What is our ultimate goal? Let’s analyse. At death, our physical body returns to dust; our subtle body, the Mind and Ego - ME based on its Karma takes rebirth. The Divine Power within us, our Soul, merges with the Universal Soul that is everywhere, the Supreme Immortal Power we call God. When at death, the Soul leaves the body and there is no breath, and there is death, there are two possibilities.
Our Antahkarana, the MIME—Mind, Intellect, Memory, Ego may come alive in another body. In MIME, Memory and Intellect are dormant but the ME, the Mind and Ego take rebirth. This happens to most of us because we live and die in ignorance. If we have a carried forward Karma, there is no way to escape rebirth. The Soul is not as we imagine. It is not 'my' Soul or 'your' Soul. The Soul is a Universal Soul. It is Divine consciousness that is everywhere. But the MIME is the unit of our existence that will be reborn as per its cumulative Karma, powered by the Soul.
However, if we have transcended ignorance and realized the truth that we are not the MIME but the Divine Soul, then at death of the physical body, there is no MIME, there is no Karma! Karma belongs to mind and ego. The realization of the truth makes us drop all our carried forward Karma.
Our mind makes us suffer by stopping us from the realization of the truth. It is not the Soul that suffers. The Soul is the Divine, the conscious energy that observes everything. It is the power that gives us life. The Mind and Ego - ME suffers when it is born in a new body.
Then it experiences the pain of the body, misery of the mind and agony of the ego and this cycle continues. Our ultimate goal is to be liberated from this cycle of death and rebirth, to realize we are the Divine Soul and thus to transcend Karma and escape rebirth and the suffering that we would otherwise experience life afterlife. This is Moksha, our ultimate goal.
(The author is a spiritual leader and the founder of AiR Institute of Realization and AiR Center of Enlightenment)
