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104
PROBLEM OF AVIDYA
[CH.
fountain-head of worldly career. We have also seen how this primal nescience, like the Christian counterpart of Original Sin, produces all sorts of evils. The supreme evil is the ego-consciousness which works like the hydra-headed monster. It generates love and hatred and lastly delusion which consists in thinking what is unwholesome as wholesome. The ego-consciousness is not confined to the self but embraces not-self as well. It is the outcome of the identification of the self with not-self beginning with the physical organism which encases it and ending with the external objects which produce feelings of pleasure and pain. This mistaken identity with the body and the senses and the objects of experience is made possible by the idea that they belong exclusively to the self. The material objects are thought to be its exclusive property by the deluded self though they are experienced and enjoyed by all persons without distinction. The external objects by themselves are not an evil. It is only when they are invested with false values by the deluded self that they become a potent source of bondage. The self develops love and attraction for the external objects including the body because it is deluded into thinking that they serve to promote its well-being. It is this belief in the intrinsic value of these brute material facts which are neither pleasant nor unpleasant without a self to contemplate them in these terms, that makes them a snare and a trap for the self, They induce attachment when they are believed to be pleasant and useful and produce revulsion and antipathy when they are conceived to be hostile to the self. The utility or hostility of the sense-data is a matter of false belief fostered by a long-drawn delusion which has been the companion of the soul from beginningless time. The delusion can be removed only by the proper appraisement of the intrinsic nature of the objects as they are without reference to the psychical reactions they are found to produce. When the self dispassionately contemplates these objects as brute facts which have no emotional or volitional satisfaction then the self will cease to be drawn by them. The body, for instance, is an exceedingly unlovable object. It is a mass of flesh and bones and blood, which should by themselves have no charm. It is subject to illness and decay and is bound to be dissolved into its elements by the operation of inexorable physiological and biological laws. It is impure, unclean and ungainly. This is no less true of one's own body than of other objects. But the fundamental and basic ignorance which forms, as it were, the original capital of the worldly existence of the self leads it astray and induces it to ascribe false values to things of experience. Beauty is one such value. Thus when a person looks at a member of the opposite sex he does not think that the human body is a mass of flesh and blood and bones. On the contrary he thinks that the person
1 Cf. doşanimittam rūpādayo vişayāḥ sankalpakstāh-NS, IV. 2. 2.
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