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excellent description is given about the movement of a worldly soul from one birth to another and so on. With each stage of development, the knowledge content of soul goes up.
III.
HIGHER STAGES OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS REFLECTED BY A LARGE INCREASE IN MEMORY AND AWARENESS:
A. Remarkable memory of Swami Vivekanad implies a
highly ordered state of consciousness
mental potential. A common man can hear and remember serially 3 or 4 at a time. This is based on conscious mind. Anyone with exceptional intellect can extend this number from 3-4 to 10-11. However, taking this number to 100 is beyond the powers of most of the people. Shatavadhan is the ability to receive, retain and retain 100 activities accrued through eyes or ear during one period of attention and carried from the conscious to the subconscious. In Jain tradition one can name ShrimadRajchandra, Guru of Mahatma Gandhi (6,7). Similarly these days, Ajeet Chand Sagarji Maharasahab, a satavdhani has demonstrated his spiritual powers in Ahmedabad (2008) and Mumbai (2012) who can listen to two hundred questions (or scenes he watches) asked by say two hundred persons at a stretch for say four hours and can answer them in the same sequence or reverse sequence after four hours, just like a machine with almost 100 percent accuracy. He is expected to give a similar demonstration involving 500 avadhans in Mumbai on November 16,2014.
It is too well known thatSwami Vivekanand had such a sharp memory that he almost remembered 11 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica, which he had just scanned once (using read would not be correct). He could virtually recall any line on any page of any of the 11 volumes available at that time. It appears that with continuous dedication and spiritual practices, the state of consciousness evolves and in many cases, it is accompanied by an increase in memory, that is improvements in capture, storage and recalling of objects and events.
Did ancient Jain Acharyas tried to estimate size of smallest particles of matter: An evidence that some unexplored mechanism to acquire knowledge exist:
B. Shatavadhan (Capability to memorize one hundred
questions or events and recall)
An example of the hypothesis of the above formalism is given below which is called shatavadhan. Shatavadhan (Shat- 100 + Avdhan) is a power to cover 100 different activities in a single act of attention. One who reaches the stage of shatavadhan is called Shatavadhani. A shatavadhanican remember 100 different things in a 100 different orders, spoken by 100 different people. This unbelievable power has been attained by a handful of people over the human history and because it needs very high stage of spiritual development. According to the modern scientific belief, a normal human being utilizes hardly 2% to 3% of his total
Another example is taken from ancient Jain scriptures [8]. It gives a Table for measurement of length (Appendix 3). It starts from the smallest particle of matter and goes up to one Yojana (a commonly used unit of length prevalent in ancient India). It indicates that ancient Jain acharyas have made an attempt to develop a table for measurement of length in 20 steps. This is an octal system till step 12. As explained in the Appendix 3, if we statistically interpret it then we find that as per their assessment, the size of the smallest particle of matter (known as avsannasannaskandhafrom practical point of view in prakrit language) is 2.9X 10 cm. This value lies in between the size of a modern atom (10 cm) and size of a nucleus (10 cm). Now we may not be knowing the meanings of many of the objects used in
