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I am the Soul therefore it knows that it is facing trouble. It realises that the stretched hand can also kill it. Therefore, it does not get caught, it flies off. In the same way, whether small or big, whichever jiva or insect, animal or bird you see, has adequate knowledge for itself. And it manages self-defence. Through its knowledge, it also searches and locates essential substances and places etc. for life. All that is thanks to the spirit that abounds in it.
Howsoever powerful an inanimate thing may be, indeed, even a book in which knowledge is written, will not know even if somebody tears it or burns it. That is why, in the Mughal era our precious treatises were burnt down. Even a little child can lift and throw it away. That's because it is inanimate. It is not capable of knowing. Thus all the inanimate things in the world are without the capability of knowing.
Body is inanimate. It is merely a collection - skandha -of atoms and therefore it does not have in it the knowledge, which is the characteristic of the spirit - chaitanya.. We have also seen that the sensory organs are inanimate. They are not capable of knowing without the help of the atma. Even, life - pran - i.e. respiration is also pudgal. We absorb the pudgals of the respiratory category along with oxygen and release the same pudgals. Pudgals are inanimate and hence respiration is also inanimate. So the body, senses or life cannot experience the atma.
In fact, these three do not even know each other. The body does not know how many senses it has. The senses do not know in what part of the body they are, whether they are capable or incapable, whether they are effective or not. Why, the body does not even know whether it is breathing or not, how many times it has inhaled and how many times it should. Nothing is known. Breathing does not know in what part of the body it is functional. Thus all the three are inanimate, all three are ignorant of themselves and oblivious of the others. None of them know each other. Like I said earlier, the inanimate does not have the ability to know.
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