The Consortium of the Soul

Soul.

Called Atman: Spirit, Consciousness, Breath. Some refuse to name it.

Across traditions, across philosophies, across religions, it is eternal, divine, witnessed, and indestructible. Bodies die, but the soul continues.

Where do I search for the real meaning of soul? All these words are complex, confusing, and difficult to visualise.

People say to understand all this, you should have an elevated state of mind; some say your chakras should be active. And some people say humans--mere humans--cannot understand all this because these are godly things.

I am a simple biologist; can I achieve that elevated state of mind? I find it difficult. Should I stop searching? I refuse to do so.

Solution: I surrender to him, to Krishna, for guidance.

One Soul, Many Garments

On the battlefield of the Mahabharata, Arjuna surrendered to Krishna, and their conversation began in the form of the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna says two things there that changed how I read everything.

First, he talks about the body and death.

vāsāṃsi jīrṇāni yathā vihāya navāni gṛhṇāti naro 'parāṇi
tathā śarīrāṇi vihāya jīrṇāny anyāni saṃyāti navāni dehī (2.22)

"Just as a person casts off worn-out garments and puts on new ones, so the embodied self casts off worn-out bodies and takes on new ones."

And in the very next verse, he says what that embodied self is like:

nainaṃ chindanti śastrāṇi nainaṃ dahati pāvakaḥ
na cainaṃ kledayanty āpo na śoṣayati mārutaḥ (2.23)

"Weapons do not cut it, fire does not burn it, water does not wet it, wind does not wither it."

Secondly, He says –

aham ātmā guḍākeśa sarva-bhūtāśaya-sthitaḥ
aham ādiśca madhyaṃ ca bhūtānām anta eva ca

"I am the Self, seated in the hearts of all beings. I am the beginning, the middle, and also the end of all beings."

By these two verses, I gather a few very important observations and also a set of characteristics to identify the meaning of the soul.

The first observation is easiest: the body dies, and it is recycled again and again.

The second observation: something is present inside the body which is indestructible, and it keeps getting a new body in the process of recycling. Since Krishna is the lord of the universe, he must be saying this for all living things, not only humans.

The third observation: whatever is indestructible should be the same for every living organism. Here I take one step that the verses invite but do not compel, a step I take as a believer and not as a logician. In the second verse, I mentioned above, Krishna says he is present in all beings.

The fourth observation is that whatever is indestructible is a form of Krishna only, which is present in every being.

Now I encounter a slight confusion: if an indestructible thing, a form of Krishna, is present in every living being, and if we call it a soul, then why are living beings different from each other, and why do they perform their actions in different ways?

From these observations and the issue of variance, I now have a set of characteristics to define soul. Indestructible, changing bodies should be true for every living being and should be the same for all living things while not being the same at the same time to create variation.

It is a difficult combination to bring together, but it is possible; Krishna said it, so let's identify it.

The permutation combination

First is the characteristic of indestructibility. The answer to that is not outside; the answer is inside us at the atomic level. Every life, whether complex or simple, is made up of atoms. And these atoms were forged in stars, most of them scattered across the universe when those stars died. In all the chemistry of life and death they are neither created nor destroyed, only passed on and rearranged; they are the ultimate building blocks of living structures, like organs, tissues and cells. When a body dies, the biological structures collapse, but the atoms and molecules return to nature, ready to be assimilated into a new body, a new garment. This is the first layer of soul characterisation, a consortium of atoms, making a body.

This consortium of atoms as a soul fulfils another characteristic. We all have a soul: a bacterium, a human, an insect, a bird, or a tardigrade. And all our souls are made up of the same fabric, the consortium of atoms. For humans, the soul is like a philosophical concept because they have a thinking brain, but for Krishna, the soul is the concept of life, and every life has a soul. And every soul has the same fundamental constitution – a consortium of atoms.

When a human dies, the soul returns to nature; the consortium is given back to the pool, and it is again available for another life. And here is the wonder of it: the new life is not required to be a human; it can be anything: unicellular, multicellular, an elephant, a jellyfish, a rose plant or a mosquito. Krishna lives in every body, in every organism, as a soul, as a consortium. Indestructible, eternal, flowing between different types of life, assimilating, returning to the pool, again changing the body. Beautiful, unbiased, above the thought process of humans, equal to every life, the same for every cell.

Now a question easily comes to mind: the body is made up of atoms, and the soul is a consortium of atoms. What is the difference between them? How are the mortal and immortal separated from each other ,when they are made up of the same fundamental particles?

