During the last few days we realised how our attitudes, activities and food trigger one of the three basic qualities in us and influence our karma every moment. Today, let us continue our journey further and understand where our past karma is stored and how it is brought out. For this, we have to have a deeper understanding of our own body, mind and intellect. We may feel that we already know them very well. We are extremely familiar with this physical body that has been with us since our birth. It was born with us and has grown with us. We know how tall it is and how much it weighs. We know its age, colour, characteristics and eccentricities. We identify ourselves completely with the body, mind and intellect most of the time. Though we know in some corner of the mind that we will leave the body behind one day, we ignore this and live as if it is eternal. That is why we need meditation. When we meditate, our identity shifts from the body, mind and intellect to our true eternal aspect called the Soul. As our link with our Soul becomes stronger and stronger through meditation, we realise, “I am the Soul which is immortal and infinite. Being the Soul, I have these wonderful tools called the body, mind and intellect which are needed to accomplish my mission in this world.”
Where is the seat of the Soul in the body? This is a very interesting question to which all of us know the answer. We may think that we don’t, but in actuality we do. How? Whenever we emphatically say things like - “I want to do it,” or “I did it,” what do we do? When we say ‘I’ we point to our chest. We never point to our head, ear, hand, stomach, leg or any other place, do we? Even a three-year old child points to his chest when he says ‘I’. He does not have to be taught to do this. It comes naturally to him. All of us do this so spontaneously because that is the seat of our Soul. If we locate the centre of our chest and move two finger widths to the right of it, that gives us the exact location of our spiritual heart where our Soul abides. This is precisely the spot all of us touch when we say ‘I’. We must focus on the spiritual heart when we meditate because it increases our concentration and strengthens our connectivity to it.
Now we know where our Soul is located, but how are the body, mind, intellect and Soul connected to each other? To understand this, let us go once again to the subtle energy module called the Soul.
Our Soul is always filled with bliss because it resonates at the same frequency as the Pure, Infinite, Cosmic Energy, we call God and is constantly in tune with it. When the Soul was created by the Pure, Infinite Cosmic Energy, it created five layers of subtle matter or sheaths around itself. These sheaths become progressively subtler as we go closer to our Soul. In fact, they are so subtle that other than our physical body we cannot recognise any of them through our senses.