saidevo
29 January 2008, 10:15 AM
From now on, the chapters are voluminous, but surcharged with vital points and quotes for knowledge, discussion and contemplation. I shall therefore post the material under each chapter, spread across many messages under each thread, for easy interaction. The quotes from Hindu texts are given as in the book in most cases, both in the main text and in notes (several notes are brought up to the main text by me), with minimum paraphrasing; the quotes from the Western sources, however, are paraphrased in the main text and minimized in the notes; interested readers may refer to the book.--saidevo
The Priliminaries of the Third and Last Answer: Self and Not-Self
The second answer, though wavering and satisfactionless, is a great advance in that it reduced the multifariousness of the world to a duality; but then explanation of the world, which is the sole purpose of philosophy, by means of two factors, can only be a tentative, and not a final, solution.
What the seeker wants, however, is a Unity; in this respect, the first answer was indeed better than the second, for it reduced all things to a unity, the will of an omnipotent being.
As a fact, some earnest seekers, having arrived at the second answer, but not satisfied, and unable to advance to the third, deliberately go back to the first, and take up the bhakti-mArga, 'the path of devotion' to a Personal God.
The case of those who have advanced to the third answer, yet also, deliberately, revive the touch of personal bhakti, is different; as that of Vyasa composing the Bhagavata after having compiled the Mahabhttrata and written the Brahma Sutras, or of Shankara, singing hymns to Vishnu, Shiva, Devi and establishing maThas (celibate-Sannyasi-convents) and temples. In such cases the bhakti is consciously directed to a very high mukta soul, acting as a spiritual administrator of a department, globe, system, of the visible world.
देहबुद्धया तु दासोऽहं जीवबुद्धया त्वदंशकः ।
आत्मबुद्धया त्वमेवाहं, इति भक्तिश्रद्धा मता ॥
dehabuddhayA tu dAso&haM jIvabuddhayA tvadaMshakaH |
AtmabuddhayA tvamevAhaM, iti bhaktishraddhA matA ||
"Bhakti is threefold: As a physical body, I am Thy servant; as a soul, I am a piece of Thee; as Spirit, I am Thy-Self." -- Hanuman to Rama.
The unity by the will of an omnipotent being, however, is a false unity, because it has no element of permanence in it. Tenure of immortality at the will of another is a mockery and a contradiction in terms.
The penultimate and the ultimate duality
Therefore the Jiva, however reluctantly, however painfully, has to give up that first unity, and search for a higher one. In this search, his next step leads him, by means of a close examination of the multiplicity which presses on him from all sides, to a duality which seems to him, and indeed is, at the time, the nearest approach to that higher unity that he is seeking.
The forms of this duality, wherein he is centred for the time being, beginning with rough general conceptions of Spirit (or Force) and Matter, end in the subtlest and most refined ideas of Self and Not-Self.
These, the Self and the Not-Self, are the last two irreducible facts and factors of all Consciousness. They cannot be analysed any further. All concrete life, in cognition-desire-action, and substance-attribute-movement, begins and ends with these. They are the two simplest constituents of the last result of all philosophical research.
Existence of Self: no one doubts it!
No one doubts "Am I or am I not". This has been said over and over again by thinkers of all ages and of all countries.
न हि जातु कश्चिदत्र संदिग्धे 'अहम् वा नाहम् वा' इति ।
na hi jAtu kashcidatra saMdigdhe 'aham vA nAham vA' iti |
says Vachaspati's Bhamati (p.2) about the nature and existence of the Self.
"This (self) is known through indubitable, non-erroneous and immediate experience of the nature of "I," as distinct from the body, the organs, the mind, the intellect, their objects, (in short) from whatever may be designated by the term "this"; (this experience exists) in all living beings from the worm and the moth to gods and sages; hence the self cannot be the object of a desire to know. No one indeed doubts "Is this I or not-1?" or makes the mistake "this is not I at all". (Translation from The Bhamati Catussutri by S.S.Suryanarya Sastry and C.Kunhan Raja. This book can be downloaded at: http://www.archive.org/details/bhamaticatussutr029636mbp [25 MB]--sd)
Descartes' famous maxim, Cogito, ergo sum, 'I think, therefore I am,' reverses cause and effect. It would be truer to say, Sum, ergo cogito. The Bible logion, "I am that I am...I am hath sent me to you" (Exodus), should be noted.
The existence of the Self is certain and indubitable. It proves the existence of everything else that is provable. It is not and cannot be proven by anything else. The very instinct of language, in East and West, past and present, bears eloquent, insistent, irrefrangible evidence to the fact, in the words sva-tah-pramANa, self-evident, sva-yam-siddha, self-proven (the technical Samskritam name for the geometrical axiom), evident and proven in, by, and to it-Self, the finality of all testimony, on which alone the purely 'imaginary assumptions', 'metaphysical concepts', of even that so-called exactest and most certain of sciences, mathematics, in all its departments, are veritably and utterly founded.
