What is Jainism

SR No.: 006714
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Champat Rai Jain
Total Pages: 210
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 11 MB

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PSYCHOLOGY WITH A SOUL The simile of the mirror will not do, for it is incapable of perceiving the whole of an object, for want of individuality. Perhaps mental messages flying from the different parts to a central spot on the surface of a conscious mirror will explain the mystery of perception. But you will have first of all to establish the supposition, and then satisfy the mind as to the law which will accommodate and re-arrange all these multitudinous criss-cross messages, without hitch or error, in their appropriate places. I think this will never be done !
What does it all signify, then ? Is it meant that loose ready-made ideas are stocked in an immense 'stores' somewhere in the mind ?
No ; for our consciousness is unitary, and not composite. Loose ideas will be like external objects and will have to be perceived as external objects are perceived. With loose ideas the mind will itself become idea-less, and devoid of knowledge. But knowledge consists, really, only in the states of the perceiving consciousness, which are inseparable from it.
The unity of knowledge may be further illustrated by another example. A man enters the field of my vision, and is perceived as one. A little later another man joins him. In my consciousness also the first man is joined by a second. Now in the world outside the two men are separate ; the first remained where he was, the second merely came and sat down by him. But in the mind the two constitute but one percept. While the second man was approaching the first one, the mind was continually furnishing new and ready-made mental pictures corresponding to the scene and the movements going on in the world outside. When the two men came together finally, there was no blending or pasting together of two different percepts in the mind. The mind is not possessed of any kind of glue or paste with which it may join together its percepts! The secret is only this that with each act of perception a new mental image is invoked and appears in the limelight.* The illustration of the dismantling of a house makes this idea sufficiently clear. Thus a new percept is presented every
* Outside the limelight of consciousness knowledge is not destroyed but exists in the sub-conscious' condition, owing to the inimical influence of matter which is in association with the soul.