Satisfaction of the soul

Mukul Sharma

Plato regarded the soul as originating in a world of Being and entering a world of Becoming. Later, neo-Platonists described the soul as a stranger on Earth, having fallen into matter from aworld with no space and time. Sometimes, the timeless versus the trapped-in-time aspects of an individual were tweezed apart with symbolic imagery. Interestingly, in the Upanishads though, the soul or higher Self, and the personality or lower self, are compared to two birds sitting on the same tree with one, the personality, pecking at the fruit while the other, the soul, simply watches.

“There are two birds on a tree,” says the Mundaka Upanishad. “The one on the lower branch is of gorgeous plumage. It eats the tree’s fruit, sings and preens its feathers. Its companion on the higher branches is of sombre plumage and silently watches over its other companion.” The meaning is clear: the bird on the lower branches is the lower self, absorbed and living with activity, while the bird on the higher branches is the higher Self, at one with spirit. And the lower self, while still absorbed in living, must at all times recognise that its higher Self watches over it and is at one with pure spirit. But, said Ramakrishna Paramhansa to his disciple Vivekananda, the lower self wouldn’t be there if it was meant to perform some function. He immediately gave a demo to show what he meant when he told him that the goddess Kali always asked him for food when she was hungry. It’s said that Vivekananda fainted when he saw his mentor lift a mouthful of rice from the plate he was eating and offered it to the idol as she opened her cosmic mouth.