According to Patanjali. Kaivalya is a state in which a soul resides once it frees itself from all bondages and delusion. It is a result of repeated and prolonged meditation, probably over several births. In this state, there is no way the world can entice the soul and pull it back into misery. It is ever blissful and continues to be so, eternally.
Yoga is a companion school of Samkhya. The Samkhya believes that there are infinitely many souls that are free in all respect and blissful in themselves. Some of these souls, for some unknown reason, get lured by ‘Prakrti’. Prakrti is the physical world. Being attracted to Prakriti, they take on physical bodies to enjoy the material world.
But these embodied souls find it difficult to free themselves from this association with Prakrti, and get entrapped forever unless they effortfully free themselves. This conjunction with Prakrti forces these otherwise blissful souls to go through a series of happy and sad states. More they experience the world, more deeply they get entrapped.
Patanjali talks about Ishwara or God who can free the souls from this apparently endless trap. But he views God as just some special omniscient soul and not as the supreme divinity that created this world. Even the Samkhya says that the concept of God is superfluous and not needed to explain the existence and sustenance of the world.
So, there is no way Patanjali can say that the freed soul finally reaches God or merges with it. He merely says that the soul attains Kaivalya. Something that is totally free from any entanglement and something which is all alone. The material world has no influence on such a soul.
But traditional Vedic scholars question this concept of Kaivalya. The soul by definition is free from all limitations, it is unbounded, all encompassing. How can there be several unbounded souls, each of which have attained Kaivalya?
The existence of many individual souls that are free and unbounded in all respect is oxymoronic. If they are free and unbounded, what makes them different from one another? At least they should all merge together into one whole?
The Vedic scholars give the simile of space inside a pot and space outside a pot to point out this paradox.
Supposing you have a pot say. There is some space inside the pot. There is also space outside the pot. And if there are many pots, there are as many spaces in each of these pots as well as a single space outside the pots. But are there really multiple spaces?
Just break these pots. How many spaces will there be? Just one. The spaces within the pot made sense only as long as the pot was intact. The moment you broke the pot, there is no difference between the space that previously was inside the pot and the space that was outside the pot.
It is the pot that created the apparent distinction between the space inside and space outside. No pot, no distinction.
Similarly, argue the Vedic scholars, the moment the soul frees itself from the clutches of the body once for all, it has no separate existence. It is the same as the soul that always remained outside the influence of the material body.
It does not merge with some external soul. It is just that the body that created a barrier between inside and outside was removed and there is just one soul as always. The separation was only momentary as long as the soul was in conjunction with the body.
This is the reason why Vedic scriptures use the same word Atma to denote both God as well as the soul of a being. Just to make this distinction clear in the context of mundane worldly discussions, one often uses the words Parama Atma (or supreme soul) and Jeeva Atma (embodied soul). That does not mean that the soul is divided into many.
The bodies merely create the illusion of separation of a single soul into infinitely many souls. It is like the pots dividing a single space into multiple spaces. The multiplicity exists only as long as the pots exist. Not otherwise.
But there are many who seem to find this subtle concept difficult to understand.
On one hand we have some modern scholars who infer that the meaning of Atma changed over a period of time. They say that initially it meant God and later became a word to indicate plurality of souls. They even try to group Vedic scriptures as early and later ones based on this distinction!
But if one reads Upanishads collectively, one comes across several places where this indistinction between embodied soul and the free soul is clearly brought out.
In Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the well-known Sage Yajnyavalkya very clearly tells his wife Maitreyi that when one frees oneself from the clutches of the body, there is no distinction between him and other souls. In fact, there are no ‘other souls’. There is a single soul that always existed.
The soul that existed inside a body, did not come from outside. Nor it went out when the body dropped. It was always there and it would continue to be there. It is just that the association with the body brought out this apparent multiplicity.
But our Buddhist friends believe neither in soul nor in God. What will happen to them when they free themselves from the clutches of the body and Mind as a result of prolonged meditation? If at all I can use the word, where will ‘they’ go?
I will discuss this interesting issue in the next episode. Please do join me then.
A series revolving around Mind – Science of Mind, Philosophy of Mind, Notions of reality, Mind modulation, Domains beyond Mind, and so on. © Dr. King, Swami Satyapriya 2019-2020
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