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While the Western concept clings to the eternal personality, the Eastern sets the eternal soul
beyond the illusory layers of personality. The two, as Juan Mascaró writes, are not opposed,
but are complementary world views. ‘Greece gives us the joy of eternal beauty in the outer
world; and India gives us the joy of the Infinite in the inner world’ (Mascaró, x).
Yet, there are crucial differences between Eastern and Western visions. For Western,
Christian thought, the linked duality of body and soul has come to imply eternal consequences
on the soul for the weaknesses of the perishable body. That each individual is born with the
sin of Adam and Eve is a basic Western concept, even if derived by ‘later generations of
Christian apologists’, and neither found in the Bible nor in Jewish tradition, but owing its
predominant place in the English-speaking world to Milton’s Paradise Lost (Robert Carroll,
326). This concept is reinforced by the reductionism of modern scientific Humanism, by
which anything must be accountable by the five senses. The soul must be stainable like any
other material, for non-stainability, according to modern scientific rules, implies non-existence.
The stain lies on the eternal essence of man’s soul, making it impossible for an individual to
gain redemption without the intervention of God’s grace.
For Eastern thought, the stain lies on the layers surrounding the soul, on the masks
which hide the soul. The masks are real in the sense that they are part of the created universe,
but, belonging only to that universe, they are perishable. The individual knows that behind the
doom of his physically manifested self is the imperishable Self. This universal Self ‘is his own
very seed and essence. Release from the doom consists in feeling identical not with the mask
but with its all-pervading, ever living substance’ (Zimmer, 1969, 349). The individual’s karma
determines whether he goes to a heaven or hell in the period between death and reincarnation,
and in what form he will return in, but the individual’s Self, which is the inexplicable,
unnameable universal Truth, bears no blemish of the misdeeds or faults of the individual. The
possibility remains, as well, of uncovering the layers of masks until no more remain, at which
point only the pure, unclouded Self exists in the splendour of moksa, or nirvana, and releasing
the individual from the cycles of reincarnation.
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