The Soul Within the Body

Right at the beginning of His instruction to Arjuna, Lord Krsna declares that transmigration of the soul is a fact: "As the embodied soul passes, in this body, from boyhood, to youth, to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death." (Bg. 2.13) The existence of the soul-an unchanging conscious principle within an ever-changing material body-is implied by the recent findings of modern science. In The Human Brain, Professor John Pfeiffer points out that "your body does not contain a single one of the molecules that it contained seven years ago." He compares the living body to a whirlpool. The form doesn't change, but all the ingredients stream through at a dizzying pace. In his Foundations of Biology, L. L. Woodruff gives another apt analogy:

So, during the seventy-year lifetime of an average American, he has "died" and been "reborn" ten times. Of course, unlike the body's ultimate demise, when personal identity seems to end, these intermediate "deaths" don't destroy the body's structure and personal characteristics. Be that as it may, however, the physical substances of a seventy-year-old person's body have actually changed ten times over. Has he been ten different people? Of course not. But then what exactly do we mean by the word "person"?

The best way to answer this question is to contemplate the person we know best-ourselves-through a simple exercise in memory. For instance, the farthest back I can remember is a day when I was about one-and-a-half years old. I was asking my mother if she could understand what I had been saying to her. I didn't know the right words, though, and I became very frustrated. In my mind this incident sticks out vividly-what it was like physically and psychologically. Through such memories I can directly experience the continuity of my existence over the years. I can recall millions of things I did, saw, heard and felt. No one else enjoyed or suffered all these things-only I did. Thus I as a person am continuous, despite the discontinuity of my body.

Going further, I can become aware that my emotions, thoughts and memories are also ever-changing. I'm actually an observer of even these mental phenomena. They are flowing by me in the same way that the molecules of my physical body are flowing by me. My body is a gross form made of gross particles, and my mind is a subtle form made of subtle particles. But I'm neither one of them. The person I call myself is in reality a continuity of consciousness-an eternal spiritual soul.

The question now arises, "Why haven't the scientists found the soul?" The simple answer is that an empirical scientist observes everything through his material senses and mind, which are too gross to perceive the subtle spiritual soul. There are some scientists, however, who do understand something of the existence of the person beyond the mind and body. For example, physicist Irwin Schroedinger, who in 1933 won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work in wave mechanics, wrote in What Is Life?: "Even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be." Of course, the most definitive statement on this subject is given by Lord Krsna Himself: "For the soul there is never birth nor death. Nor, having once been, does he ever cease to be. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain." (Bg. 2.20)