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
52
form a man's personality and personality is what a man is, and this, in turn, shapes man's destiny. So it is said " a man is the master of his own destiny"; you become what you think. The mind consists of three parts, the outer (conscious) mind, the inner (subconscious) mind and the superconscious mind, which is the seat of the soul. The outer mind consists of two parts, the logical mind, located on the left, and the intuitive and emotional mind, located to the right side. The subconscious mind is not fully active. Buddhism has carried out lot of studies to understand the functioning of mind and activating the sub-conscious mind through meditation. Mind is multidimensional and always exists in excited state. It has unsurpassed multi tasking and parallel processing capabilities. It is the one which perceives, discriminates and forms an opinion. It is discursive, dualistic, thinking and always functions with respect to external references. It desires, compares, plots, manipulates, indulges in anger, emotions like hate, love, jealousy, greed, pride etc. Since in reality it is non-existent, all the time it is engaged in asserting, validating and confirming its existence by fragmenting, conceptualizing and accumulating experience. This ordinary mind is ceaselessly shifting and is subject to external influences, habitual tendencies and environmental conditioning. Actually, it is flickering, unstable, chaotic, confused, undisciplined, changing, repetitive and endlessly minding other's business; It is rarely concerned with the Self who is its master and does not ponder over its impermanence, death, rebirth etc., its energy is consumed by projecting outwards. No-mind is its ground state when all these activities cease. The nature of pure mind is defined by five qualities: It is vast and boundless, like space and possesses wisdom of all compassing space. It is a perfect reflector, like a mirror, and precisely reflects whatever comes before it in all the details, without being affected in any way. This is the mirror like wisdom of mind. It possesses equalizing wisdom, meaning essentially that it is impartial and has no bias towards anything. It has wisdom of discernment implying that it can distinguish all phenomena without confusion. The mind also has all accomplishing wisdom, that is it can visualise, analyse, perfect and spontaneously comprehend everything it comes across.
In comparison, the inner mind, much more powerful than the outer mind is pure, pristine awareness, that is at once intelligent, cognizant, self illuminating, intuitive and always awake, but it is hidden within the outer mind, obscured by mental scurry of our thoughts. The inner mind always remains untouched by change, fear or death. It is said to be the knowledge of knowledge itself. When the outer mind goes to the state of nomind, then the infinite faculties of the inner mind come into play and can be experienced but have to be activated, to function fully. Mind is similar to a film; if one wants to project Self on it then the old exposures have to be erased, otherwise there will be no clarity and the Self will not be recognized. It is said that the mind is a bad master but is a good slave and therefore it has to be controlled.
Upon death, the brain dies but mind, which is also the repository of the memory,