The Return Home: Enquiry & Reply

I received very insightful and valuable questions from a reader, James. His questions were so good, and it occurred to me that others might like to read my reply.

James: "The problem I have with the journey home is that if we were all to become God conscious and retire into heaven with no more re-births, what then would the purpose of human beings be as the bodies would be soulless, and surely that is not our purpose here on earth in the first place — or is it !!"

My reply:

There is no chance of all human beings simultaneously achieving and Becoming God-Consciousness. If that were to happen, the universe would collapse. It is our individual mirroring of the endless infinite aspects of the Oneness that project this temporal illusory holographic universe. Without our enjoying (bhoga) the Veil of Ignorance and Delusion, there would be no manifested universe — only the unmanifest Oneness, the plentitude often termed the Void.

There is only one Soul. We all share the same Soul, that is the Oneness. Our individual gunas (modes as sattva, rajas, tamas) generate the thousands of differences in billions of human beings. Our individual flavors and proclivities are produced by Prakriti's gunas, our material nature. Our gunas are what make each of us appear unique. But beneath that curtain of illusory appearances, we all share the Soul of the One.

Bhagavad Gita VI.29
"The Self (Atma-Soul-the Oneness) is present in all beings, and all beings are present in the Self. The Self of the One has the same 'form' as the Self-Atma-Soul in all other beings."

The misunderstanding of this, I believe, has come about over the centuries as people have used various words to describe the soul or the individual soul. Christians say soul, so English speaking people tend to accept the term soul to describe the individual. I believe western oriented gurus have done the same to make the teaching a bit easier to accept and digest.

Perhaps the Sanskrit word 'jiva' comes closest:

http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=+jiva&trans=Translate&direction=SE

Our 'spirit body' is what goes with us, as individuals when we leave the current body — and is made up of the accumulations of thoughts & acts we have produced over 100s of incarnations. In any case, we share one soul. Even the Sanskrit word 'Atma' has been used differently by various Indian schools. The literal root meaning of Atma is 'to breathe' and 'to pervade'.

Also a human body cannot, does not exist without a spirit body, meaning a soul. There is no such thing as a soul-less body, except as fearful superstition. Once the spirit body exits, the body dies.

The Heavenly Realms are Temporal

Although many do go and have gone to the various heavenly realms, their stay there is temporal. When their accumulated 'merit' to remain there is used up, they return here. In other words, they have to come back to the earth plane and incarnate into a human body to complete the Journey and achieve the full Realization of God-Consciousness. So heaven is not the ultimate goal.

Bhagavad Gita VIII.16

"Up to Brahma's realm of being (meaning including the heavenly realms), (all) the worlds are subject to successive rebirths. But he who reaches Me (the One) is not reborn."

Temporality infects every layer of the manifested Cosmos. All the realms, the Myriad Worlds as they are called in Buddhism, continually appear and disappear as one Kalpa melts into another. The sage and scholar Krishnananda has said, "You will find yourself in the process of Time, if you cannot reach the state of timeless eternity."

And as you have begun to suspect, YES! The sole purpose of Life here on planet Earth and the creation of human beings is to Veil the Knowledge that we are the ubiquitous Oneness and all-powerful.

After enjoying (bhoga) many adventurous journeys, both blissful and perilous, in the Time-Space continuum throughout the Cycles of Time, eventually and inevitably we become weary with it all.

We begin to long to return Home, and through the process of Enlightenment and Wisdom-Knowledge, we Remember. Because our human form contains the totality of the universe as the chakra system, we have the capacity for God-Consciousness. Once again we Become that which we always were, are, and will be — the One!

Crazy wonderful, isn't it! What an wild adventure the Creator has cooked up for Itself. The ancient Seers, the Rishi's were also poets, and the Upanishads speculate that the Oneness felt alone! In any case, here we are in this mad cacophony, both terrible and beautiful, heartbreaking and enlightening, differentiated five-sense perception, a chaos of signals coursing through our synapses, and an elixir of nectar waiting in the Heart — amazing Life on Earth in human form!

As Swami Lakshmanjoo has said, "This whole universe has come into existence just to carry you to God consciousness."

Thank you for your wonderful enquiry.

We meet in the Heart,

Susan

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