A man whose chosen Hindu name is Vridavanath
spoke at Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025 on the plight and ultimate
aim of an embodied soul as described in the Bhagavad-Gita. A conditioned
soul/self (atman) that has entered the material realm and is thus
subject to karmic consequences can come back to the divine source of all: the One
that is in all. As material, embodied beings while alive, that is, as both biological
and spiritual, we are prone to getting locked into dualities of attachment and
aversion, which in turn play right into suffering. We forget that we are
wearing material masks, and that our real identity (atman) is greater
than our material roles that we assume in our daily lives. Through our actions,
we bind ourselves by the law of karma. Before being born into the material
realm, a person’s unembodied soul (atman) knew Krishna, but as embodied,
the soul/self relates to other corporeal bodies rather than to other people as
spiritual beings and thus in compassion. Why does Brahman or Krishna—the respective
impersonal or personal notions of Absolute Truth—create the world with
separateness from the divine included? Furthermore,
how is a devotee of Krishna to navigate working in business, given the
separateness woven into the very fabric of our daily existence as material and
spiritual beings?
The full essay is at "On Embodied Souls in Business."
