SOUL
The soul is a spark of the Divine in the heart of the living creatures of Nature.
It is not seated above the manifested being; it enters into the manifestation of the self, consents to be a part of its natural phenomenal becoming,
supports its evolution in the world of material Nature. It carries with it at first an undifferentiated power of
the divine consciousness containing all possibilities which have not yet taken form but to which it is the function
of evolution to give form. This spark of Divinity is there in all terrestrial living beings from the earth’s highest
to its lowest creatures.
It is necessary to understand clearly the difference between the evolving soul (psychic being) and the pure Atman, self or spirit. The pure self is unborn, does not pass through death or birth, is independent of birth or body, mind or life or this manifested Nature. It is not bound by these things, not limited, not affected, even though it assumes and supports them. The soul, on the contrary, is something that comes down into birth and passes through death--although it does not itself die, for it is immortal--from one state to another, from the earth plane to other planes and back again to the earth-existence. It goes on with this progression from life to life through an evolution which leads it up to the human state and evolves through it all a being of itself which we call the psychic being that supports the evolution and develops a physical, a vital, a mental human consciousness as its instruments of world-experience and of a disguised, imperfect, but growing self-expression. All this it does from behind a veil showing something of its divine self only in so far as the imperfection of the instrumental being will allow it. But a time comes when it is able to prepare to come out from behind the veil, to take command and turn all the instrumental nature towards a divine fulfilment. This is the beginning of the true spiritual life. The soul is able now to make itself ready for a higher evolution of manifested consciousness than the mental human--it can pass from the mental to the spiritual and through degrees of the spiritual to the supramental state. Till then there is no reason why it should cease from birth, it cannot in fact do so. If having reached the spiritual state, it wills to pass out of the terrestrial manifestation, it may indeed do so--but there is also possible a higher manifestation, in the Knowledge and not in the Ignorance.
It belongs to the transcendent and because of it we can open to the higher Nature beyond.
The soul or psyche is immutable only in the sense that it contains all the possibilities of the Divine within it, but it has to evolve them and in its evolution it assumes the form of a developing psychic individual evolving in the manifestation the individual Prakriti and taking part in the evolution. It is the spark of the Divine Fire that grows behind the mind, vital and physical by means of the psychic being until it is able to transform the Prakriti of Ignorance into a Prakriti of Knowledge.
The mind thinks and the vital craves, but the soul feels and knows the Divine.
The soul is the witness, upholder, experiencer, but it is master only in theory, in fact it is not-master, anisa, so long as it consents to the Ignorance. For that is a general consent which implies that the Prakriti (Nature) gambols about with the Purusha (Soul) and does pretty well what she likes with him. When he wants to get back his mastery, make the theoretical practical, he needs a lot of tapasya to do it.
In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light
The soul looked out from its felicity.
It felt the Spirit's interminable bliss,
It knew itself deathless, timeless, spaceless, one,
It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite.
![]()