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
takes place by natural selection and life is a struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. One point is clear from the Darwin's theory that evolution is a product of two processes, which are operating all the time: interaction and adaptation. Both are the traits of soul i.e. consciousness. Adaptation essentially means learning and there is no devolution, i.e. unlearning. Evolution, however, is not confined to physical evolution only; the underlying trend is evolution of consciousness;. Whether mechanical interaction with the environment leads to physical evolution of the brain or consciousness is the motive force which by interaction with matter leads to learning process which in turn raises the consciousness level remains to be determmined by further research at molecular level. Be it as it may, the journey of life on earth has been from a very low level of consciousness in single celled species to the highest level seen currently in humans. Evolution, like karma (Chapter 4) has two components: Sanchit, the cumulative evolution from the single celled algae to the present human life and arjit, that is the extent to which we evolve in the present life. Thus we owe our present state of consciousness, indeed our very existence, not only to "our" past lives or to our parents but to the lives of all the species which have existed till now, alive and dead; extant and extinct. This is the fundamental concept leading immediately to the importance of nonviolence. As far as we can extrapolate, the evolutionary trend of consciousness should continue in the future. This then is the path of nature and it has set itself a goal of raising the level of consciousness to ever increasing level.
The question then arises "Can we humans, by some technique, attain the next state, which, in comparison to us, may be considered an enlightened state". It may just only be a step away. According to Jainism, the answer is “Yes, we can”. That is Jainism all about. At any point of time, the population has a wide spectrum of consciousness levels. A small fraction is highly advanced, at the highest end of consciousness level, most are at the average level and a few are at the lower tail end. The distribution should be similar to the Maxwellian distribution of energy. Those at the highest level are close to the next stage where nature is going to take us in course of time by Darwinian evolution, i.e. they are almost there. They, by practicing the techniques propounded by Jainism (as discussed in chapter 6), and surely by other paths as well, can attain the next level of consciousness.
One important point may be noted here regarding the origin and evolution of life. All species are symmetrical and have binary system (two eyes, two arms, two legs etc). All the life on earth therefore probably has the same root. There are three basic type of species on the earth: Archea, Bacteria and Eucarya and it has been speculated that all