Seek and ye shall find.

Faith

It seems to me that it all comes down to faith. One who has been touched by God has faith. There is no proof for this. It is an audacious statement. How do we know who has been “touched” by God? But this is just the point, isn’t it. Knowledge and faith are really quite separate. Knowledge implies certainty reached through judgment; faith is beyond judgment.

Take the soul. There is no proof for the existence of any such thing as “soul.” Even to use the word “consciousness” strains the credulity of logic. After all, consciousness, awareness, mind, sentience, and thinking all refer to different things. A computer is a machine and is certainly not sentient in any real sense. And yet, machines “think.” Don’t they? And if “thinking” is not what machines do, what is it then?

If we reserve thinking for humans, then what exactly is it that cephalopods do? Can an octopus think? Are plants sentient? And if they do, then do they have souls?

There is no proof for the immortality of the soul beyond what we ourselves can see and feel and intuit. But then, if something is self-evident should we deny it simply because we lack the linguistic tools to explain subjective experience in purely objective terms? We can create no mathematical model for spirit or soul. But mathematics is a language we have invented to describe an objective world. We have no mathematics for spiritual experience. Are we then to conclude that spiritual experience is invalid, since we cannot break it down into a symbolic language meant to describe material experience?

We cannot “know” the soul in the same sense as we “know” material and phenomenal things. But since the world “out there” is a function of the world “in here” it is impossible to “know” in any absolute sense.

Plants and insects experience reality very differently than we do. Is the human experience of reality the “only” and therefore “best” version?

Like a child determined to fit a round peg into a square whole, the materialist wants to show how all phenomenal experience is a product of what he calls “matter.” But “matter” itself is elusive. “Matter” is impossible to define.

Materialists reject subjective reality as counter-intuitive. “I know what I see; this is matter.” But so many truths are counter-intuitive, or else we would all conclude that we live on a flat earth. That the earth is round is counter-intuitive, a conclusion arrived at through some serious thinking. The natural observation of day and night leads us to the conclusion that the sun moves around the earth. Our natural observation also leads us to conclude that matter creates spirit. Both ideas are incorrect. Matter does not create spirit any more than the sun moves around the earth. These are “objective” conclusions which avoid deeper ways of interpreting reality.

There is no mathematical proof that you or I or anyone else exists. And, if we begin with such dry logic it is absurd to say that there is anything like an eternal soul. But in the East, where human wisdom was born thousands of years ago, the existence of the soul or atma is a self-evident truth; an axiom which must be considered before anything else.

We have no objective proof for the subjective world. But then again the phenomenal world of objects must be based on the subjective world of consciousness. Without the subject there is no object.

Don’t take it from me. I am only a frog in a well, croaking obscenely. My voice is insignificant. Buy we may take hope and inspiration from the learned and realized souls who have gone before us. The immortality of the soul has been affirmed throughout human history from the time of Krishna, Vyasa and Shukadev in ancient India, to Jesus Christ and his apostles at the dawn of the present era in Jerusalem. Philosophers and thinkers from Plato to Plotinus to Hegel, Schopenhauer and the modern mystics and saints have affirmed the version of Vedanta. So many greater, nobler and wiser souls have walked on the path before us.

Can we so easily dismiss their hard experience of the self-evident character of the soul? Or should we not rather do our best to discover this self-evident reality for ourselves?

They tell us, “Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall open.” The background hum of the universe fills the air with the underlying sound of reality: “Om.” Om is the universal sound of affirmation, meaning, “Yes. It exists. Divinity is real. Soul is eternal.” Listen closely and you can hear it.

Faith has its own eye to see reality. It is curious that you and I can see, but we can’t see the eye, which is the instrument of sight. I can’t see the eye, but I have sight. Should I conclude that the eye doesn’t exist, since I can’t see it? We see with the eye of the soul, but we can’t see the soul itself. Should we conclude that soul doesn’t exist? Or should we rather think that although I can’t see the soul, it must exist.

Argument can be useful, of course. But argument works through negation. “It is not this,” leads us to “This is it.” A good argument eliminates options just as a detective spends a long time eliminating potential suspects. We arrive at truth through the process of elimination. But trial and error is insufficient to arrive at the truth. And the tendency to negate is not checked when it arrives at the soul. So that when logic and argument is faced with subjective reality it turns upon itself. Thus “objective” argument cannibalizes the “subjective” self. And so argument never arrives at its “object.”

Through argument the subjective self tries to discover itself by applying an objective language used for objects. Since the subject cannot be turned into an object by this artificial process the result is circular, a tautology. The self trying to contort itself into an object through argument fails to discover itself through this method. It is a fatal redundancy for logic. The process is akin to trying to see yourself in your house by running outside and looking through the window.

And when logic is unable to recover from this fatal error it declares the self nonexistent. This is the fatal flaw of logic and argument.

Argument can be useful to some extent when we want to try to give some backing to a theistic view. But as Kant insisted, reason has its limits. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. We may use argument to convince someone to open their eyes, but we can’t make them see. Sight exists quite apart from rational thinking and spiritual vision is quite distinct from logical argument. As long as one believes that vision will distract from critical thinking there is no hope of convincing them to open their eyes.

Therefore it is said, “Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door will be opened.”