest to the possibility and without being immodest, I humbly affirm the verity.
Aare Oyefeso is a philosopher and businessman based in Lagos.
