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THEORY OF MATTEREALS AND JAIN PHILOSOPHY / 85
Arhat, a human being, knows the entirety as this involves knowing past, present and future simultaneously?
Great Jain saint Mahapragya has effortlessly resolved this dilemma. According to him, Arhat does not access the happenings sequentially as we do. While the speed of light is our limit of perception, HE has the capacity to deploy his perceptive sukshma-pudgals (mass-less micro particles like dions and quadons) to captures the entire sequence with infinite speed. Period of capture reduces to zero so that the time elapsed cannot be quantified and entire happening collapses into a zero-period frame. This is supported by modern scientific and mathematical advancements also.
. We find everything in pairs - lok & Alok, positive & negative, matter & anti-matter, so does zero and infinity - they too, form an inseparable pair. Try adding miniscule to infinity we get zero or try subtracting something from zero, we get infinity. The tangible world exists between these two extremes. It is much significant that any unit when tends to become infinite another unit associated with it spontaneously becomes zero.
Mathematically, any arithmetic digit, if divided by zero, the result obtained is infinite. For example, w/o = 00.
Stating same thing in terms of physics, if mass attains infinite density, the space occupied reduces to zero. Similarly,
Time = distance / speed
When speed 7, time 0, irrespective of distance involved. Here lies the entire explanation of the phenomenon of omniscience. In Jain philosophy, the distance is synonymous to the knowledge. In case of nirvana, when speed = oo and time = 0, applying above formula,
Knowledge = infinite speed x zero time
Interestingly, the resultant outcome of this equation is indefinite and could be either oo or 0. While the first result of o stands for an Arhat, the second outcome of 0 exemplifies moksha or emancipation of the spirit. A simple analogy explains it better – take a circle, and imagine its diameter increasing till it becomes infinite. It remains a circle till its diameter is just short of infinity, after which, at infinity, it is no more a circle, but a straight line with infinite extent - state of Arhat. Conversely, reduce the diameter, till it becomes zero. Circle may become a point with infinitesimally small diameter, but when diameter actually becomes zero, strangely, everything disappears - moksha.
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