Modern Man In Search Of A Soul

Divine Life Society Publication: Modern Man In Search Of A Soul by Sri Swami Krishnananda

I was told that there was a doubt in the minds of some people whether there is a soul for which man is searching, or there is only the soul. This difficulty, this question also arises due to a misunderstanding of the very meaning of the soul itself. Though there are hints in the great scriptures as to what all this means, we do not have that intellectual calibre to go into the depths of the implications of these scriptures, much less the time to study them.

What is man searching for? All of us are well-educated, cultured persons with time enough to think deeply over this matter. We cannot say that we are searching for money and status merely, though it may be one of the things that we are searching for. We have seen learned people who are not happy. We have seen very rich people who can burn money but are unhappy in many, many ways. Potentates, politically powerful, ruling a large dominion are terribly insecure day in and day out; they have no peace of mind. There is something that everyone is missing, whatever be the acquisitions of a person physically, materially, economically, politically. Something is missing which keeps us anxious all the while. A very rich man is always anxious about something. He does not rest quietly, thinking: “Everything is fine, like milk and honey. Let me sleep.” No rich man will sleep like that; he is worse off than a poor man as far as anxiety is concerned. Similarly, every person with any kind of acquisition is insecure for various reasons. A healthy man is insecure that he may fall sick and cannot be eternally healthy.

So, there is a lacunae, unintelligibly though, felt by each person, and one would like to search for an answer to this insecurity, this restlessness, and this elusive character of that which one is searching for in life. No one seems to have got what he wanted in this life. When the time comes for us to leave this world, it appears very few will go with the satisfaction that they have got what they wanted. There was always something receding, like the horizon, and not permitting the grasp of the human being—psychically, intellectually, mentally, much less physically. We cannot know so easily what we have lost. We may concede that there is some terrible lacunae in our life, and we are hollow, a vacuum, empty inside in some mysterious way in spite of our material possessions and social status.

Perhaps every one of us may be aware there is something lacking, but it is not easy for us to know what it is. We go on experimenting with various circumstances. “Perhaps I lack material wealth.” We struggle, experiment with it and get something, and find that it is not the thing that we wanted. We go on searching in various ways for other things such as power, authority and doership, and we find that we are not really seeking them, and they are not at all what we expected. We have been experimenting with the location of something which we have lost in the various persons and things of the world, and to our consternation we have realised, and some of us are yet to realise, that these locations—call them persons, things, events, circumstances, situations—are not the spots in which we can discover that eluding something which we seem to have lost.

This mysterious, eluding something which cannot be confined to the body of an individual is what we very glibly define as the soul. We may touch our chest and say, “My soul, my conscience, my Atman speaks.” This Atman, this little thing we are indicating within the location of this physical body, is not what we are seeking—though it is present there also—because it is an influence, it is a force, it is to some people something like an abstraction; and yet we will find that all life finally is an abstraction. Our life is an abstraction; it is not a concrete thing. We are not living a concrete life. For instance, when we touch money, we are not touching a substance but are touching a value, a conceptual evaluation which is in the head and not in the hands.

So are we living in a physical world, really speaking? Or are we living in a world of concepts, ideas, notions, evaluations and aspirations? Do we believe that this is a physical world? We are seeing a table, we are seeing trees, this building, and the world is there so hard and solid; how do we call it maya or unreal? We will realise one day that we are living in an unreal world.

The people that are around us are not our people. The things that we seem to possess, we have really not possessed, nor have we been searching for them. We have only been experimenting with them as tools for the discovery of that which we have lost. We have not lost anything physical. What have we lost? What are we searching for? What is it that is keeping us restless and unhappy?

Each person has his own concept of the meaning of life; that is what we call a philosophy of life. Humanity is one, though people are many. We can imagine that there can be one meaning in the midst of many people. That one meaning can be said to be the soul of humanity.

Hence, the soul is large, and it is small. When it is large enough to comprehend the meaning discoverable in the whole of creation, we call it the soul—yes, it is true. But the process by which we discover the location of the soul or the meaning in life is by degrees. The soul may be one, which is a different matter, but in our lives it does not always reveal itself as one. There are degrees of the manifestation or descent of this concept of the soul. I do not say there are degrees of the descent of the soul itself, but the concept of the soul has a descending character and an ascending character. This is the reason why we feel that there are many souls, and each one is searching for one’s own soul, which perhaps is the reason why one is sometimes impelled to become selfish in spite of the fact that there are similar souls in other people. Yet we are occasionally altruistic; we think in terms of larger circles and the welfare of many other people, and we are serviceful, which tendency cannot be explained if the soul is only inside our body. So there is a larger soul than our own soul, yet we are searching for our own meaning.

There are gradations in an army hierarchy, for instance. The lieutenant colonel is a soul of the group which he commands, and the colonel is a soul of a wider group that he commands. Now, are there two souls? Is the lieutenant colonel one soul and the colonel another soul? And there is the brigadier, the lieutenant general, major general, and so on. Each one is a soul. I have already said that the soul is not a person, because one person cannot control so many other people. It is a pervasive influence, a larger immanence of an invisible something—a meaning, an authority, a soul, intelligence, consciousness, whatever we like to call it. That thing exists, pervading all. Perhaps the general’s soul pervades the souls of all the lower categories. The soul of the general is immanent in the souls of the lieutenant generals, the soul of the lieutenant general is present in the souls of all the major generals, and the soul of the major general is present in all the souls of the brigadiers, etc. So are there many souls, or is there only one soul? We can answer this in any way because there are gradations of the concept of organisation, the concept of authority and the concept of pervasive influence, which is the soul that we are speaking of. Thus, there is a soul, and there is also the soul; both are correct. The larger dimension appears to comprehend the lower levels, absorbing the existence of the lower categories of soul in the higher one; yet the lower ones exist in their own capacity, notwithstanding the fact they are subsumed by the operation of a higher soul. In that sense we are searching for the soul, but we are also searching for a soul when we are ascending the series from lower levels.

I do not think I should go too far into this question. I have not tried to give an answer, but I have tried to stimulate your minds to a need that you will feel, and must feel, for an answer which you cannot escape giving to the question of your own life. Please consider it for yourself.

Excerpts from: Modern Man In Search Of A Soul by Sri Swami Krishnananda