This well-known image is of an etching rendered by the famous Italian engraver Luigi Schiavonetti for Robert Blair's poem The Grave, published around 1808-1813. The design for the etching was based on a drawing originally done by English artist and poet William Blake. It is titled "The Soul hovering over the Body reluctantly parting with Life.” I thought this image would serve as a good launching-off point for an essay on some of the minor though more complex details about Meher Baba’s teaching on the soul and its connection to the physical body. Notice that the title of this etching implies it is meant to portray a soul reluctantly leaving the body.
As I already explained in my previous essay, The Soul vs. the Subtle Body, Meher Baba gives a very unique teaching about the soul. It is nothing like the Christian conception of it, as something that leaves the body at death. Although there is something called “the subtle body” that does.
For reference, Baba’s teaching has much in common with the Hindu school known as Vedantism and the Sufi school of Wujudiyyah. Both of these traditions teach the concept that every soul is in fact the One Over-Soul. These are not hard to look up. But Baba goes much further in explaining how exactly all this works.
As I’ve explained many times, for Baba the connection between the soul and the physical body is not one of location, as in the picture above, but one of association and identification. The soul is not a finite thing located in space as it is depicted in the etching, which actually depicts a person’s subtle body leaving his or her body.
This is because the soul is really God and is therefore infinite and transcends space. In Baba’s teaching there is only One Soul and that Soul is God. You are that soul reading this paper. Your sense of being an individual soul demarcated from other souls is a mirage caused by impressions gathered from experiences over the course of experiencing yourself as countless forms in evolution followed by many human lifetimes. These gathered impressions form a kind of psychic partition — with a sense of yourself as finite with finite mind and sense of ego.
All sub-humans, such as plants and animals, along with all humans, are in fact this One infinite Soul. These impressions form the many senses of individuality.
In truth, there is only one cosmic soul which gathers experience through all the different forms. . .
And in the Intelligence Notebooks, Meher Baba makes this even more clear.
That One is the only One who hears through all ears, smells through all noses, speaks through all tongues, and thinks through all minds. That same One - God - meaning the same One Self, the same One Paramatma, exists in all minds and all bodies. Just as there are different minds and different bodies, so accordingly the experiences of the universe are different. But the One who experiences the Illusion, the Imagination, the universe, through the mediums of these different minds and different bodies is that same One Self alone.
So, the above depiction based on a drawing by William Blake could never be an accurate depiction of a soul departing from a human body, at least not in Meher Baba’s teaching. It is, however, how souls have generally been traditionally imagined by religious people throughout history, as is testified by the etching’s own caption, "The Soul hovering over the Body reluctantly parting with Life. How wishfully she looks On all she’s leaving, now no longer her’s!”
But it could be a reasonable depiction of what Baba calls a subtle body. See p. 4 of my essay The Soul vs. the Subtle Body. I want to add a few facts about the subtle body that Baba taught about. The subtle body retains the form of the physical body when a person dies. So the depiction above would be an accurate depiction of it. Between lifetimes the sanskaras left over from the person’s previous life then form the subtle body into the shape it will take in the next life.
The subtle body begins to evolve immediately with the evolution of consciousness.
A subtle body does take up the same space as the physical body and truly is etherial. The subtle body has a different set of senses from the physical body.
The physical world is experienced first through the medium of the subtle body, then the physical body. Experience of the subtle world can only be experienced through the subtle body.
We are not our subtle body any more than we are our physical one. Also, the soul is no more in the subtle body than it is in the physical one. The soul is omnipresent and One with God and cannot be confined in space. The connection between the soul and the body is one of identification, not location. When it is said we “leave” our physical body, it is inaccurate. Rather, at the time of death, we cease to identify with the physical body, leaving us to identify solely with our subtle body. I created a crude picture to depict this change in identification to the subtle body.
Another series of points I want to clarify are about a chart in God Speaks that is easy to misunderstand if you are new to Baba’s teaching. In the second edition of Baba’s main book God Speaks is a chart by the American artist and close disciple of Baba’s Rano Gayley. It is numbered Chart VIIIA and is titled Creation, Evolution, Reincarnation, Involution and Realization, according to Meher Baba.
I want to point out several interesting things about this chart that are rarely noticed. It is my favorite chart and hangs framed over my couch. The story of its addition to the second edition is described in my paper How God Speaks was Written, p. 10.
First, Baba gave Rano the words that appear around the chart. They are intended to read, "Formless and colorless, God's creative and impulsive imagination to know himself as Omnipresent, Infinite and Eternal." That is Baba’s whole theme in a nutshell.
The next thing to notice is that there is a winding black ribbon or string that goes counter-clockwise around the chart.
This represents sanskaras that wind over time, becoming denser and denser until they reach their peak density in the human form, and then slowly fade away over the course of the planes depicted on the right. This winding and unwinding is represented by the string becoming thicker and darker before it becomes fainter and fainter and finally fades away. This is consistent with the book’s theme of sanskaras.
