What does Premanand Maharaj Ji say about the soul?

Shri Premanand Maharaj Ji speaks about the soul not with philosophical abstraction but with intimacy. He says: the soul is not something you need to find or create. It is already here. It is the witness behind all your experiences — the one who knows that you are happy, knows that you are sad, knows that you are confused. That knowing presence, beneath all the noise of the mind, is the soul.

He teaches in the Vaishnav tradition that the soul (jiva) is a spark of divine love, eternally related to Radha-Krishna. It is not identical with God, but it is of the same substance as God — love. Just as a spark comes from fire and shares its nature but is smaller than the fire, the soul comes from the divine and shares its nature but is a distinct individual. This distinctness is not a flaw — it is what makes love possible. Love requires two.

The soul's trouble, Maharaj Ji says, is that it has forgotten its nature. It has become identified with the body, with the mind, with the roles it plays — parent, spouse, professional, Indian, whatever. And so it searches for fulfilment in things that can never fully satisfy it, because they are not what it truly is. Bhakti is the process of the soul re-discovering its own nature. When the soul hears the naam of Radha, something stirs in recognition — as if a traveller, long lost, hears a sound from home.

Based on Shri Premanand Maharaj Ji's satsangs.