- Why does the soul want to have experiences if it is perfect and already in the presence of God?
- How does the soul in the beginning get a form- a rock, plant, animal, human? there is a missing link here that I can’t understand?
- Are souls of different types/natures from the beginning?
—SS, USA
Dear SS,
1) God created a lila (play): its perfection has been covered with thick layers. Bit by bit, through evolution these layers are taken off. Experiences serve our soul to evolve, to take those layers off. The soul wants to get back to itself, and to God. In the end of evolution our pure essence remains, and we have re-found the perfection we had from the beginning. The soul finally is happy and doesn’t need any more outer experiences. Why all this drama, if the soul was perfect already in the beginning? The whole show is the idea of the Cosmic Playwright, who created this drama out of His one Consciousness.
2) The soul gets a form by receiving these layers. A rock is a soul surrounded by many layers, there hardly seems any life and consciousness in it (but there is). A plant has less layers, and consciousness expresses more. Animal still less layers, a human even less, a true saint none. Divine consciousness remains.
3) It’s a bit of a mystery: all souls are made of the very same substance, the substance of God, Spirit, Pure Consciousness, Sat-chid-ananda, or however you want to describe it. As Yogananda said, the wave is the same as the Ocean. So all souls are the same in essence. On the other hand, each soul is unique, and should express its uniqueness. As Yogananda writes in his Autobiography of a Yogi: “God created each man as a soul, dowered with individuality.”
How can souls be the same and still be unique, individual, different? That you must ask your intuition. I don’t know.
All the best,
jayadev
