Key of Knowledge

SR No.: 006702
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown
Publication Year: 1919
Total Pages: 1204
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 25 MB

Page 742

THE SIDDHANTA.
721
of a muscle. Such animals cannot exercise any choice, and are fatally condemned to perform the prescribed movement, no matter what the circumstances be. This shows that the mind is an instrument of selection in regard to the movement to be executed, and of analysis with regard to the movement received, which it can shunt off along any particular motor track in the system, checking and diverting its course at will. This is sufficient to show that the function of mind is not to make a sensation felt in a place different from that where it should be felt, but only to analyse it, permitting or checking its natural reflexes or substituting others for them at will, at the same time. The objection therefore fails in its entirety and we must, accordingly, conclude that the soul is not confined to any particular locality in the body, but pervades every part of it within its periphery.
Now, since the body is not constant, but a thing which grows from small dimensions, it follows that the soul cannot have a permanent size of its own so long as it is involved in transmigration. This amounts to saying that the soul is an expanding and contracting substance; it begins from a microscopical size in the female womb and goes on expanding with its body till it attain its full proportions. Finally, that is, at the end of each earthly life, it is contracted again into the seed of the next incarnation to undergo the expanding process once more. Thus does the jiva continue to expand and contract in its different bodies, in the course of transmigration, till nirvana be reached. 55