Nature of Self: The changeless amidst the changing
The next question about it is: What is it? Is it black--white--flesh and blood and bone--or nerve and brain--or rocks and rivers, mountains, heavenly orbs,--or light or heat or force invisible,--or time or space? is it identical or coextensive with the living body, or is it centred in one limb, organ, or point or spot thereof?
The single answer to all this questioning is that "That which varies not, nor changes, in the midst of things that change and vary, is different from them";
तस्माद्वेषु व्यावर्त-मानेषु यद अनुवर्तते तत् तेभ्यो भिन्नम् यथा कुसुमेभ्यः ।
tasmAdveShu vyAvarta-mAneShu yada anuvartate tat tebhyo bhinnam yathA kusumebhyaH |
"Hence, that which is constant in whatever is variable, that is different from the latter, as a string from the flowers (strung thereon)."
-- Vachaspati's Bhamati (p.3)
therefore the I Consciousness, which persists unchanged and one, throughout all the many changes of the material body and its surroundings, is different from them all. 'I' who played and leapt and slept as an infant in my parent's lap so many years ago, have now infants in mine own. What unchanged and persistent particle of matter continues throughout these years in my physical organism? What identity is there between that infantine body and this aged one of mine? But the 'I' has not changed. It is the same. ( for the persistent Jiva-atom--footnote #1)
Talking of myself, I always name myself 'I', and nothing more nor less. The sheaths in which I am always enwrapping the 'I' thus: I am happy, I am miserable, I am rich, I am poor, I am sick, I am strong, I am young, I am old, I am black, I am white, I am a god in dreams, a very helpless human creature on waking--these are accidents and incidents in the continuity of the 'I'. They are ever passing and varying. The 'I' remains the same. Conditions change, but they always surround the same 'I', the unchanging amid the changing; and anything that changes is, at first instinctively, and later deliberately, rejected from the 'I', as no part of itself.
And as it remains unchanged through the changes of one organism, so it remains unchanged through the changes and multiplicity of all organisms. Ask anyone and everyone in the dark, behind a screen, through closed door-leaves: "Who is it?" The first impulsive answer is: "It is I." Thus potent is the stamped impress, the unchecked outrush, the irresistible manifestation of the Universal Common 'I' in all beings.
आमन्त्रितस्.ह् .अहम् अयम् इत्येव अग्रे उक्त्वा, अथ अन्यन्नाम प्रब्रूते यदस्य भवति ।
Amantritas.h .aham ayam ityeva agre uktvA, atha anyannAma prabrUte yadasya bhavati |
I-iv-1: In the beginning, this (universe) was but the self (Viraj) of a human form. He reflected and found nothing else but himself. He first uttered, "am he". Therefore he was called Aham (I). Hence, to this day, when a person is addressed, he first says, 'It is I,' and then says the other name that he may have. Because he was first and before this whole (band of aspirants) burnt all evils, therefore he is called Purusha. He who knows thus indeed burns one who wants to be (Viraj) before him.
-- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, I.iv.1
The special naming and description: "I am so and so," follows only afterwards, on second thought. So real is the 'I' to the 'I', that it expects others (who really are not 'others') to recognise it as surely as it recognises it-Self.
Again, what is true of the 'I' with regard to the body, is also true of it with regard to all other things. The house, the town, the country, the earth, the solar system, which 'I' live in and identify and connect with myself, are all changing momentarily; hut 'I' feel myself persisting, unchanged through all their changes.
Beginning or ending of the 'I': never experienced
'I' am never, and can never be, conscious of myself having ever been born or of dying, of experiencing a beginning or an end...
Births and deaths of 'others' are always felt as only 'incidents' in our life, 'my' life, which is always felt as permanent, impossible to begin or end 'I' never realize that 'I' was born or shall die. 'I' can only 'see' in 'imagination', a tiny infant body being born, and a grown up one dying, and, in thought, connect the two with "my-self', 'me', 'T'. So I can, and do, see, with physical eyes, the bodies of 'others' being born or dying. We cannot realize that 'I' shall die.
That we 'fear death' is really only fearing the loss of enjoyment of our possessions, especially of our body, through which we enjoy the possessions, with which 'I' have identified my-self, by means of which I feel my separate individual 'self'-existence. We do not fear sleep, nay, we welcome it, in its due time, and stand in terror of insomnia, because, and only so long as, our body and possessions are not menaced by or during sleep.
maasa abdaa yuga kalpeshhu gat aagamyeshh vanekadhaa |
nodeti na astamety ekaa sa.nvid eshhaa svayaM prabhaa ||
--Panicha-dashi i.7.
"In all the endless months, years, and small and great cycles, past and to come, this Self-luminous Consciousness alone ariseth never, nor ever setteth."
But as regards all the things other than 'I', that 'I' am conscious of, 'I' am or can become conscious also of their beginnings and endings, their changes.
