Gandhi Before Gandhi

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

Page 65

GANDHI BEFORE GANDHI
What is Soul - Atman?-Indian perspective.
additional series of kaleidoscopic changes in the arrangement of the particles of the body is presented which is called self-consciousness. This is a very small credit given to the human stage of individual development. In that philosophy there can be no place for individual memory, as the incoming particles in the body can never come to know, what was done ten years ago by a certain multitude of particles, if they were not there then. It does not answer in a satisfactory way the question - what is it that preserves unity amidst the continuous changes that are going on all the time in the body? This unifying entity that is in every living thing is what the Aryans call the Atman, the soul. All living beings, therefore, are Atman, plus material body, not mixed up in a mechanical way as water and sugar are in syrup, but both of them phenomenally acting upon each other and creating important changes in each other.
The Western scholars and scientific men of the modern age draw a demarcation line between animals and men, and we are told that animals are only conscious, while human beings are self conscious. Self conscious is supposed to be the naturally inherited property of every human being. Animals have only the consciousness of feelings through sensations but that they have no consciousness of their own individual existence, while human beings, in addition to the consciousness of the external world through feelings and
thoughts have also a consciousness of their own existence. This distinguishing mark of the human being is easy to understand and digest in superficial thought but it leaves the question open, what is self-consciousness, or consciousness of the self? In fact, what is self? Materialistic science does not admit a self other than the body. Consciousness and self-consciousness, in their view, are merely the kaleidoscopic panorama from the psychic side of the various elements of the living body that are changing every moment, replaced by others. According to this idea, man is a bundle of bones, muscles and nerves, whose chief and perhaps the only function would be to store sensations, feelings and emotions. Man would, therefore, be very little different from the animal except in the supposed fact that in the human being an
Spiritual nature of the soul-Matter of experience?
What is really speaking the spiritual nature of the soul? It may be said to have a center but no circumference, and therefore cannot be described by any words, it can only be experienced by all of us, if we are living on that plane; but we can sometimes describe it just by a simile The description which would be given of different things is just according to the idea that we derive through experience of our senses. As soul itself is not a thing which can be perceived by the senses, no