Nothing is easier to forget than that we are immortal souls. I am an immortal soul; you are an immortal soul. As Yogananda puts it, “Man is a soul and has a body.” When we think of immortality, we tend to picture ourselves living forever in our current body. But would it age to the appearance of a 100 year-old body and remain looking that way through eternity, or would a ‘fountain of youth’ effect pertain, allowing us to appear forever as we looked in our twenties? The absurdity of either formulation is palpable, yet it does not prevent medical researchers from trying to extend the life of a human body for as many years or decades as possible, whether through cryogenics or genetic engineering or some such biological intervention.
At some point, one has to ask oneself, is this really what I want – to live in my current body, in my current life situation forever? With all of my eccentricities, shortcomings, quirks, and prejudices? As hard, frightening or brutal a reality as death is for us to confront, the idea of dying and being re-born in a new body is actually a relief to me in comparison with this misguided scientific attempt to tinker with the natural limits of the human body. To be mortal is to live as a bodily form, yet to be immortal is to live without a body. To put it another way, the word “immortal” does not merely mean “undying” or “living forever.” Since it is the opposite of “mortal” (“having a body, subject to dying”), it means “without a body, not susceptible to dying.”
Obviously, we are talking about the soul here. It is the soul that is immortal, not the body. The ignoranct condition that we generally live in is a state in which we associate the totality of who we are with our current body. We forget that the Higher Self, to which the Hindu and Buddhist teachings ask us to awaken, is who we really are: the Self that subsumes all the many bodily incarnations of the past and future of our soul. It is this Self that eventually can attain union with God through enlightenment.
Our baseline state of ignorance, beginning and ending with our ignorance of our true nature as an immortal soul, is the root cause of all suffering and all evil. Ignorance leads to temptation. Some temptations, like the desire to eat an ice cream cone, are obviously benign, although at a karmic level these benign sensual temptations keep us rooted in attachment or “samsara,” leading us to back away from the possibility of Awakening and Enlightenment. Other temptations, less benign, lead us toward sin and the commission of evil acts. These amount to a backward U-turn on the forward evolutionary march of our karmic journeys.
Ignorance is the state of being trapped in the dualistic world of maya, subject to the laws of karma. Temptation is the emotion that leads us to bury ourselves further in the delusions and illusions of samsara. Ignorance and temptation breed sin and evil, which are at root a form of mental disturbance. To paraphrase Eckhart Tolle in “The Power of Now,” don’t forget the undeniable, that man is essentially crazy.
Bird of Spirit 