What is the soul as per the Bhagavad Gita?

In chapter 2 as soon as Arjuna surrenders to Krishna and asks Him to for instructions, Krishna begins describing the soul because everything that follows is dependent on understanding what the soul is.

In a succession of verses Krishna describes the soul as eternal, individual, and unchanging through the different developments of the body. It moves from one body to another in what we see as birth and death. The soul can’t be cut, dried, dissolved, withered, burned or in any way affected by any material ingredient. It can certainly not be killed.

Later Lord Krishna gives more information. The soul is superior to dull matter because it is alive and conscious. It is the higher self which must control the lower self, the lower self being the impulses of the senses and mind. It pervades the body with consciousness as the sun pervades our universe with light, and it is eternally a fragmentary part of Krishna.

One of the truly great insights that Krishna gives is that the soul is suffering due to being conditioned and struggling in this world. This conditioning is done by material nature, but it’s not actually natural, it only seems natural because it’s all we know. For a baby born in prison and who grows up in prison, prison life is natural, but for anyone outside prison it’s not.

The soul is naturally pure, but the conditioning makes us think and act in certain ways based on identification with a material body, and that causes suffering because the body appears to suffer and we identify with it. Krishna says it’s possible to remove this conditioning of the soul.

The knowledge of Bhagavad Gita hinges on understanding the eternal nature of the soul, and its current predicament being trapped in an endless cycle of birth and death, meeting with good and bad in temporary situations and never finding eternal happiness.

We are those souls and Bhagavad Gita is for us to understand first who we are, then how and why we are suffering, and then how to stop it.

Comments

  1. SynOopsNovember 17, 2022 at 11:49 PM

    Who decides whether soul should go to material world?Is it forced to do so?What is the meaning of spiritual elevation when one day when universe ends we go back to god as soul is a part of god?The soul has any freewill like what if it decides to leave material world and go to spiritual world can it do this or is it struck untill the end ?
    Also who decides in what body a soul will go for rebirth ?

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