Over-soul

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"The Over-soul" is an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, first published in 1841.

"Over-soul" as a term has more recently come to be used by Eastern philosophers such as Meher Baba and others as the closest English language equivalent of the Vedic concept of Paramatman.[1] (In Sanskrit the word param means "supreme" and atman means "soul"; thus Paramatman literally means "Supreme-Soul.") [1] The term is used frequently in discussion of Eastern metaphysics and has also entered western vernacular. In this context, the term "Over-soul" is understood as the collective indivisible Soul, of which all individual souls or identities are included. The experience of this underlying reality of the indivisible "I am" state of the Over-soul is said to be veiled from the human mind by sanskaras, or impressions, acquired over the course of evolution and reincarnation. Such past impressions form a kind of sheath between the Over-soul and its true identity, as they give rise to the tendency of identification with the gross differentiated body. Thus the world, as apperceived through the impressions of the past appears plural, while reality experienced in the present, unencumbered by past impressions (the unconditioned or liberated mind), perceives itself as the One indivisible totality.

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The phrase originates with Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay by that name.

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart. [2]

For Emerson the term denotes a supreme underlying unity which transcends duality or plurality, much in keeping with the eastern philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. This non-Abrahamic interpretation of Emerson's use of the term is further supported by the fact that Emerson's Journal records in 1845 that he was reading the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke's Essays on the Vedas. [3] Emerson goes on in the same essay to further articulate his view of this dichotomy between phenomenal plurality and transcendental unity:

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul. [4]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ God Speaks, The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose, Meher Baba, Dodd Meade. 1955. Sec. Ed. pp. 1 ff., 156, 172
  2. ^ The Over-Soul, from Essays: First Series, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841
  3. ^ India in the United States: Contribution of India and Indians in the United States of America, Sachin N. Pradhan, SP Press International, Inc., 1996, p 12.
  4. ^ The Over-Soul, from Essays: First Series, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841