Nirvana and the Soul Eternal

The body is gross mind and the mind is subtle body. Like the moon, the mind acts as a mirror to reflect the light of some higher source not subject to decadence. But we are deluded into believing that the mind has its own luminosity

CJ: Bhaskar Banerjee

Mon, Jul 13, 2009 09:42:00 IST

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Life and Balance :

IT IS through intelligence that all matter in illuminated and the body, as it were, being matter, cannot and does not have any luminosity of its own. Let us now proceed to an analysis of the mind.

Mind illumines the body but is mind matter or it is intelligent and has luminosity as its own essence? We know that mind does not deteriorate so easily as the body but we also know it to be vigorous at times and degenerated at another. And anything that waxes and wanes cannot have luminosity as its own essence. For example, the sun at all times shines in its full glory, but the moon waxes and wanes. Why? Because it is borrowed light from the sun. A lump of iron when put in fire glows and shines, but its light will vanish because it is borrowed. Decadence is possible only of that light, which is borrowed and not of its own essence.

The body and mind, both subject to decadence, are matter. The body is gross mind and the mind is subtle body. Like the moon, the mind acts as a mirror to reflect the light of some higher source not subject to decadence. But we are deluded into believing that the mind has its own luminosity, and all enquiry for truth, of the beyond stops then and there. This is the biggest obstacle for our remaining trapped.

Sankhya (the analytical science of the ancient Hindus) has gone beyond by establishing that the soul, which we call Intelligent design, being the source of all knowledge, has luminosity as its own essence, unlike those that we have seen as borrowed, and is therefore not matter, bound by time. Eternality is the quality of the unmanifested, beyond the grasp of the senses. Mind, as we have seen, is in time. To transcend the mind is to go beyond time.

Mind, which is like a bridge between the body and soul, between matter and spirit, acts as the very barrier to realising the timelessness of our being. This is the delusion. With the removal of the mind, the reality of timelessness is seen as it is. The moon is reflected in a pond as long as there is water, but upon its drying up, the moon is gone. Then dawns the realisation that it is not gone, but that it was not there in the first place. The breaking of this delusion of the identity of Purusha (Spirit, Consciousness, Soul, Substratum), and Prakriti (Matter, Nature, Material), is Moksha, freedom from the cycle of birth and death, which are all happenings in Nature. Death is not the stoppage of existence. Existence is without a beginning or end but simply is.

This ‘Isness’ is eternal, the permanence of Purusha, not only sustaining all manifestation in Nature, but is also the very source of our existence. To experience this reality is to become one with existence, to become Purusha, the Source Itself. This is also the Buddhist Nirvana; the extinguishing of the lamp is its literal meaning.

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