Thomas Moore in his book "Care of the Soul", HarperCollins Publishers, 1992, tells us giving us a reminder that "It's easy for consciousness to become lodged in the material world and to forget spirituality." So the soul then becomes neglected for the physical body takes precedence and importance.
Agathiyar tells us that we are here to gain Atma Balam, or strengthen the soul. So what is food for the soul then?
As early as in my very first Nadi reading in 2002, Agathiyar and lately Ma, Aiya, and Lord Muruga, have been giving us constant reminders on the need for a particular experience for only then the soul tends to grow. Moore too says, "Just as the mind digests ideas and produces intelligence, the soul feeds on life and digests it, creating wisdom and character out of the fodder of experience."
As Moore writes, "Renaissance Neoplatonist said that the outer world serves as a means of deep spirituality and that the transformation of ordinary experience into the stuff of soul is all-important", the soul comes to learn and grow from its experiences. The spirit of God is in all things and we learn to pick up the essence of these individual spirits in his creation. Having collected sufficient experience for it to grow, the soul then it shifts into a silent mode contemplating on all that it had absorbed and begins to digest them while in solitude. Having done with the absorption, it takes on a new perspective of the world and returns to address the world and its issues from a different angle, and to educate others on true living, sharing the wisdom gained from its period of hibernation and silent contemplation. They become gurus in the eyes of others. Rather than ignore the world and hideaway on the onset, we need to live life to the fullest and after having had the experience, learn to differentiate the good and the bad, drop all that hurts the self and others, and extend all the best towards oneself and others. The rebirth takes place here itself.
Moore says of rituals as "Action that speaks to the mind and heart, it doesn't necessarily make sense in a literal context, meaning when Agathiyar gave us the 5 tenets to live a fulfilling life in the eyes of the divine some facets of it might be hard to swallow but as Moore says some action may not have an effect on actual life but speak instead to the soul. We come to realize that everything we do besides serving us serves the soul too.
Just as "rituals maintain the world's holiness" Moore says "The soul needs an intense full-bodied spiritual life as much as and in the same way that the body needs food."In https://blog.good-will.ch/WordPress/2010/10/23/rishi-agastya-a-little-miracle-and-some-stories, we read that Agathiyar loves to cook and to serve. "Through serving food he likes to spread himself into the people and thus to adjust any imbalances in the mental, emotional, and physical bodies. He lives in tune with the universal consciousness and in such a tune-up the food is given to all the elementals around him with himself as the channel." As Agathiyar stressed on the need of food to us too, Moore too says, "Communion, union with divinity, is accomplished by means of food. Taking food into the body is a ritual way of absorbing the god into oneself."
We might not think about the soul right now, but Moore says "Growing old is one of the ways the soul nudges itself into attention to the spiritual aspect of life." Thus the reason Agathiyar encourages us to start early while we are fit and healthy. His Harinarayana composition brings to light the need to call for God now and not later.
When Lord Muruga told me that we at ATM shall bring reformation I understood pretty well the reasons for the tiny changes we had been working on at ATM for some time now. Thomas Moore too writes that the traditions in the world religions were subjected to reformation too. Then we read that Agathiyar "In his spiritual activities he never treads any trodden paths, but gives new trends and directions, being full of freshness. His life is always accompanied by will, spreading be-ness and presence. He is very humorous and his teachings are very powerful, but nevertheless humorous, thus uplifting the people."