[Advaita-l] Concept of soul

[Mahesh Ursekar]

Pranams Shrinivas-ji!

Your observations are quite astute but miss the whole line of my argument. I
was trying to question if we can retain our original definition of the
"soul" as talked of in Vedanta. I will outline my whole argument again for
your convenience.

Your observation:
>> "The point is the life pulsates or enlivens wherever and whenever the
uppadhis or equipments are
>> conducive to express that all pervading light of consciousness."

Sure, let's examine its consequences. As I understand from Sadanandji's
other writings, "life" for him is the "subtle body". So, one can say that in
the primordial soup that existed on earth many millions of years ago, there
arose an "uppadhi" that allowed some "subtle body" to manifest itself as
life. Simple enough.

Now most scientists seem to have a consensus that the first life-form was a
unicellular prokaryote cell. Further, scientifically speaking, a cell is the
smallest unit of life.

My question to him was: if you say that the first life-form was a cell which
was enlivend by a subtle body, then what enlivens the millions of cells in
our body?

Sadanandji's said, it was a single subtle body that constitued the "whole of
the jiva" - in other words, a single subtle body that pervaded the entire
jiva.

My next question was: What happens if I extract some cells from my body as a
culture (or say I donate blood in a bag)? These cells are alive and behave
in the same manner as when they were in the body. In short, they are living.
By Sadanandji's account of life, they should have a "subtle body" of their
own. *Where does the subtle body for these cells come from?* Surely it is
not the subtle body of the entire jiva as they are outside it. If you can
answer this one question, I would be most satisfied and we can bring this
thread to a close.

Thanks, Mahesh

PS> Forgive me if I am unable to get my point across any better than the
above.

On 8/24/07, Shrinivas Gadkari <sgadkari2001 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Namaste,
>
> I am copying below segments of two posts that I
> feel comprehensively answer this and related
> questions.
>
> from sadanandji's post:
> "The point is the life pulsates or enlivens wherever
> and whenever the uppadhis or equipments are conducive
> to express that all pervading light of consciousness."
>
> from ravisankarji's post:
> "I may be totally wrong, but I believe that a
> soul/jiva can be made to identify itself with any
> material body and suffer based on its karma.
>
> So if God ordains that jIvA has to cling on whatever
> these scientists create and suffer, then it will have
> a soul - otherwise it will not."
>
> My comments:
> With this view point, there will be no contradictions
> to resolve even if a human being is produced from
> scratch.
>
> However what equipments (bodies) we create will
> determine the subset of "souls - out there" who can
> animate these equipments.
> ("out there" refers to state of souls when they are
> ready to be attached to a body)
>
> It may very well be that after centuries of efforts we
> may realize that after all the best equipments are
> created by union of male and female.
>
> Regards,
> Shrinivas
>
>
>
>
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