SOUL, IDENTITY, "LOCATION"

Just where are we “located”? This is a “loaded” question, requiring a multiplicity of answers.

          First, there is the “we.” The many “I”s. Theosophy (and Hinduism, in particular) present a person as consisting of the physical body, the emotional (or astral) body, the mental body, the soul (or embodied spirit). There are other sub-bodies, as it were, but this is sufficient to work with. It is said that the soul, which is “higher” or less dense than the other “bodies,” is inclusive of them. This implies that if the physical body is eliminated at death, the soul still includes the emotional and mental bodies, which is to say the feelings and thoughts (mind) of the person who did exist, which thus both “individualizes” the soul and limits its self-awareness, for it remains “tied” to specific feelings, thoughts, as well as memories. Just because it is now absent the physical aspect neither makes it “enlightened” or “purified,” for it remains “tainted” and even with a personality. It still has a long road to haul, be it purging of that which is false through the Catholic “purgatory,” or through myriad reincarnated lives.

          Second, if, in fact, we are souls (including mind, emotion, and body), or embodied spirit, just “where” is this. Doesn’t spirit permeate the universal? Would it be equivalent to what we refer to as “God,” that is, if it were purified to the extent that it was free of ego, which is to say, self and self-reference, which is to say further, from thought, feeling, and flesh? Wouldn’t it become as “pure energy” permeating the whole universe and even universes? There have been Hindu holy people who have stayed coma-like in meditation, maintained by devotees, apparently connected to their body by a thread of consciousness only, and/or not even needing normal nourishment. I have read of such things and known a few people who knew a few other people. I take it as true. Over the years I too have had my own “out of body” meditational and otherwise experiences, which took me out of my body and far out into the universe. I don’t think it was sheer imagination or a dream-state. I believe “I,” my consciousness, my self-awareness, traveled spatially great distances. I have also noted elsewhere in these writings that I have traveled through time, as it were, and experienced different reincarnations of my “own,” that is, of this soul of which “I” am the current manifestation as the person I am.

          Third, so where am “I” (or we) actually “located”? The answer lies in which level of being that we identify ourselves as primarily existing in and in which our living experience actually occurs. A case in point: Over the last ten years I have “moved” my “level of being” so that it is less physically-identified, less emotionally-identified, and more mentally identified and probably soul-identified. Very recently, I “returned” to a specific situation which requires greater physical and emotional beingness after a ten-year movement away from that kind of being. In that situation, which was a bit surreal for me, I remembered how it used to be but is not now. It was very clear to me that I had made such a shift out of necessity and out of love. My point here is not to be enigmatic or vague, as it may appear, but that this identity we have of “ourself” can express and manifest on many different levels in many different, even very distant, “locations.”

          It seems to me that we have a rather habitual bias that “we” are definitely located in the physical body, since the physical body is our primarily apparent locus of activity, even though our locus of feeling and thought may be even more primary than our body, especially if we consider that perhaps we have had many physical bodies that have “dropped away” over the eons, but the emotional and mental bodies have evolved and continued to develop for a very long time. We may have forgotten that this is so, believing that it has always been a “clean slate” upon each new birth, but there are many who realize that they have carried feelings and thoughts, if not actual memories, from previous existences. So it is that we have a “predisposition” to our physical existence, which is also a biological predisposition with the purpose of survival of our species, of “ourselves,” as we see it.

          At this point I could digress into the notion that “I” do not really exist but, rather, am a figment of my own imagination, which begins to flow more towards the Buddhist way of seeing. But I won’t go there for now. Rudolf Steiner’s view is that upon physical death, the soul “blasts” (if I recall correctly) out of the body into the universe, literally passing the planets and proceeding to the “edge” before being drawn back into the next body into which it has reincarnated. I have no idea as to the veracity of this. It could very well be that, for a physical body to be animated by a soul, that soul must literally focus itself within that body and thus be “contained” for a lifetime. Given some of my own experiences and that which I have read and heard, I don’t believe that such energy is necessarily that contained. Is not the whole notion of “enlightenment” one of one’s consciousness or awareness going beyond, while still including, the physical body? Don’t the various “saints” and shamans of religion “talk to God”? Of course, this leads me to “the cloud of unknowing” of Meister Eckhardt, which I will not pursue here and now.

          If an atom bomb exploded down the street, my body would be instantly vaporized. But that would still leave me right where I am. That’s how I see it. We think so many things to be certain, when they are not at all.