The answer is simple, and it also solves the issue of variance, raised earlier. The soul is the consortium of atoms, and the body is the living, dynamic pattern in which that consortium is arranged and held in motion, not merely its shape in three-dimensional space but that shape actively maintained moment to moment. When the organism dies, that specific dynamic pattern can no longer hold itself and collapses, even though for an instant the atoms still sit where they sat, but the consortium itself is indestructible and returns to nature, to the original pool. When it is assimilated in the next life, the consortium, the soul, is the same, but the three-dimensional arrangement is different, and that is the body. The new arrangement can be a human, or it can be a grasshopper.

It is a vast image: infinite possibilities, infinite permutation combinations, the same soul taking infinite patterns across the species and organisms.

Let's summarise: a consortium of the atoms, the soul. It is indestructible, the same in all life forms, in an unbiased manner. Flowing through the cycles of life and death, creating infinite patterns called bodies. A form of Krishna present in everybody as the soul, the same and variable at the same time.

Pattern and Karma

On that battlefield, Arjuna asked the question- knowing that I will die, knowing that they will die, why should I act at all?

I add another layer to that question – Knowing that I will die, knowing that they will die, why should I act at all? And if I act at all, then why is my Karma different from others?

And this is the answer. A body is a specific arrangement of the consortium of atoms called the soul. And the whole nature of an arrangement, of a living pattern, is to act, to behave according to its own sequence and its meeting with the world.

We do not act because we will last. We will not last. We act because acting is what a living pattern does. The type of act depends upon the specific pattern of a body and the environment surrounding it. Bacteria have different karma than humans, birds have different karma than mammals, and two humans have different karma. Why? Because every organism is a different specific pattern of the consortium of atoms called soul; and every one of them has a different microenvironment.

I see the universe in those verses

For me, a true god never does two things: he never keeps only the human perspective, and he never breaks the laws of the universe he himself created, not even for the sake of preaching. That is why I surrender to Krishna, because when I see those verses, I feel thermodynamics, the conservation of atoms and energy through countless cycles. He does not talk about the soul only for humans; for him, the soul is him, present in every organism equally as the consortium, and appearing as different patterns through countless permutations and combinations, so I see mathematics in those verses. I surrender to him because I see the genetics in those verses: the arrangement of the consortium in genes. I see genotype, the particular sequence, and I see phenotype, the Karma, resulting from the interactions between sequences and microenvironments. I surrender to him because he is the soul of every life form, bringing sameness and variance at the same time.

The authorities, some humans, do the gatekeeping of the concept of soul, saying we need an elevated state of mind; I refuse that because that makes the soul specific to humans. Krishna does the opposite; he makes it universal, applicable to every life, and he is simple; he makes it an accessible concept. He just wants us to see the pattern through the lens of biology; that's why, as a biologist, I praise him with the only language I know, the language of biology.

The last rites

Until now we have talked about death, and about life. We must also talk about the last rites. Why? Because if the concept of soul is true for every organism, then the concept of the last rite should also be true for every organism.

When a human dies, we call the priests. They come, and they perform the rites, the fire, the water, the ash, the sacred words. I do not say a word against this. It is old, and it is tender, and it is for the living, who need some way to carry what cannot be carried.

But the priests stop just before the real last rites. Humans made two mistakes here. Because they can think, they confined the soul to their own species, the ones with a thinking brain. And they assumed that once the body is dead the soul has already gone, so burial or cremation or any other method will suffice as the last rite.

Not true; the soul did not leave anywhere; it is still waiting for the real last rites, that is, destruction of the pattern and returning of the consortium of the atoms to the original pool. This is the most important rite of life and is performed by the ultimate priests.

Decomposers are the ultimate priests; fungi are the ultimate priests; they use the chemistry of life itself to unmake what the chemistry of life had made, breaking the very molecular bonds that once held the pattern together. They break the pattern to free the consortium of atoms, the soul, so it can return to the original pool and can enter in the next life.

And these priests are not specific to humans; they perform the last rites of an elephant, of a tree, of a lion, of a fish; they are the universal priests of life.

I am in all beings, Krishna says. I am everywhere. In every creature, in every arrangement, in the highest and the lowest without distinction, and I am also in the ultimate priests without whom the cycle will never be continued.

He says, do not grieve, Arjuna. You cannot kill what is never destroyed, and you cannot save what was never meant to be kept. The garment will be set down. The substance will return to the pool. The priests of the soil will perform the true rite. And what you truly are, what all of you truly are, the one soul wearing every garment, was never for a moment in danger.

That is what I see now, when I read the verse.

Nothing of the substance is lost. Only the arrangement. And the arrangement was only ever the way the one soul chose, for a little while, to wear itself.

I surrender to Krishna, I surrender to biology, I surrender to the consortium of atoms, I surrender to soul, to every pattern.

Jai Shree Krishna.