Atma Dharma

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Champat Rai Jain

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soul, whenever and wherever it arises in the heart. Good and evil vanish at the merest contact with the self; likes and dislikes disappear from the heart even in the din and fury of a battlefield, if one becomes conscious of his true being for as much as the fractional part of a second. No need to dwell any further on the point; self-knowledge, when it ripens into a firm belief in the existence of the soul as separate and distinct from the body, as that body is from the clothes in which it is clad, is the source of all conceivable kinds of good to him who also meditates on his own being as divine and godly in every way. The forms of meditation that have been recommended by us, it is to be noticed, are only helpful secondary causes to which the mind might cling for support when wavering or unsteady. They are not needed when the soul can feel its being directly and without recourse to any such mental device.
Passing on now to a consideration of some of the accessories to self-realisation, we have seen that every soul is a Paramâtman in potency, a being who is to be perfected, or a god that is to be deified. How this deification of the individual soul is to be brought about ?-is the one theme of religion. Dhyana (meditation), culminating ultimately in pure self-contemplation, is the main cause of success ; but a number of minor points have to be