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THE NOTION OF GROWTH
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found insight into one single experience may positively reveal the mechanism of an entire level of reality, - as a part often reveals the whole behind it.56
The sutra introduces a systematic method for exploring partial areas of reality. It describes seven consecutive and interdependent steps that lead us ever closer to the examined object. The last step is the full integration of the (new) insight into our consciousness. Like pramana the insight then becomes part of the unified basis we rely on for steering our life.
The method of partial sights is excellently suited for becoming aware of vague experiences. It produces even faster results if we use it in dialogue with similarly interested people. It becomes much easier to verbalize our insights (step 5), if we have a partner to talk to.
Since reality is a huge, complex object, there of course exists an infinite number of partial views (nayas) from which this object (reality) can be perceived. The Jains accept that every perspective - as global as it might appear - can always only represent a partial truth. They accept fundamentally that there are other perspectives and partial truths - apart from their own - that may be equally valid.
This understanding is the basis of a sovereign tolerance towards other views, opinions, religions and philosophies that looks for its equal. The fundamental recognition that
56 Although the expansion of understanding from part to the whole
happens on more intuitive levels and beyond intellectual patterns like logic or deduction, it is not less precise and systematic. We experience insights of this kind as sudden dynamic understanding, where mind and feeling encounter an intuitive re-arrangement of thoughts. All new ideas, concepts, inventions etc. this world ever produced originate in this kind of dynamic insight.
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