Where is the soul? One of the biggest misconceptions is that the soul resides in the body. People may say, "This person died, and the soul has left," but it's not true. The soul is not inside the body. The soul projects itself as the body and the mind. It finds a location in space-time, and broadcasts or telecasts itself through the body. But just as the characters in a movie are not inside my television set when I'm watching it, and Beethoven is not inside my radio when I'm listening to it, my soul is not inside my body. My soul is merely localising or expressing itself through my body.
If we go to a bookstore, we can find numerous books on socalled "out-of-body" experiences. The real mystery is how we get an "in-body" experience. To believe that our soul is "inside a body, looking out" is a convincing but socially induced hallucination. The soul doesn't exist in space or time; it is beyond space and time. Yet everything we call physical seems to occupy some little place in space-time. The chair we sit on is localised in a particular spot, and for a period of time. Our body occupies different locations in space-time. Our thoughts occupy different locations in space-time, and all this is the localisation of our soul, which has no location in space-time. We can, therefore, say that the soul is transcendent.
So when we ask, where is the soul? We're not asking the right question because `where' implies a location in spacetime. The soul is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It's everywhere in general, and nowhere in particular.
If we go beyond the superstition of materialism, we can see that our body-mind is a field of intelligence, of unconditional life force. The life force expresses itself through infinite transformations into this or that form, into this or that phenomenon, now appearing, now disappearing. But the life force itself is eternal; it's unchanging, it all-pervading, and we are that force.
Source: TOI, 12/9/2007
