Enlightened Vision of the Self

Author(s): Akalankadev, Devendra K Goyal
Publisher: Radiant Publishers New Delhi

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THE ENLIGHTENED VISION OF THE SELF
The Jaina conception of staticity (substance] is ‘persistent flow'. The substance persists through modes. It is as well as becomes. Being and becoming are not mutually incompatible. One implies the other. Dead staticity is incompatible with change. Absolute being is inconsistent with becoming. If becoming were conceived as a super-addition to being, there would be self-contradiction. Becoming is not related to being in the same way as a pen is related to a table. But becoming means the state of being at a certain instant. Becoming involves and presupposes persistence. Becoming is not a derivative of being but its necessary concomitant. The question 'Why should a thing become and change?' is as absurd as the question 'Why should a thing exist?' Being and becoming are ontologically inseparable though they can be distinguished by logical thought. The thinkers who presume being as absolutely static and conceive becoming as a derivative of being are landed in selfcontradiction. They eventually reject either being or becoming or both as illusory:69
Thus, the reality of being is not opposed to the reality of becoming; becoming is, in fact, the fulfillment of being in its dynamic aspect. Sri Aurobindo observes:
The Being is the fundamental reality, the Becoming is an effectual reality: it is a dynamic power and result, a creative energy and working out of the Being, a constantly persistent yet mutable form, process, outcome of its immutable formless essence. All theories that make the Becoming sufficient to itself are therefore half-truths, valid for some knowledge of the manifestation acquired by an exclusive concentration upon what they affirm and envisage, but otherwise valid only because the Being is not separate from the Becoming but present in it, constituted of it, inherent in its every infinitesimal atom and in its boundless expansion and extension. Becoining can only know itself wholly when it knows itself as Being."
The Jaina conception of Reality seeks to avoid the two extremes