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The Path of Arhat : A Religious Democracy
objectivity to the personal phenomena which come only by cultivating a habit. The cultivation of this habit remains not so difficult if on every occasion of pleasure and pain we seek within ourselves their causes and try to go deeper in our enquiry as to their propriety and their impact on our character building. We are bound to experience that once this process of objective observation becomes habitual, the impact of emotional upsurges of pleasures and pains on our psyche becomes blunted. So the first requirement is the habit of objective observation of all the personal and impersonal occurances in life.
Upada ba-Nimitta ( Material and Efficient Cause ) ". The next requirement is the understanding that every phenomenon in life is governed by the doctrine of cause and effect and nothing which happens in this universe is accidental or miraculous. Once this understanding is ingrained, our attention would naturally be focussed on finding out the cause. Care should be taken to see that we go to the root cause instead of an immediate cause, which superficially strikes us, is mostly the effect of some other cause. For instance if some one has disturbed us by inflicting an insult, we at once conclude that the cause of our disturbance was that someone else. But if we think deeper and go to the root of the real cause of our disturbance, we will find that we are hypersensitive or that we were some how responsible for inciting the other one to insult us or that the other one who insulted us did not mean to insult us.
The Jaina philosophers have emphasized that whatever is the immediate cause, disturbing our soul, is foreign to us and merely provides an occasion or a situation. In Jaina philosophy it is a 'Nimitta', a pretext, with the help of which the 'self', which is the real cause, called 'Upidana' moves, and experiences the results. If the 'self' tries to remain unmoved, i. e., tries to remain unaffected by the situation, the object which is foreign to it and which is a 'Nimitta' cannot produce any result,
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