Many religions, philosophers, poets, and other artists believe that human beings are possessed with a soul. The soul is supposed to be an immutable, larger than our worldly-self, supreme, incorruptible, magnificent, and beautiful entity, that elevates the worth of human beings infinitely beyond that of a mere biological phenomenon.
But the awesome mystery about the human soul is how did it come into being and why do we only see its manifestation sparsely?
Proponents of human soul believe that human beings are intrinsically endowed with it; but it is difficult to know at what point in human evolution did man see himself larger than his body and his surroundings. That is, when did the modern conception of soul evolve.
How do we account for the presence of cruelty, crime, tyranny, selfishness, and hatred in the mankind when it is endowed with the loving and merciful soul? Why do we have to legislate fairness, democracy, and truthfulness, when these attributes should be naturally present in human beings, as they are the elements of their soul, as we understand it?
While we are unable to prove the intrinsic presence of soul in a human being, we can look at it in another way. We know that human mind is a developmental structure based on human experience, knowledge, capacity, and inclination. The ideas of truth, fairness, decency, and brotherhood are reflections of our mind and not something that came to us from the outside. If we believe in that then we would know that soul is one of the conceptions out of our spiritual oeuvre. On the basis of this conception we can understand why some people are pathologically cruel, while others are joyfully compassionate; why some are blindly materialistic and others are doubtlessly spiritual. Each human being is at a point in his mental growth.
Soul is the highest level of a human being. It represents the epitome of his magnificence in love, compassion, fairness, and selflessness. It is both the ripened attributes of a man, as well as the potentialities of his further growth.
From the blog of www.kaulscorner.com Suffern, New York, 4.23.11
