Practical Path

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

Page 21

THE PRACTICAL PATH.
unwary are led to imagine this one-sided description of their nature as exhaustive, many even falling into the pitfall of logical 'suicide' by basing their deductions on a set of rules or formulas which are applicable to facts gleaned from a particular stand-point, but not to any other. We can observe for ourselves the nature of confusion which is likely to result from an ignoring or mixing up of different stand-points by means of the two following illustrations :--
(1) Let us take for our first illustration the famous text, 'Jiva is Brahmin' (soul is God), which certain people preach without the least possible qualification. But obviously the statement is true only in so far as the natural qualities of the soul are concerned; it is not true in respect of the present manifested condition of an ordinary jiva who must exert himself in the right direction to attain to his natural purity. As water in its essence is pure gaseous matter, so is a java, with regard to his pure natural qualities, a perfect God; but as water, as water, cannot be said to be air, so cannot a java involved in the simsara be said to be pure Brahmân. This illustrates the effect of a one-sided absolutism of thought which ignores all other points of view; and its far-reaching consequences can be seen in the monistic speculations of certai: philosophers who have based their system of metaphyeics on the natural attribute of the soul, altogether ignoring the standpoint of evolution. These gentlemen, unable to explain the different conditions of beings and things arising in the course of their evolution, have actually found themselves forced to describe the world as an illusion, pure and simple.