Confluence of Opposites

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

Page 90

72
SCIENCE
conditions of that being as modified by the influence of another being or thing. It will be monstrous to suppose that I can feel another's being but not my own! As a matter of fact my knowledge of another de. pends on my capacity to feel the states of my own being. Hence it is wrong to say that in knowing an object the ego only knows the object but not itself. The fact is that only that which has a concrete existence can be felt by the soul, and as the states of consciousness, that Is to say of the soul-substance, have no existence apart from the soul-substance itself, they can only be felt simultaneously and along with the soul's own being, This is even so with reference to the feeling of pleasure or pain with which all of us are familiar. When I say I am feeling pain' or 'I feel pleasure,' I do not mean that pleasure and pain are concrete things outside me which I have alighted upon in some mysterious way. What I do mean is that I am aware of a state or modification of my owo being which is painful in one case and pleasant in the other. Pleasure and pain are thus only states of my consciousness, that is to say, of that general feeling of awareness which I have of my own being. The newly born infant that cries out on coming into the world, undoubtedly, also feels pain as a state of his own conciousness, though he is unable to form a clear picture of bis little personality in his mind for want of Intellectual lucidity at the time. Notwithstanding what modern wisdom may urge to the contrary, the fact is that a feeling of pleasure or pain cannot be experienced