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STAGES OF SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT
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Innumerable years, as already mentioned, make one palyopama.
To illustrate to the mind the idea of a palyopama, if you dig a hole in the ground 8 miles long, 8 miles wide, and 8 miles deep, fill it with hair cut up into the shortest possible lengths, and press it into the hole by marching heavy processions, steam rollers or anything similar over it, and then once a year take out a piece of the hair, it will in time become emptied, but it will be in an innumerable quantity of years. Processes Necessary to Reach the State of Samyaktva
Come back, now, to the processes through which one must pass, in order to reach the state of samyaktva. The first thing to do is to lessen the duration of the karmas, and the amount by which the duration is to be lessened is the next question. Each of the seven above named karmas must be reduced to 100,000,000,000,000 years maximum duration; and when the living being experiences the feeling that this whole embodied life is a misery, it shows that this work of reduction has been done. This is the first process called yathapravṛtti-karana. This is only possible for a five sense-organ mind-endowed living being. Other lower living beings do not pass through this experience for first process at all. But this experience may be felt an infinity of times and still the living being may not pass into the next or second process.
A muhūrta, as already mentioned, is 48 minutes English time, and 30 muhurtas are, therefore, one day. If the living being can succeed in reducing by only 48 minutes this one hundred billion years maximum duration of the karmas, he is then in the 2nd process called apūrvakaraṇa which has to be passed through in order to obtain the samyaktva condition. This second process consists in the manifestation of a desire to remove the worst degree of anger, of pride, of deceitfulness, and of greed. The first time this desire is experienced shows that this further reduction in the maximum duration has been effected. The literal meaning is 'not previously'; that is, this desire has not been previously experienced.
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