According to his Greek and Roman biographers, Socrates communicated with a spirit being. “The familiar prophetic voice of my ‘spiritual guide’,” said Socrates, “has manifested itself very frequently all my life and has opposed me, even in trivial matters, whenever I was about to do something wrong” (Plato, apology of Socrates, 39C1–40C3; in Luck 1985, p. 187). The Greek word for the “spiritual guide” was daimonion. Xenophon, a disciple of Socrates, said Socrates referred to his daimonion as “the voice of God” (Xen. apology 12, in Luck 1985, p. 185). This is somewhat akin to the Vedic concept of paramatma, or Supersoul, which posits a localized personal expansion of God in the hearts of all living entities. Persons of a certain stage of spiritual advancement are able to directly communicate aurally with the Supersoul, and others may indirectly experience the promptings of the Supersoul in the form of intuitions and pangs of conscience. Of course, it may have been that Socrates was in communication not with Supersoul but with another kind of spirit being—for example, a minor demigod who had taken an interest in his activities.
In Plato’s Phaedo (81C–D, in Luck 1985, p. 169), Socrates speaks of ghosts. He proposes that ghosts are souls who were not “pure” when they left the body. They retain some subtle yet visible substance, which enables them to be sometimes seen. Good souls do not become ghosts. As punishment for impious deeds during their earthly existence, ghosts are compelled to wander near inauspicious places such as tombs and burial grounds until they are once more allowed to enter a normal physical body. Many elements of Socrates’s description of ghosts are familiar to me from Indian philosophy, which holds that the human organism is composed of three elements: a gross material body, a subtle material body composed of mind, and the soul itself, which is a particle of eternal consciousness. Under this view, ghosts are souls without gross material bodies. But they retain their subtle material forms (without, however, being allowed to enjoy subtle material pleasures) and in those forms haunt the living with a view to gaining control of a gross material body for gross material enjoyment. I propose that the action of the ghost’s subtle material body upon the subtle senses of an embodied person’s subtle body produces the perception of an apparition. After some time, the ghost is allowed to take on another physical form. If one properly uses this human form, one can become freed from both the subtle and gross material coverings, and attain to the realm of pure spiritual existence. A ghost is different from a demigod. The higher demigods and ghosts are both souls that have subtle material bodies. But demigods are pious souls who have been given positions in the universal system of management, and they are also given opportunities to experience subtle sensual pleasures surpassing those available to ordinary humans. Ghosts, on the other hand, are generally impious beings, whose subtle bodies are full of strong material desires that cannot be fulfilled. They are denied the subtle sensual pleasures available to the demigods.The only opportunities they have for satisfying their desires lie in commandeering the physical forms of humans, as in cases of possession.
In Book Ten of the Republic, Plato presents the story of the warrior Er, who died in battle (Eliade 1967, pp. 375–376). Twelve days after death, he revived, as he lay on his funeral pyre, and described what he had seen when his soul left his body. He and other souls came to a place where they saw two openings side by side in the heavens and two openings side by side in the earth. Through one of the openings in the earth souls were coming out and entering the opening leading into heaven. And through the second set of openings souls were coming down from heaven and entering the earth. The souls coming up through the opening in the earth described their sufferings in the hellish regions below, and those returning through the opening in the heavens described their enjoyment in the realm above. According to the Vedic cosmology, humans living on earth accumulate karma. Those with good karma, accumulated through pious acts, are elevated to the heavenly planets, but they return to earth when their good karma is exhausted. Those with bad karma, accumulated through impious acts, are sent to the hellish planets, but they return to earth when their bad karma is exhausted. If, however, one performs pure devotional service to God, one goes to the spiritual world, from which one does not have to return. Pure devotional service results in no karma, good or bad.
Aristotle, in the twelfth book of his metaphysics, said that the stars and planets acted as an intermediary between his spiritual Prime Mover and the world of matter, composed of four elements (earth, water, fire, and air). The movements of the celestial bodies were therefore the intermediate cause of terrestrial life and movement (Thorndike 1923, v.2, p. 253). Here we find a cosmology that depicts the universe as divided into three regions, resembling the Vedic cosmology.
Publius Cornellius Scipio Aemillanus (185–129 bc) was a member of a patrician Roman family. At a time when he was contemplating suicide, he saw his deceased father in a dream. In the course of warning him against suicide, his father instructed him on the nature of the soul. An account of this incident is given in Cicero’s on the Republic (IV, 14–26). The father of Publius, from his place in the spiritual world, said: “Unless God whose temple is the whole visible universe releases you from the prison of the body, you cannot gain entrance here. For men were given life for the purpose of cultivating that globe, called Earth, which you see at the center of this temple. Each has been given a soul, from these eternal fires, which you call stars and planets, which are globular and rotund and are animated by divine intelligence. . . . Like all god-fearing men, therefore, Publius, you must leave the soul in the custody of the body, and must not quit the life on Earth unless you are summoned by the one who gave it to you; otherwise you will be seen to shirk the duty assigned by God to man. . . . be sure that it is not you who are mortal, but only your body; nor is it you whom your outward form represents. Your spirit is your true self, not that bodily form that can be pointed out with the finger. Know yourself, therefore, to be a god—if indeed a god is a being that lives, feels, remembers, and foresees, that rules, governs, and moves the body over which it is set, just as the supreme God above us rules this world. And just as that eternal God moves the universe, which is partly mortal, so an eternal spirit moves the fragile body” (Eliade 1967, pp. 373–374).
The views expressed by the father of Publius about the soul of the individual body and the soul of the universe are quite close to those found in our template Vedic cosmology. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada says in his commentary on Bhagavad Gita (7.6): “This material body is developed because spirit is present within matter; a child grows gradually to boyhood and then to manhood because that superior energy, spirit soul, is present. Similarly, the entire cosmic manifestation of the gigantic universe is developed because of the presence of the Supersoul.
. . . The cause of the big universe is the big soul, or the Supersoul. And Krishna, the Supreme, is the cause of both the big and small souls.”
In his metamorphoses, Ovid (43 bc–18 ad) declared that in the beginning “nature was all alike, a shapelessness, chaos . . . in whose confusion discordant atoms warred.” But he also spoke of an original, singular god “who out of chaos brought order to the universe, and gave it division, subdivision.” Then came stars, the abodes of a plurality of gods, who seem to have been subordinate to the one who originally brought order out of chaos. Then “shining fish were given the waves for dwelling, and beasts the earth, and birds the moving air.” Finally humans appeared. Ovid suggested “man was born, it may be, in God’s image” (Sproul 1979, pp. 170–171). Here again we see an apparent tripartite division of the cosmos. The spiritual realm of the original singular god, the celestial realm of the subordinate gods (demigods), and the terrestrial realm of ordinary living beings, including humans.