Jainism Eternal and Universal Path for Enlightenment

Author(s): Narendra Bhandari
Publisher: Research Institute of Scientific Secrets from Indian Oriental Scriptures Ahmedabad

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Jainism : The Eternal and Universal path for Enlightenment
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very primitive species have evolved into the most developed species. Life first started on the Earth about 3500 million years ago. Since then, the nature has been following a direction, a direction of evolution of consciousness. This record is preserved in form of fossils on Earth from the very beginning as shown in Figure 1.1. Let us look at this record in some detail.
Evidence of whatever happens on Earth, in form of any activity involving either living and non-living, eventually gets washed off by rain and rivers in to the sea and deposits there together with the dust at the bottom. The history of life is preserved as fossils in these sediments. It is clear from these records that life on earth began about 3500 million years ago, about 1000 million years after the Earth was formed, with relatively simple single-celled micro-organisms, the first prokaryotes. They evolved into multi-celled (eukaryotic) organisms and then slowly into mobile (moving) and flying species. Mammals and humans arrived on the Earth very recently. Hominids, the predecessors of Homosapiens emerged only about 6 million years ago. This sequence or the tree of life is shown in figure 1.1. If we ignore small perturbations which have punctuated the evolution occasionally, we find that broadly the nature itself has followed a direction, a path of evolution of consciousness to higher and higher level. Thus we may conclude that the natural or "true" path is the one which evolves consciousness to a higher level. We can then say that every action which enhances the consciousness to a higher level is "dharma" and any step which goes in the reverse direction, i.e. reduces the level of consciousness is "adharma".
Jainism classifies species in one sensed (touch) to five sensed (touch, smell, taste, hearing and vision) species. Nature seems to have started with one sensed organisms and slowly evolved in to five sensed organisms. Extrapolating this trend into the future, it can be predicted that the level of consciousness will develop further with time and a super human will no doubt arise. Jainism prescribes a methodology to attain higher level of consciousness, evolution to the next stage, if nature continues to tread this evolutionary path. This stage will be accompanied by higher level of jnin.
Study of the fossil record in sediments has taught us many other aspects of evolution. The main features are summarized below.
1. As already mentioned, evolution of consciousness has been the path taken by nature: from single cell to multi-cellular, to more complex marine species and ultimately to mammals and to humans via a detour through plants etc describes the direction of this evolution. Plants adopted a direct process of getting energy from the environment through inorganic processes (photosynthesis) whereas other species found a way of