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JAINISM, CHRISTIANITY & SCIENCE
are overpowering and may drag the individual even into crime. Desires are not destroyed one by one, but they can be controlled one by one. The man who gives up tobacco, for instance, only subdues his craving for it; he does not root out the element of desire in that respect altogether. Even when a strong disgust for tobacco characterizes the mind, the craving is only subdued, although more effectively. The reason is this, that the psychic life being unitary and indivisible, it is not cut up into separate currents to maintain our diverse desires. The internal agitations are non-composite and will only disappear once for all and for ever. Body-consciousness is the root of ignorance and internal agitations, and all our desires spring from it. So long as this body-consciousness remains in the faintest degree and is not replaced, wholly and entirely, by the soul-consciousness, desires cannot be uprooted, though they may be controlled. In so far as will is associated with different objects of desire, it only attends to them one after another, and not by dividing itself into so many separate branches. It is for this reason that religion enjoins the complete renunciation of all things, including clothes. Like the demon in the Arabian Nights' Tales who springs out of the last remaining pip in the pomegranate, desires, if they have a single object of the world left to support them, will refuse to die and will spring up over and over again. From the foregoing it is clear that it is as sinful to entertain an evil intention as to execute an evil program. Both in Jainism and Christianity evil intention itself is. condemned, because that is the very form of desire, through which the inflow of matter is continued into the soul.
