On gross underestimation




 
 
If adherents of revered ancient religious systems for whom earthly man only seems to ‘consist’ of the mortal body and an immortal soul are inclined if need be, to admit that something soul-like, exactly as is found in animals, effects itself in their self-expression during earthly life, one may also take into account that those possibly prepared to accept this, assign to these effects an upper limit of expression which – in reality – hardly comes close to including their lowest zone of influence. They already ascribe to their eternal soul everything higher, sure in the view that only something lower and insignificant can be the expression of a temporally limited living complex which is itself in truth only a functional consequence of the transient earthly life of the body. To a certain extent this view is supported by the fact that the animal soul, as has already been explained, receives in earthly man from the eternal soul most significant influences which lead it in many respects to something incomparably more elevated than what is in its own nature. These are influences the animal could never be granted! It has therefore become difficult to determine with certainty the things which must be assigned to the animal soul of earthly man, and what beyond doubt is the influence of the lasting soul. Despite all this, one can always be certain that the upper limit of what originates in the transient earthly-animal soul of man who is fettered to the earth can not be set high enough! – The hermits of Athos in their way prove beyond contention a deep understanding when they declare all kinds of scholarship to be incompatible with genuine piety and an obstacle to beholding God. In order to understand this properly one must know that these ascetic anchorites were not concerned at all with the generally familiar divergences between faith and knowledge, but with scholarship as such, regardless of whether it includes ‘orthodox’ theology and scriptural knowledge safe from all religious doubt. Their understanding allows them – as an exaggerated conclusion to be sure – to value much more highly an illiterate living completely for his eternal soul, than someone familiar with orthodox theology capable of resolving every question rationally. For they know that although reason also owes a great deal to the influences of the eternal soul, the eternal soul barely needs its scholarly research…
  Perhaps it will shock some readers when they realise that, untouched by any doubt, they were accustomed to ascribing in good faith much to their lasting soul which – if they are to show respect to the truth – they must gratefully assign henceforth to their earthly animal soul. But it is better to pass through this shock at some point than to persistently content oneself with dreams which have nothing in common with reality, and therefore can promote nothing real in those tethered to their dreams. Now it is certainly not necessary, as was the case with the strictest hermits among the monks of Athos, to devote oneself only to experiencing the eternal soul, and to suspect as it were in everything brought into consciousness by the powers of the transient animal soul, the ‘snares of hell’. It is even appropriate to encounter the animal soul within one with all due reverence, and in no way to disdain what it has to convey to earthly man. One must nevertheless strive to subordinate the animal soul completely to the service of the eternal soul, for, through this service it can further the work of the eternal soul in a hardly imaginable way. If the animal soul is not, like the remaining soul, the self-aware space of experience of an individualised eternal spark of the spirit, – if it also does not reveal itself as a form of feeling derived from the highest light-receiving powers of First Being, – nevertheless it is the secondary effect of First Being, be it in its manifestation most remote from the light and only blindly pregnant with creation, from which everything took and takes its form. It is appropriate to show reverence here, and every underestimation must create unintended consequences!
  Those who believe in, or claim to already feel an eternal soul will certainly not want to hear that even the supreme products of human thinking – whether this thinking relates to what is commonly called ‘philosophy’, to religion, to mathematics or any field of highly developed technology, including chemistry and all medical research – can have come into existence without any contribution at all from the eternal soul. It will be even harder for them to understand that even technically highly significant works of all forms of art are only the work of the animal soul which has reached its supreme development in man, even if, it must be said, they can become, at every level of technical classification, manifestations of the lasting soul… There is hardly a word so misused as the word ‘soul’ which everyone not only wants to be accepted as the description of something superior to animal nature, but who also would resist most vehemently if you expected him to give the lasting soul precedence as reality over his own thought up view of life. –

 


Bô Yin Râ