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MILLENNIA BEFORE DARWIN
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after having left behind the animal and lower kingdoms - can awaken step by step to buddhic consciousness and thus can become a Buddha – a fully awakened human being which can choose immediate nirvana or to postpone nirvāna to help others still struggling on the spiritual path." Full spiritual awakening, enlightenment or liberation can only be accomplished by right thinking and action, such as complete nonviolence and self-purification. During these efforts high yogic powers may develop, such as spiritual clairvoyance, knowledge of the thoughts of others (when the soul has acquired sufficient purity to be unable to misuse its power) the power to see karmic relations between someone's successive incarnations, and, above all, an infinitely spiritual and wise compassion. Finally one reaches what the Jains call kevalajñāna, omniscience: the soul reaches for ever its full unlimited blossoming. This is evolution in the true sense. All that our being always contained but could express only partially is than fully unfolded and manifest to the individual consciousness. That essence is our soul - every soul of every form of life – which is immortal and uses one form after the other on its long pilgrimage through nature.
A Jain might say that within this endless oscillation between high and low forms of existence the chance of being born as a human is very small. But in any of these forms of existence we must have had the opportunity to attract those karmas which gave us our present existence as a human! And when we finally become humans, most of us spoil the opportunity. How many of us really choose a spiritual life and, turning away from all lower aspects of our nature, direct ourselves exclusively towards the divine?
Still there are enough indications within the Jain teachings that the real state of affairs differs from the above exoteric opinion. One of the questions which are of interest in this connection is the exhaustion of the number of souls. Souls reach liberation, the highest state of being, never to return to a lower state. If there were no supply from below, one day all souls would have reached liberation - and because there has
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