30 Dec 2020
[An online spiritual discussion was conducted on December 06, 2020, in which several devotees participated. Some of the questions of devotees answered by Swāmi are given below.]
[Śrī Veena Datta asked: Swāmi, You said that awareness is produced when inert energy enters the nervous system of a human body. When a human being dies, the inert energy is also destroyed. In that case, how is a soul transferred from one body, which is dead, to a new body?]
Swāmi replied: The individual soul or jīva is a bundle of thoughts or qualities. It is permanent and is not destroyed even when the supply of inert energy from the oxidation of food in the physical human body stops at the time of death. That inert energy is called the soul or the basic soul and it forms the bulk of the individual soul. The individual soul (jīva) is generally the awareness existing as thoughts in the mind. Within this general awareness, the jīva is a very small dot of awareness that exists permanently, as per the plan of God. The general awareness produced in the brain and nervous system from the inert energy disappears at the time of death stopping the functions of the jīva. The inert energy produced from food has no link with the jīva. This jīva leaves the gross body embedded in an energetic body which is of the size of one’s thumb (Aṅguṣṭhamātraḥ puruṣaḥ...). In that energetic body, the jīva goes to the upper worlds, as per the fruits of its deeds. After enjoying the fruits in the upper worlds, it returns to earth in an energetic body for rebirth. It enters into the womb of a woman through the sperm of her husband. The energetic body of the jīva disappears as soon as it reaches earth and the jīva then prepares its gross body in the womb of the mother.
The disappearance of inert energy and the general awareness from the human body has no effect on the individual soul. This permanent individual soul keeps rotating in life cycles, going to the upper worlds and coming down to the material world (earth). This entire cyclic process happens as per the divine plan. Awareness in the gross body first appears as mind, which is the manomaya koṣa. This mind is just dots of awareness (Mano'ṇupramāṇamiti). It is made of pulses in the neurons (nerve cells) that communicate information from the senses to the brain. This information is the group of thoughts that are acquired in this birth. The individual soul is also a dot of awareness, but it has come from numerous previous births. It contains the various strong thoughts of those previous births. Actually, there is no difference between the individual soul (jīva) and the mind produced in the human body (manomaya koṣa). The only difference is that the individual soul remains permanent, whereas, the mind, which is the result of the general awareness produced from food is not permanent. But the strong thoughts in the mind acquired in the present birth also enter into the individual soul.
The cause-effect relationship is part of the logical analysis based on the worldly logic belonging to this imaginable world. We cannot say whether a cause-effect relationship exists in the context of God and the soul, unless we are sure that the logical cause-effect relationship based on worldly logic is thoroughly applicable to that context. We can use terms such as a cause-effect relationship in a superficial sense, but not in the entire deep sense. The reason is that such terms apply only to imaginable items belonging to the imaginable world such as gold being the cause and the golden chain being its effect or the mud being the cause and the pot being its effect. But when you bring God into the picture of a cause-effect relationship, you must realize that the unimaginable God standing in the place of the cause is quite different from the imaginable causes like the gold or the mud. We can apply these terms of worldly logic only to the case of an imaginable cause producing an imaginable effect. We cannot apply these terms to the case of an unimaginable cause (God) producing an imaginable effect (soul). The world is imaginable and any item within the imaginable world, including the soul, is indeed imaginable. God, who is the cause of the world, is unimaginable. Such relationships between an unimaginable cause and an imaginable effect do not exist in the imaginable worldly logic belonging to the imaginable world. We can say that God is the ultimate cause of this entire world. We can also say that this entire world is the imaginable effect of the unimaginable God-Cause. Up to this statement, it is okay. But if you try to apply this concept of cause-effect any further in the case of God, the concept fails at every step since God is not an imaginable entity like gold or mud. You can use the words, cause and effect, in the sense of the initial input and the final output, but you cannot use them to explain the process of how the unimaginable God produced the imaginable world or the imaginable soul. The cause-effect relationship can thus be used to successfully explain cases involving two imaginable items such as gold producing the golden chain or the mud producing the mud-pot. But when the cause is the unimaginable God and the effect is an imaginable item like the world or the soul, the cause-effect relationship does not apply completely since it fails to explain the process of how the cause produced the effect. In that case, one can object to the applicability of the cause-effect relationship in the case of an unimaginable cause producing an imaginable effect, in the first place. The conclusion is that the cause-effect relationship can only be used superficially in the case of God and that it cannot be used to explain the process of how God produces imaginable effects.
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