Gandhi Before Gandhi

Author(s): Bipin Doshi, Priti Shah
Publisher: Jain Academy Educational Research Center Promotion Trust Mumbai

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A GANDHI BEFORE GANDHI
Pandit Gattulalji
Here is another case of the wonderful cultivation of memory. Pandit Gattulalji who died only a few years ago was born blind. In his early days, there being no system or institution for teaching the blind to read, he never had that training, What he learned was through hearing what others read. But his memory was so wonderful that after hearing a passage once, he could reproduce it at any time.
He became the head of the Vaishnava community in Bombay and received the highest respect from his coreligionists all over India. He gave many public demonstrations of what his memory could perform. He is the author of several works on the Vaishnava faith.
a state of consciousness, to be possible. Yet annihilation, absolute destruction, is as inadmissible in the moral as it is in the physical world; but little reflection or reason is needed to see that all phenomena are but states of some reality, of something that exists, the states may change into other states; but it is impossible for something to become nothing, or for nothing to become something. Such a miracle can neither be conceived by reason nor justified by experience. We may indeed, state such a proposition verbally; but as soon as we pass from words to things, from vagueness to precision, from the imaginary to the real, we cannot form an idea of any such annihilation in the objective or the subjective world.
An idea or a thing that has passed away from consciousness is not destroyed, but only transformed. Instead of being a present idea, it becomes a residuum, representing a certain tendency of the mind exactly proportioned to the energy of the original idea. The existence of ideas in an unconscious state, therefore, might be regarded as a state of perfect equilibrium. In other words, whenever any piece of information or knowledge comes to us like a flash, it is because that information or that knowledge was acquired by us sometimes in the past and it was existing in a latent state in the mean time.
What is the secret regarding this uncommon faculty of such people?
The phenomena of memory obey the law of the indestructibility of force, of the conservation of energy, which is one of the most important laws of the universe. Nothing is lost; nothing is annihilated; nothing that exists can ever cease to be. In Natural Philosophy this is an admitted fact. It is such a fundamental law that the whole of Natural Philosophy is considered but a commentary on it. Normally, we are not in the habit of applying this principle: we are commonly so accustomed to regard all moral and mental occurrences as the results of chance, and as subject to no laws, that many at least admit the annihilation of that, which was once
There must be a science which can teach how to accomplish the same result consciously and intentionally. Electricity existed even before the science of electricity was formulated; only in those primitive days people did not know its laws. It is claimed by the Jains of India that they posses a perfect system of philosophy, which teaches how to cultivate and perform wonderful feats of memory. We may only hope that our psychologists would get hold of a learned Jain and find out from him the methods and secret of this wonderful science,
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