Soul over Nature

Soul is that timeless part which silently witnesses and decides. Nature is that part which is engrossed in activity and movement. In the ordinary human, nature prevails over the soul; (s)he is bound by the ignorance, error, and bondage of personal and cosmic nature. Free-will here is a deception of nature, because all impulsions, actions are eventually dictated by forces of which the soul is a mere bystander or puppet.

When the soul is not self-established in its own power, it uses processes or instruments of nature to manipulate nature (alcohol or WhatsApp for stimulating oneself, anger or threat or lure to sway others) which further binds it in nature. It takes time and relentless vigilance to come alive of its own pervasively unconscious slavery.

In the divinized and sovereign human, the soul prevails over nature. This happens in three stages: standing apart from nature unidentified with her, refusing her exhortations and holding poise, and finally possessing and enjoying nature and compelling the soul's will over her.

The first condition for this reversal of power and ascendency over nature is the universalization of a fully individuated soul. This can be begun but cannot be completed from a mental level of consciousness because the mind is a part of nature; always fragile to its own divisiveness, the importunities from the vital, and inertia of the physical nature. Universalisation attempts from and through the mind have one or more of three pitfalls: ego exaggeration (hence toxic control-mania), susceptibility to illusionism (hence ascetic withdrawal), vulnerability to adverse forces of perversion (hence harrowing subjection to self-loss).

Universalized from a station above the mind, the soul then and only then has access to a Power that is not a puppet of, but the Lord of nature. Because it is that Power that created nature in the first place and concealed itself in it.

- Neelesh Marik (Kolkata, India)

Keywords: Power over nature, Bondage of nature, Limitations of the mind, Spiritual practice

 

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