Swami Viditatmananda Saraswati
All living beings have an Atman. Atman is the essence, the core, the very truth, and the very being of all living beings. Atman is saccidänanda and is present everywhere. It is not that everything has Atman. Rather, Atman is everything. Do not separate Atman from things. It is not that I have a self; rather, I am the Self. All that exists is but the manifestation of Atman and, therefore, everything is interconnected; everything is one.
The many things that we see are the manifestation of the One. The one Atman manifests as all beings, sentient and insentient, and living and non-living. All are manifestations of this one Self just as all ornaments are manifestations of gold, or all waves are manifestations of water. Everything in creation is the manifestation of the one Self, Atman.
Atman is present everywhere and is the connecting link. All beings spring from the Self, and that is why we have order or harmony that connects or sustains everything. This very order or harmony is Atman, which sustains everything.
Q: Do we have to accept on faith that Atman is real and that it lives on after our death?
Atman is different from the gross, subtle, and causal bodies. The Self, is identified with these three because of ignorance and is called jévätman, the ego, and sometimes also called the soul. The Self or Atman, by itself, is ever free and unconnected, and sustains and illumines everything.
However, because of ignorance, the self identifies with the body-mind complex and comes to be called the jéva, the ego or the individual self. Upon death, what transmigrates from one body to the other is the individual self that is identified with the subtle body. Rather than accepting different embodiments in blind faith, we can understand that the continuity of life is a reasonable and logical proposition. In nature, nothing new is created or destroyed. Matter, for example, does not get created or destroyed; it just changes forms. Science has taught us that there is no creation or destruction; there is merely a change of form. Science does not accept life as separate from matter; life is viewed as a property of matter. However, we say that matter is the medium for the manifestation of life. Just as a bulb is the medium for the manifestation of electricity, so also, the subtle and gross bodies are the locus for manifestation of Consciousness.
Just as there is continuity in matter, there is also continuity in life. And in the same manner as matter is not born and never dies, there is neither death, the destruction of life, nor birth. It is simply a change of form; a change of embodiment from one to the other. Therefore, there is continuity in matter as much as in life.
Excerpted from avgsatsang.org. Swami Viditatmananda Saraswati is a senior spiritual leader of the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam
