The Soul: the Mystic Flame in the Secret Heart of the Inmost Being

It is impossible to dissect the body and find the soul. It is not an organ like the heart, brain, kidneys, lung, stomach or liver. We can thus establish that the soul is not the physical body or its component parts.

The vital being, that part of us that feels, reacts, emotes is variable. Our feelings and emotions change from one moment to the next. If we look for the soul here, we find that everything is changing, nothing is permanent. While we may mistake our emotional and aesthetic responses as belonging to the soul, they turn out to be superficial, transitory, ever-changing and not the eternal, immutable soul that we are seeking.

Descartes maintained that his ability to process thought meant that he existed. If we reverse this logic, then those who don’t think do not exist! What about all of the plants and animals without mental formation. Do they exist? Of course. The test of existence based in the ability to think is flawed, and certainly does not speak to the existence or any evidence of the soul.

What is the soul? Sages and seers who have focused on this question have identifed an experience that leads them to what they designate as the soul, an eternal, central element that has the direct knowledge through identity with the Divine Presence, yet resides within the formation we identify as our lives, our mind-life-body complex. They tell us that the soul is veiled, hidden deep within, behind this external personality we tend to identify with. More often, they identify it as a flame, the mystic fire, which kindles our deepest aspirations and awakens our sense of wonder, devotion and consecration.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “The true soul secret in us, — subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, — this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine. Not the unborn Self or Atman, for the Self even in presiding over the existence of the individual is aware always of its universality and transcendence, it is yet its deputy in the forms of Nature, the individual soul, caitya purusa, supporting mind, life and body, standing behind the mental, the vital, the subtle-physical being in us and watching and profiting by their development and experience. These other person-powers in man, these beings of his being, are also veiled in their true entity, but they put forward temporary personalities which compose our outer individuality and whose combined superficial action and appearance of status we call ourselves: this inmost entity also, taking form in us as the psychic Person, puts forward a psychic personality which changes, grows, develops from life to life; for this is the traveller between birth and death and between death and birth, our nature parts are only its manifold and changing vesture.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 1 Meaning and Nature of the Psychic Being, pp. 30-32