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and hardness of feeling is required to harm someone. This hardness keeps on increasing with each and every act of violence.
Learning the rules is not enough. One must have the willingness to observe them sincerely. Even the force of discipline is not enough. What is vital is the knowledge of the harm caused by one's action and realization of the pain it gives to the object. Knowing this, one must abandon the act. Unless one is not aware of the harm and pain caused, the determination to abandon the act is not enduring.
Flinching and moving away from the source of pain is a phenomenon observed in all living organisms, no matter how small or primitive. It is only the limitation of our physical senses that makes us unaware of the effect of pain on innumerable living things. That is where the importance of knowledge becomes evident. In ignorance of the harm we cause, we continue to indulge in those acts that seem to be harmless, but are not.
One of the most primitive forins of life is the flat worm. Besides simple tissue structure, what mainly exists in flatworm is a simple network of nerve fibers. They have no brains, yet they have surprising powers. One freshwater species, for example, can learn from experience. Individuals have been trained to find their way through a simple maze, selecting white-painted passages and avoiding dark-painted ones, by getting slight electric shock when they made a wrong decision. Another ainazing capacity of the living organism, even at that micro-level, is that they contain and retain the information within their simple neuronic structures. The worms that learned the mazes were killed and their flesh fed to other worms. It was found that the new worms ran through
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AHIMSA: THE SCIENCE OF PEACE Jain Education International
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