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CHAPTER I
Jain Education International
THE ABSOLUTE AS PURE CONSCIOUSNESS
A
Essence and accident taken together, the person called 'I' is an individual unit consisting of a body, a mind and what will be shown as its essential presupposition-pure subjectivity, called also pure consciousness. Not that the particular body and mind and that pure consciousness remain side by side in clear distinction, nor as even half distinct from one another, from the beginning. It is given as almost a homogeneous unity, from out of which the three, with all the sub-stages involved, are only progressively distinguished out through a sort of deepening of reflection, much as what happens when forms are distinguished from out of a given situation. In a given situation, at the unreflective level, neither forms nor the residuary matter stand distinguished, even so much as half distinguished; and when subtler forms progressively unfold themselves in their respective autonomy- autonomy implying that the forms discovered at each stage can be imagined and tackled by themselves-every lower stage is, from the point of view of this distinguishing, understood as one where the form had stood undistinguishedly fused, and the residuary matter the-fused-state-minus-the-form-distinguished appears as never realizable in its autonomy but only as indefinite, speakable only in terms of the form distinguished -as what the form is not-its positivity (not denied) being only spoken of as a dark indefinite positive base which that form had somehow been dragged into and fused with. In other words, phenomenologically, matter as such is but the self-negation
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