Next, the gross, subtle, and mental “spheres” described in the book are depicted as literal spheres in the chart. For instance, this image shows the “subtle sphere” of the first four planes, the fourth depicted as a doorway to the mental.
And finally, there is one point that can easily be unrecognized as there was no way to depict it.
The figures in the chart such as of various gasses, stones, plants, animals, gross plane people, and people on the planes, are not actually meant to be depictions of forms — though they are portrayed as such. In actuality, if you read the book, you see that these represent states of consciousness. For instance this image of a horse is not so-much a picture of a horse as it is an image that represents horse consciousness.
Remember, for Baba the forms in evolution are really just a by-product of a kind of consciousness factory.
Directly and indirectly, these associations and dissociations of the consciousness of the soul are absolutely essential to keep the wheel of evolution of consciousness revolving. The evolution of gross forms is but a by-product in the universal factory of evolution of consciousness.
This is equally true of the picture of a person approaching the path. The picture clearly represents the state of consciousness of such a person who begins to seek a higher truth, not the body of a particular person.
However, I have always thought the figure used in the chart to represent this state of consciousness may have been a self-portrait of the artist herself.
I have one more point I want to clarify.
A person new to this chart in God Speaks could come to the conclusion that each of these forms depicted might represent a class of forms that have souls. And this might in turn arouse in them the question, “Does a rock have a soul?” After all, the chart does begin by depicting some rocks. This will take some explaining.
To begin, I have already explained that in Meher Baba’s parlance, it is not quite right to say a thing “has” a soul. Such an expression conveys the pagan idea of soul, which I explained in The Soul vs. the Subtle Body. While individual forms in evolution have a subtle body, the expression that someone or something “has a soul” comes from the outmoded conception of a soul as something inside a person or animal or thing that they possess. In Baba’s parlance it is truer to say a soul has a body than to say a body has a soul, in so much as Soul in a particular state of consciousness, which we can call “a soul,” identifies with that body.
And when it comes to earlier states of evolution, such as stone, the problem is exponentially more complicated. This is because the individuality we associate with animals and humans has not yet fully formed. To read a discussion by Baba on this point see Beams from Meher Baba on the Spiritual Panorama, 1968, p. 44.
. . . one soul can get linked up with many bodies. This can occur at the earlier
stages of evolution. There are group-souls. Each group-soul gets linked up with
numberless physical forms as in the case of blades of grass. When the group-soul gets more advanced in consciousness then it can get connected with one form instead of with numerous forms. Group-souls are an exception to the one-body-one-soul equation.
Some Baba followers may feel I am out of bounds to say that I feel this is better explained by my own analogy of lenses in EOP. But I am out of no bounds. When I write I write as a philosopher attempting to articulate to other philosophers what Baba may be saying, not a as a Baba lover pretending to be a philosopher.
EOP uses a different metaphor to explain much of what Baba says, but it is not inconsistent with it. In fact in many cases EOP provides understanding at a glance, with charts, that words alone cannot help but muddle. I think the concept of “group-souls” is one of those cases.
The way we would explain the rising consciousness associated with stone and metal in EOP is to avoid bothering with depictions of stones and pieces of metal.
Instead we focus on the underlying causal evolution that, much later and seen through the advanced nervous systems and sense organs of human beings, can be experienced as rocks and pieces of metal. And in my first two books I referred to this period of evolution as inorganic evolution, which means before life evolves. When we speak of this evolution, we speak of the evolving perceptual schemas that give rise (mathematically) to various species of gas, stone, and metal. This obviates the need to “picture” individual clumps of these inorganic substances. My books are dedicated to explaining the evolution of such substances, and do not attempt to imagine these materials existing as such in the earliest phases of the evolution of perception.
It is only in Baba, though, that we read that as early as these primordial species of inert materials there is already a glimmer of consciousness. This is hardly surprising since Baba is clear in all his works that:
. . . the beginning is a beginning in consciousness, the evolution is an evolution in consciousness, the end, if there be an end, is an end in consciousness.
So what amount of consciousness is stone consciousness? Baba says it is almost nil, but it exists.
In stone form the mind has no desire, no feeling, and also has the least possible sanskaras (most finite, almost nil) and so the most finite experience of the universe (almost no experience) almost does not think (realize) the Imagination (universe).
So, I hope this makes things clearer.
Do these gold coins have souls in them? Certainly not, no more than a person has a soul inside him. At least not in Baba’s teaching. In Baba’s teaching there is only One Soul, which experiences variously through different media in conformity with varying congeries of impressions.
There is a state and stage of consciousness associated with the state and stage of the evolution of inorganic forms in their mathematical form.
In New Age thought some crystals have crystal devas and the Earth has a soul named Gaia. In Baba, such talk is superstition. Some people will be displeased with my saying this, but future philosophers should be delighted.
That ends this list of minor details on souls.
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