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Law of Kärma
The essence of man, according to Mahatma Gandbi is soul which has its objective value in Upanishads. “The One is real, the wise declares as many." Here also we find a progressive explanation of the self through four stages of (i) the bodily self; (ii) the empirical self; (iii) the transcendental sell; and (iv) the absolute self. The soul or self is characterised in such a way : the self is free from sin, from old age, from death and grief, from hunger and thirst, which desires nothing but what it ought to desire and imagines nothing but what it ought to imagine, that it is which we may try to understand. We find a development of the self from the waking, dreaming and sleeping states and is called triya.
Mahatma Gandhi asserts that the individual soul stands self-proved and self-known. One is absolutely certain about the existence of one's own soul and there can be neither doubt, nor denial regarding its existence. Individual self is the mixture of real and unreal, a knot of the existent and nonexistent, a coupling of the true and the false. It is a product of the ignorance but its essence is the light of the Absolute. The absolute soul, when identified with the body, is the product of ignorance but the soul as such is pure and absolute.
We use such expressions as “my body”, “my senses", etc. This shows that the body and the senses are certain objects which belong to me but are not identical with myself. Further, while body and the senses undergo changes, a man remains the same self throughout. For the same reason, a man's self must be distinguished from his mind, intellect and ego. All these are objects for the self and, therefore, not identical with it, The mind, ego and intellect of a man cease to function in the states of deep sleep, swoon and ecstacy, but even then his self abides as a conscious reality. Nor can the self be regarded as an aggregate of conscious states or a stream of consciousness, A flowing stream is not conscious of itself. It is the same or appears to be the same only for the same observer of its flow from beginning to the end. All these views lead Gandhi to believe that the real self of man is a permanent, self-conscious being or an unchanging immutable spirit.
The real self of man is revealed in the turiya state of consciousness. It is a state of deep concentration which is
