Hindu Atman (soul) and star dust

 Research in science is clearing with a theory that we, human being, atom, animals and everything came from ‘star dust’ and will go back to start dust . The cycle of becoming nothing, something and everything is the phenomena that advancing steps of cosmology and providing a prism of what actual we the human beings are.  Advancement and quest to know the universe is also providing an idea what actually we are and from where we have come from.

 In India, the thrust was to know self (Atman) and the true self. Indian philosophy is impressive in a way that it went deep in the topic to know self and the first question start ‘who I am’ and ‘what is the right for me’ and ‘how I get the right knowledge’. Self remained in limelight in Hindus philosophy and the Apastamba-Sutras I, 8, 23, “The Brahman (universal self) which is wise and recognizes all things to be in the Atman (self), who does not become bewildered when pondering on it.” In Vedas Atman (Self) is taken as breath or to the wind, in Rig Veda chapter X 16, “Suryam Kakshuh Gakhatu Vatam ataman (The eyes goes to sun, the breath to the wind). Here, breath is taken as a synonym of Atman, the self. The breath, which is self is free as a wind and if the man is dead then the self, which is atman goes to wind. There are some texts in which self is taken as Parana which is life. The Vedic philosophy is cleared that the self is different from the material and this self is life, the breath.

 For Indians Atman (soul) and body (Sharir) is different and there nature is also different. For Vedantists soul is Sakshi (observer) and conscious and eternal and one with the universe soul (Brahma). This idea of soul was the most common property of Indian school and was so completely taken as for granted that it look waste to elaborate arguments further, Max Muller in orthodox philosophy of India, introduction stated, “Mortality with the Hindus is so entirely restricted to the body which decays and decomposes before our very eyes that such as expression as Atmano Mrita Tvam (Immortality of the self) sounds almost tautological in Sanskrit.”

 The Indian thought of self conclude Vedantists in Mahamudgara (The Hammer of Folly) edited and translated by Durga Das Ray said, “As is birth, so is death, and so is the dwelling in the mother’s womb, thus, is manifest the misery of the world; how can there be satisfaction here for thee.” The concept of self is so proved in Hindu philosophy that there is well established certainty of own self and no doubt of self which is soul like of Descartes. Individual self is the highest thing in Hindu philosophy.

 The Atman is taken as soul, breath, individuality and Upnisads talked mainly on the investigating the true nature of self. “Atman means that pervades all, which is the subject and which knows, experiences and illuminated that objects and which remains immortal and always the same” Katha Upnisad 2, 1, 1.

The old Hindu philosophy worked hard on the concept of know they self especially in Chandogaya, Mandukya and Katha Upnisads and stated that self is immortal, self is luminous, self proved and beyond any doubt. The self is not body, senses or the internal organs. It is also to a product of matter, It is also not a bunch of qualities.

Ramanuja of Dvaita Vedanta tilted something towards unknown, toward the god- He makes our body as the temple of god and of the voice of god within us as like of Saint Paul, “That we live and move and have our being in God.” And the Alvar saints made Bhakti as the main source of salvation. These saints were from Southern part of India where the culture was different from Aryans, they were called Dravidians and their philosophy was complete devotion to god. The concept was that devotee forgets everything, even his existence in devotion and god was the supreme that take cares of this world and of human beings. And therefore ritual like Devdasis, girls who had to serve these gods in temples throughout their lives was practiced at large in Southern part. “The one god who runs through all beings, who is all pervasive and who is the immanent inner controller of all beings is the supreme reality. There is nothing greater than He. There is nothing external to Him, He fill the whole universe. The Taittriya tells that all beings arise from him, live in him and return to this Brahman” ShriBhasya, III.

Ramanuja tilted the concept of soul as an attribute or mode of god and forms part of his body. It is a spiritual substance and absolutely real but different from god. Ramanuja insists that the Karma should be performed in an absolutely disinterested manner simply to please god. The oldest philosophical school, Samkhya, took dual theory of self with two independent identity of Pursa (soul) and Prakarti (nature) Pursa is pure conscious, eternal and real, knower and mind (Buddhi) is different from soul which is intellect which is subjective or psychological senses. The mind manifests thing like virtue, knowledge and others. The other aspect of Samkha is ego (Ahmkar) is defined as assumption or misconception.

The Indian philosophy went so deep to characterize the substances which work on their nature. The Pursa always remain after as well as before his release until the final liberation which is only by the true knowledge But the transmigration continue of Pursa and it is like clothed in what called Linga- Sarira or subtle body but pura is real and true self when attained the knowledge.

