December 6

The Soul Itself Is Pure Consciousness

Question: When the soul joins all other souls in its final chapter, does it retain a consciousness or is that lost?

Sri Gurudev: The soul itself is pure consciousness. So it retains its pure consciousness state, but it doesn’t retain the individual consciousness that’s part of the mind. Once you achieve that state, the product of the mind is gone, like a dream that is gone when you wake up. The mental consciousness constantly varies. All your ideas, thoughts and experiences are not stored in the Self, but in the mind.

Here we should understand the difference between soul and Self. The soul is a mixture of Self and mind. Or, in other words, the soul is the Self reflected in the mind, the mental mirror. So it’s a reflection of the Self that you call soul, and that seems to have all the colors and the modifications of the mind. But once you raise your level of consciousness to pure consciousness, then there’s no mind at all. Along with the mind, all this mental dream goes away. You don’t retain any of those old memories. But until that total liberation, you do retain them.