The material body is a vehicle which you are temporarily in and temporarily using. There are many examples which can help you understand that you're not the body. For example, you can ask yourself the question, "Am I my hand?" And then you can ask yourself that if your hand was sitting on the other side of the room because it got cut off by a sword or it fell off on your way to work or something, would you be where the hand is or would you be where YOU are looking at the hand?

A materialist holds to the concept, theory, that there is only one energy that exists, and that is matter. And so when he comes to questions such as "What is consciousness? What is awareness? What is life?", he concludes that it also must have some chemical basis. It's either chemical in substance or somehow it's an offspring of the complex chemical arrangements that are there in the brain and the rest of the body. So basically, in materialistic civilization, we've come to the conclusion that life itself is really nothing more than this offspring of matter.

I mean if somebody tells me that life was created a certain amount of time ago, some billions and millions and millions and millions of years ago by the combination of chemicals, if they tell me this then I take it for granted that they know what it is that was created. If somebody says that life was created ten thousand million years ago then I take it for granted that they know what they are talking about when they use the word "life."

Now what we would like to put forward here is the point of view that in fact, life is a distinct element from matter. That life is itself an energy that's completely different from matter. It is not an offspring of matter. Life is life. Matter is matter. And these two distinct energies in the material world as we see it, sometimes interact and sometimes they do not. From this point of view, a life particle, a particle of life, sometimes called a spirit soul or the atma or a soul, this spark of life, this life particle we are proposing is, in fact, a distinct energy. And that there are innumerable such life particles. There are countless numbers of such life particles. And that the characteristic of this life particle is life, existence, eternality, and awareness. These are the natural characteristics of the life particle or spirit soul. Just like you can't speak of water without also referring to wetness. You can't have water without wetness. Similarly, when we speak of the life particle or the spirit soul we cannot separate it from awareness. We cannot separate it from existence and consciousness.