Vedantam for Beginners -1 : 23 : 1 - Swami Sivananda
12/05/2019 23. ‘I’ Is The Soul And Not The Body-1. A sense is not soul, because you can apprehend an object through any other sense, e.g., “Previously I saw a tree and now I touch it;”—such an expression will be meaningless if ‘I’ is not different from the eye which cannot touch, and from the skin which cannot see. The ‘I’ or the Soul is distinct from the senses. There is a fixed relation between the senses and their objects, e.g., between the eye and colour, the ear and sound, and so on. It is the eye and not the ear that can apprehend colour, and it is the ear and not the eye that can apprehend sound. If a sense were the Soul, it (the Soul) could apprehend only one object, but the ‘I’ can apprehend many objects; the ‘I’ can see colour, hear sound, and so on. Therefore, the ‘I’ or the Soul which confers unity on the various kinds of apprehension is different from the senses, each of which can apprehend only one object. If we do not admit a permanent Soul beyond our frail b...