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JAIN JOURNAL
Chastity or Self-absorption, are of eternal value, guidance and inspiration. They are God-given and God-giving. We reach God through them. They negate the sins and passions of Anger, Pride, Deceit, Greed, etc. Sin and sorrow also are as eternal and infinite and indestructible as soul and salvation. You cross the ocean of samsāra. You never destroy it.
The Bhavyas or Liberables only attempt to follow the path laid down by the Arhantas. But mundane misery must ever remain unkillable in its extent and length.
The motion and movements of matter are not necessarily the signs of life. Matter may be moved by soul. Then also it is moved by th non-soul partner of soul in its embodied condition. For Pure Soul has no desire or need to move matter of any kind. Thus in a way matter is moved by matter only. In other words, soul is not the cause of any motion except when the soul is impure, soiled with its connection with matter and then it becomes the cause of motion. Even Love and Art and the noblest and highest forms of endeavour in life are material and renounceable. A beautiful form is matter-born, a result of the physical body made of assimilative molecules (ahāraka varganā). Love is only an effect upon the mind produced by this form of Beauty. The soul may also be affected by deep, devoted Love owing to this Love reinforcing a pure kind of Delusion which again is Karmic matter. Similarly Art. The Artist's unity with his all-absorbing aim in Painting, Poetry, Melody, Sculpture or Architecture is only a child of matter, which is subtle, pure, non-harming, but all the same matter, which soils the soul and stands between it and its full realisation. Similarly, religious practices, worship, postures of asceticism, etc., all the ladders to spirituality are material and matter-born. They fall into the category of non-soul. They are obviously not the soul in its entire fulness, in its perfect purity. They are help for the soul to achieve self-realisation. But they are not the soul. As pneumatic belts or upturned floating pitchers are help to a swimmer in water, but are not the swimmer, the practices of religion, even the highest of them, the sincerest and most earnest pursuit of right belief, right knowledge and right conduct are all mundane matters. They have no place in the region of pure souls. They are material, mundane, cis-liberation. As long as the soul is fascinated by or dependent upon or even in association with any of them, its connection with matter, with karma, with samsāra is not severed, and the mundane soul does not achieve the dignity and status of self-hood, of being its own pure self, of being a liberated soul, pure for ever.
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