Monday Morning Greetings 2026 #19 – The Origin of the Living Entity and the Limits of Reason

A natural inquiry that comes up in almost all spiritual traditions concerns the origin of the living entity in this dark world. All mokṣa traditions — Vedic, Buddhist, and Jain — universally profess that our condition here in ignorance is beginningless or eternal. The Judeo-Christian traditions, in contrast, hold that the material world, and consequent ignorance, is not eternal but has a creative beginning point that is followed by a “fall theory,” which begins with Adam’s tumble from a position of innocence. Śrīla Prabhupāda seems to have indicated at different times propositions about this subject that support both theories, although the propositions are mutually exclusive. In other words, if one is true, the other cannot be. So, which is a better explanation of the origin of the conditioned soul’s ignorance? From the standpoint of reason, neither. Both propositions as to the origin of the jiva are problematic within the parameters of human reasoning. To think that the soul has been…