The idea of subtle body by the seeing of gross body is very natural and it was also common in Greeks, Pythagoras claimed that subtle ethereal clothing for the soul apart from its clothing when united with the body. Vedanta took this thin and transparent (Sukshma Sarira) soul as a seminal or potential power and at the time of death leaves the corpus without being injured itself. The function of Yoga is subduing away of the self from all that is not self, in the highest object of this philosophy, by ascetic exercises delivering the self from the fetters of the body and the body senses.

 Samkhya also hold that senses are different from the soul and in order to prove he argued, “If each sense could perceive by itself, each sense would perceive its own object only, the eye color, the ear sound, the skin warmth and that what perceives all their impressions together at the same time and in the same object must be something different from the several senses which is the soul.” The question that whether the body is same as soul, a question which was never came to Vedanta but Samkhya asked it and solved it a the body has been once destroyed by being burnt, the consequences of good and evil deeds would cease to pursue the self through endless series of births and rebirths, the perplex minute philosophers meet with the question, why with the dual organ of vision, there is no duality of perception, why if memory is supposed to be a quality or mode of the self, mere remembrance of an acid substance can make or mouth watery.

 Even the Nayaya Philosophy took the mind or intellect totally different from the mind of Samkhayas. Samlhya concept of mind is eternal while Naya took it as non-eternal. For Samkya mind is a comic principle independent of self and meant to account for the existence of the light of reasoning in the whole universe. Nayaya took it as subjective activity of thought in the acquisition of knowledge or in the lighting up and appreciating of the inert impressions received by the senses. This knowledge can come to an end and vanish by forgetfulness while an eternal essence like the mind of Samkhya, though it may ignored can never be destroyed.

Nayaya declared clearly that nor does knowledge belong to the manas which is but the instrument of knowledge, it arises from the conjunction of atman (soul) with manas and on the other side of mana with indriyas (senses).Manas is the true instrument and the wielder of an axe must be someone different from it.

 But Lokayat, the Indian materialistic philosophy, holds that “What was called soul was not a thing by itself but simply the body over again, it is the body that felt, that saw and hear that remember and think, thought the saw it every day rotting away and decomposing with the smile appealing to the intoxicating power that can be develop by mixing certain ingredients which by themselves are not intoxicating as an analogy to the production of soul from body.” Charvaks clearly said that in a sentence, I am fat is totally an assertion about a body it alone is the soul and nothing other then it.

 The greatest philosophy in India prevailed at the time of Buddhism and Vasubandu goes into more detailed when he confronted the existence of pure conscience (Vignaptimatra) with inherent power. This potential attribute with its force perform threefold modification, first of all it manifest itself as Vipaka or alayavijana which is a store house of consciousness. Then this universal consciousness further manifests itself into two forms, it takes the form of an individual subject or ego (Klista Manovijinana) and secondly it manifests itself in the formal the various mental states and of the external objects (Visaya- Vijnapti) .

In Indian schools, memory had not got the limelight as it was deserved and it was treated as a means of knowledge then it falls under experience which is either immediate or mediate. Every experience is supposed to leave an impression or modification of the mind which is capable of being revived. Another manifestation of memory is the act of remembering and recognizing.

 These schools tried to learn the form of self and found that knowing self can get the way to know the truth. Soul, means as the major component of self and without self there is no form of self. It is interesting that at the time of Renaissance in the west, first time in the history of philosophy, thinkers again took the task to confront and undertake the task from the start. Like Greek to whom human looked for fellowship and a matter of inspiration. That was the time when feeling to compass the Nature of the universe and grasp the truth with the use of reasoning alone to found the strength of mind and will and to raise the self to perfection without calling upon divine grace for help. That was the time to turn to expose the presence of intellect and its functions and relations to empirical substances.

 And therefore Desecrates’ consciousness and extension, mind and body, then came as independent of one another and do not involve each other in existence. As such there were two independent substances called mind and body. Desecrates made this dualism of mind and body as important for human beings who have both body and soul. The human body like all other organic bodies is a mere machine; the moving principle of this machine is the heat in the heart. The death is because the destruction of some important part of the body machine, in human beings alone, god by a special creation adds soul. There can be no real relation between body and soul for they are diametrically opposed, the relations of the soul to the body is of the nature of the pilot to his machine but mind and body are relative substances which are quit independent of each other.

 But afterward, Spinoza added that human mind is not purely finite and illusory but is capable of raising itself to the highest state of knowledge and he called this mind as the idea of the body and then the idea of the idea. The idea of the body follows parallelism that is thought and extension run parallel and other order and system of one correspond to the order and system of the other. But the idea of the idea follows that mind is a part of the infinite intellect of god, the idea of the mind itself exist in god by the same necessity and the same power of thinking. 

