What Is The Soul?

Question: What is the soul?

Answer: A person has many desires through which he feels the entire world and himself. However, among them, there is such a part of the common desire that feels the Creator. It is called the soul.

Question: Where is this desire, this soul? After all, if we ask an ordinary person about this, he would say, “The desire is within me; I desire.”

Answer: And if we replace his heart, will he have the same desires?

When a heart transplant was first performed, everyone thought that it would result in a completely different person, but nothing like this happened; nothing changed. This means that desires are not in the heart. The heart just reacts to them, and therefore we associate our desires with it.

I think that if we transplant a head, we’ll discover that in it there are no desires, not even thoughts. Desires are outside of a person. They can be divided into two parts: egoistic and altruistic.

In the egoistic desires, I feel myself and our entire world. However, there is a possibility to partially transform egoistic desires into altruistic ones. In them, I will love others, but I will love truly, not just in words. Then, in this desire in which I will love others, I will feel the Creator.

It is like an exit out of myself, from a life for myself to a life for others. This isn’t in the human body. The body exists like an animal. Our heart is a motor that supplies blood to the entire body. Our brain controls the animal body and nothing more.

Question: What enlivens the body? We walk, sense, breathe, feel ourselves, and feel others. Isn’t this called the soul?

Answer: Don’t animals do the same? This has nothing to do with the soul. It is in none of the creatures on earth. There is a vital force that allows the body to exist.

The soul is part of the Creator from above. In other words, this is a desire that has reached a state of similarity to the Creator—an absolutely selfless, devoted quality of bestowal and love. It exists outside the body of man, outside of his egoistic desire. It is an acquired, but eternal component of our spiritual self. This is the spiritual “I” of a person if he has attained it, and if he hasn’t, then he is an animal.

Some aspire to it, some don’t. But in anyone who climbed down from a tree and turned from an ape into a human being, at least in some way, no matter at what level, there is already an embryo of the soul—that is, an ability and opportunity to develop the soul. But it is buried under a huge layer of egoism.

Question: How can we get to it in order to let the “sprout” come out?

Answer: A person has no motivation for this. He considers all kinds of noble, cultural, and social impulses to be his soul: art, music, and so on.

However, animals also sing. There is nothing special in this. Everything that a person develops based on the essence with which he was born doesn’t belong to spirituality, to the upper force, but just represents the further development of his animal desires, inclinations, and thought.

Question: Does this point, the embryo of the soul, emit any special pleasure to which a person aspires?

Answer: When a person really aspires to reveal his soul, he has terrible nostalgia, depression, suffering from desire, and at the same time, the inability to find the meaning of life: what I am living for, why do I live, who controls me, how can I exit the framework of this world and start to exist outside of its limitations?

This is called the aspiration to attain the soul. Now, it already is manifested in many people because from generation to generation we develop and reach such states in our egoistic development that push us out of our egoistic nature. Egoism itself pushes a person out of himself, giving him negative feelings throughout his existence.

Question: Today, the world is being pushed somewhere by greater suffering, unemployment, robots that will come and squeeze us out of our jobs, and so on. Isn’t this a kind of advancement of humanity to understand of what a soul is?

Answer: Of course, everything that happens in our personal and social life, in the world, in nature, and in the cosmos, happens only in order for us to get closer to the Creator, to reveal Him, to become completely similar to Him, to the point of adhesion with Him.

When we replace all our egoistic desires with a desire to become like the Creator in bestowal and love for others, and through others, to Him, this will be the attaining of our soul, its complete correction.

Let’s leave our bodies, everything that we see and feel in our world through our five animalistic, bodily senses. There is a desire apart from this. It is initially egoistic.

It must be changed to an altruistic one, to complete bestowal and love for one’s neighbor, meaning, for any person, for everyone together, and for everything that is outside of you. Then, you will begin to feel the Creator in this desire to the extent of its correction. It is precisely this corrected desire from reception to bestowal, that will be called the soul.

Attain your soul!
[206399]
From KabTV’s “A Talk About Soul” 3/30/17