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THE LIBERATION FROM BONDAGE
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When boiling water was seen it appeared that heat is an integral part of it when its nature was understood heat was no more found to be integral to it
A misapprehension revealed the self to be bound, contiguous, exclusive, aberratic, extraordinary and alloyed When it's nature was revealed it was known that it is unbound, integral, unique, perennial, universal and unalloyed The cognition of the nature of self is self itself It inheres in the body and is still independent of the latter
Lord Mahavira was an aspirant of emancipation He had embarked upon his campaign to throw the cribbing conservatism to winds How, then, could he submit to the sanctions imposed by an extraneous politically sovereign entity? He discovered the sovereign entity in his own person • Self was his goal Self was the centre of his meditation Self was the one who meditated Again, it was for the sake of self that he meditated Self was the be all and end all to him As the oil pervades the sesamum seed, cream the milk and fire the fuel-wood, so the self pervades the body
The milling' separates the oil from the sesamum seeds The friction makes the fire manifest in the wood Similarly by means of systematic and discriminative meditation the self is discerned from the body.
Lord Mahavira endeavoured to realise the self by means of discounting and obliterating the body
The gross body contains the subtle one and the latter the soul
The Lord would shift the attention from the gross body to the subtle one and thence merge it into the soul
The soul is abstract, minute and beyond the ken of vision The Lord would realise it by means of refined wisdom It is the self that charges the body with consciousness and it is the body that is enlivened with the consciousness The self is the seer and the body the seen The self is the knower and the body the known The Lord would be led upto the self pursuing the 'awareness of its conscious, seer and knower