And Leibniz took it further and said that body is only an aggregate of bare monads in which human body is a machine of infinite complexity unlike ordinary machine. It is an organism in which every part is an organic force. And though the aggregate mirrors change of all other monads of this universe and more clearly than others, this queen monad by virtue of its superiority in the aggregate many are termed as soul. As soon as conscious desire for the movement of the hands occur. 

But time went more rational and pragmatics found their theory upon the revelation of sense experiences. The study of consciousness took them to far different from conclusions that experience is not made up of separable discrete date filled together like the bites of a mosaic into a pattern. On the contrary it is flowing and continuous affair in which there are no cracks and joints in a shape of spatial or temporal. Things shade and merge into one another in space and as well in time. Nothing is self contained, everything has to spill over. It is continually into what we call things or substance. The curdled spots melt and run at the edges into a liquid transitive stuff which thickens immediately into some new substantive aspect. The content of consciousness then though infinitely multiple and varied is one and not many as empiricist taught, is a physiology of mind according to James William.

But what empiricist hold, Locke, whose method was primarily psychological and mind is passive in the reception of simple ideas and when the mind becomes active then complex ideas generated. Hume came with different view and said that this is a system of different perceptions or different existence which are linked together by the relation of cause and effect and mutually produce, destroy, influence and modify each other. Our impressions rise to their correspondent ideas and these ideas in their turn produces other impressions.

In Psychology formerly mind is regarded as essentially reasonable and moral, its moral and rational aspects say the whole story. But in advance psychology the traditional cosmologies have collapsed and there are stirrings of something new in their place the ideal descriptions of man as the rational animal are now more commonly replaced by the picture of man as irrational impulsive and emotional. The gist of this philosophy is that in psychology we are to rely wholly upon the external observations and never to accept data for which the evidence is entirely derived from introspection. The mellifluous survey by empirical and modern thinkers on mind as in the faculty of psychology, not only in describes the functions and nature of mind but also study as a flow of mental events of mind. The expositions of sensations, impressions, memory etc are found as the property of mind whose nature is to induct deduct compare as functions.

Socrates also persistently advocated the supreme necessity to know the self. How much Nietzsche was popular, no matter but his problem was genuine for him in the will to power, Vol. II book III pg 18, “One would have to know what being is in order to be able to decide whether this or that is real.”

The dependence of soul on body does not meant that soul is a physical body but like Pythagoreans or Democritus, the existence of soul is a harmony of the body. Aristotle adds that soul is the entire vital principle of any organism, its power and process of life. He further distinguished plant and animal by nutritive, locomotive powers and also a power of reason and thought.

Stoic went differently and said that man is a microcosm or small edition of the universe as the universe is the macrocosm of man. They further stated that just as the universe, man is both body and soul and the soul is the part of universal soul. The western philosophers were agreed that the soul is the major center of reasoning and thinking and the thrust is to know the right.

 Over all, Dr Faustus said, “Then, man was born with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil and the cruel thrust for worship. And, man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few moments of life before death’s inexorable decree.”

Physical events and processes occur and mental events and processes occur and there is relation of events and processes to each other, David Hume said, “There are some philosophers who imagine, we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self, that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence,-- for my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other of hear of cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure, In ever can catch myself at anytime without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception.”

 And here Alexander Pope describes the nature of a man in ‘From an Essay on Man’ that “Know then thyself, presume not god to scan; the proper study of mankind is man, placed in this isthmus of a middle state’ a being darkly wise, and rudely great, with too much knowledge for the skeptic side; with too much weakness for the stoic’s pride, he hangs between, in doubt to act, or rest; in doubt to deem himself a god or beat, in doubt his mind or body to prefer; born but to die and reasoning but to err; alike in ignorance , his reason such, whether he thinks to little or too much’ still by himself abused, or disabuse, crated half to rise and half to fall, great lord of all things, yet to prey to all; sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled, the glory, jest and riddle (mystery) of the world.”

 And again William Wordsworth in intimations of immortality, “Our birth is but sleep and a forgetting, the soul that rises with us, our life star, hath had else where it’s setting, and cometh from afar.” Certainly most philosophers took soul and body as the combination of self, mainly like Purusa or Samkhya, soul is one, conscious and eternal, Or like

Plato or Samkra, soul and body makes man where soul is essentially have the property of conscious that is, of awareness and the relation of soul to the body is derived mainly as a driver to the vehicle. 

But later when science developed and so the theory related to mind and body came with new perspectives, John Hospers in an introduction to philosophical analysis made a remarkable categorization of mind –body relationship the inter-action-ism theory of commonsense said that physical events are caused because of mental events and vice versa, a blow in the head (physical event) feel pain (mental event) every time physical stimulus causes something to registered in consciousness and even feeling of fear (mental event) causes hear beat faster( physical event) . John Hospers.