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58
THE PRACTICAL DHARMA
fection and joy. He knows that every weakness overcome is a clear gain, and remains cheerful under the severest trials and mishaps. As he advances steadily along the path, he soon begins to feel the natural delight of his soul, compared with which the ease and pleasure of millionaires and great potentates of the world loses all its fascination in his sight. Onward and onward does he press, making fresh conquests everyday, till the all-illumining effulgence of kevala jñāna (omniscience) bursts on his consciousness from within, on the breaking up of the clouds of ignorance and sin, amassed together by the four kinds of his ghātiyā karmas. Devas now come to worship Hım, and so do the best of men. Worshipped and adored by devas and men, the Conqueror lingers in the world of men till His aghātiyā karmas are worked off, when He rises to the top of the universe to reside there, for ever, in the enjoyment of all those divine qualities and attributes which people associate with their Gods.
The destruction of the ghātiyā karmas, it should be pointed out, is accompanied by many kinds of changes in the system of the muni who makes a conquest of his lower nature! Sense-perception is lost once for all and for ever, nerve currents are straightened out and lose their jñānaand darśana- obstructing crookedness, and the kārmāņa and taijasa šarīras are burnt up, as it were, though they still retain their form, owing to the influence of the remaining four kinds of karmas. The reason for this is that the sensory system consists of nervous threads' which under the influence of the customary forms of activity have become arranged in certain forms, so that when we check the activity of the senses and prevent the mind from wandering in its usual haunts, holding it to a particular point, a kind of strain is produced which tends to unloosen the very structure of nerves and of the knots formed by them. If we now persevere in the attitude of concentration for a sufficiently long period of time, these nervous threads' would become completely detached from their old groupings, and fall apart. The ascetic, who knows that the natural 'light' of his soul is obscured by the 'bushel' of matter, and knows how to remove the cover, concentrates his mind on those centres of his nervous system which are the least obscured and affected by matter. As he perseveres in concentration on these centres,
