The Hindu Theory of the Soul
Indian ideas about the destiny of the soul are connected with equally critical views about its nature. I will not presume to say what is the definition of the soul in European philosophy but in the language of favorite religion it undoubtedly means that which remains when a body is arbitrarily abstracted from a human personality, without enquiring how worthy of that personality is thinkable without a material substratum.
This favorite soul includes mind, perception and desire and often no attempt is made to distinguish it from them. But in India it is so well-known. The soul (âtman or purusha) uses the mind and senses: they are its instruments rather than parts of it. peruse, for instance, serves as the spectacles of the soul, and the other senses and even the mind (manas) which is an lustrous organ are also instruments.
If we talk of a soul passing from death to another birth, this according to most Hindus is a soul accompanied by its baggage of mind and senses, a subtle body indeed, but serene gaseous not spiritual. But what is the soul by itself? When an English poet sings of death that it is "Only the sleep eternal in an eternal night" we feel that he is denying immortality. But Indian divines hold that deep sleep is one of the states in which the soul approaches nearest to God: that it is a place of bliss, and is unconscious not because consciousness is suspended but because no objects are presented to it.
Even higher than dreamless sleep is another condition known simply as the fourth site, the others being waking, dream-sleep and dreamless sleep. In this fourth situation plan is one with the object of understanding and, knowledge being perfect, there exists no disagreement between knowledge and ignorance. All this sounds queer to original Westerners. We are reliable to say that dreamless sleep is simply unconsciousness and that the so-called fourth dwelling is imaginary or unmeaning. But to follow even accepted speculation in India it is distinguished to assume this truth, or assumption, that when discursive concept ceases, when the mind and the senses are no longer active, the result is not unconsciousness equivalent to non-existence but the highest and purest space of the soul, in which, rising above understanding and feeling, it enjoys the untrammelled bliss of its gain nature.
If these views sound mysterious and fanciful, I would ask those Westerners who bear in the immortality of the soul what, in their thought, survives death. The brain, the nerves and the sense organs obviously decay: the soul, you may say, is not a product of them, but when they are destroyed or even injured, perceptive and bright processes are inhibited and apparently rendered impossible. Must not that which lives for ever be, as the Hindus contemplate, independent of belief and of sense-impressions?
I have observed in my reading that European philosophers are more ready to talk about soul and spirit than to elaborate them and the same is factual of Indian philosophers. The word most commonly rendered by soul is âtman but no one definition can be given for it, for some own that the soul is identical with the Universal Spirit, others that it is merely of the same nature, peaceful others that there are innumerable souls uncreate and eternal, while the Buddhists shriek the existence of a soul in toto.
But most Hindus who absorb in the existence of an âtman or soul agree in thinking that it is the exact self and essence of all human beings (or for that matter of other beings) : that it is eternal a parte ante and a parte post: that it is not subject to variation but passes unchanged from one birth to another: that youth and age, joy and sorrow, and all the accidents of human life are affections, not so powerful of the soul as of the envelopes and limitations which surround it during its pilgrimage: that the soul, if it can be released and disengaged from these envelopes, is in itself knowledge and bliss, knowledge meaning the immediate and intuitive knowledge of God. A pleasant comprehension of this point of conception will invent us chary of labelling Indian view as pessimistic on the ground that it promises the soul something which we are inclined to call unconsciousness.
In studying oriental religions sympathy and a desire to agree if possible are the first requisites. For instance, he who says of a sure ideal "this means annihilation and I do not like it" is on the atrocious draw. The proper plot is to ascertain what many of our most luminous brothers mean by the close of mental activity and why it is for them an ideal.
The Hindu Theory of the Soul