"Never has the cessation either in time or in space of consciousness been experienced, been witnessed directly; or if it has been, then the witness, the experiencer, himself still remains behind as the continued embodiment of that same consciousness." (Devi Bhagavata III.32.15-16)
It may be objected "But this is only negative proof, show me positive proof, that the 'I'-Consciousness stretches through all time". The answer is: "First, it is not negative proof that is advanced here, but negation of negation of Consciousness , and two negatives make a positive. Second, in order that you may have positive proof of the kind you have in mind, i.e., witnessing the everlastingness of the 'I', you must watch it everlastingly, you can scarcely have direct positive proof of evcrlastingness compressed into a few seconds or a few minutes of answer to your query, can you?
Lack of memory of past births is no disproof of rebirth. Far the larger part of daily knowings, feelings, actings, is completely forgotten Yet nothing of them is wholly annihilated, it all remains buried in the sub- or supra-conscious; and is revivable under special conditions; as is proved by the work of hypnotists and psycho-analysts. How and why--the scientists admit they have no satisfactory purely physical or physiological explanation. The superphysical explanation, given by Indian and other yoga and mystic traditions, is that all, the minutest, details of experience are 'photographed' and 'phonographed' in the sUkSma sharIraM, subtle body, on which the successive physical bodies of the same soul are strung. The complete explanation is to be found in the metaphysical aphorism, sarvam sarvatra sarvadA, 'all is every where, every when, everyway or all-ways' (Yoga-Vasishtha IV.33.1--sd).
When-so-ever and where-so-ever I imagine myself, my consciousness, i.e., all Consciousness (for consciousness is always and only My consciousness), as ceasing, in that same act of imagination I see the subsequent time and the further space as devoid of Me--a contradiction in terms.
Every when and where, every then and there, every instant of time and point of space, at which I may try to imagine myself (i.e., the 'My-consciousness,' the consciousness which is Me, which is I, the subject, and not the body which is an object) as ending, is itself within me, in my imagination; I am all around and about and beyond it always and already. Thus may we determine what the 'I' is.
Omnis determinatio est negatio, "all determination is negation," is a well-known and well-established maxim (found in Spinoza’s letter to Jarigh Jelles dated June 2nd, 1674--sd). We determine, define, delimit, recognise, by change, by contrast, by means of opposites; so much so that even a physical sensation disappears entirely if endeavoured to be continued too long without change; thus we cease to feel the touch of the clothes we put on, after a few minutes.
Scrutinising closely, the enquirer will find that everything particular, limited, changing, must be negated of the 'I'; and yet the 'I', as proved by the direct experience of all, cannot at all be denied altogether. It is indeed the very foundation of all existence.
'Existence,' 'being', (using the two words roughly as synonymous at this stage), means nothing more than 'presence in our consciousness,' 'presence within the cognition of the I, of the Self, of Me'. What a thing is, or may be, or must be, entirely apart from us, from the consciousness which is 'I', of this we simply cannot speak. It may not be within our consciousness in detail, with its specifications; but generally, in some sort or other, it must be so within consciousness, if we are to speak of it at all.
**************************************************
Footnotes:
**************************************************
1. The persistent Jiva-atom
What truth there is in the view, that some one or more particles of matter persist with persistent consciousness (two forms of which view are the theosophical doctrine of the auric egg, jIva-kosha, and Weismann's theory of cell-continuity) may appear later. (See the chapter on Jiva-atoms, infra.)
The Priliminaries of the Third and Last Answer: Self and Not-Self
The second answer, though wavering and satisfactionless, is a great advance in that it reduced the multifariousness of the world to a duality; but then explanation of the world, which is the sole purpose of philosophy, by means of two factors, can only be a tentative, and not a final, solution.
What the seeker wants, however, is a Unity; in this respect, the first answer was indeed better than the second, for it reduced all things to a unity, the will of an omnipotent being.
As a fact, some earnest seekers, having arrived at the second answer, but not satisfied, and unable to advance to the third, deliberately go back to the first, and take up the bhakti-mArga, 'the path of devotion' to a Personal God.
The case of those who have advanced to the third answer, yet also, deliberately, revive the touch of personal bhakti, is different; as that of Vyasa composing the Bhagavata after having compiled the Mahabhttrata and written the Brahma Sutras, or of Shankara, singing hymns to Vishnu, Shiva, Devi and establishing maThas (celibate-Sannyasi-convents) and temples. In such cases the bhakti is consciously directed to a very high mukta soul, acting as a spiritual administrator of a department, globe, system, of the visible world.
देहबुद्धया तु दासोऽहं जीवबुद्धया त्वदंशकः ।
आत्मबुद्धया त्वमेवाहं, इति भक्तिश्रद्धा मता ॥
dehabuddhayA tu dAso&haM jIvabuddhayA tvadaMshakaH |
AtmabuddhayA tvamevAhaM, iti bhaktishraddhA matA ||
"Bhakti is threefold: As a physical body, I am Thy servant; as a soul, I am a piece of Thee; as Spirit, I am Thy-Self." -- Hanuman to Rama.
The unity by the will of an omnipotent being, however, is a false unity, because it has no element of permanence in it. Tenure of immortality at the will of another is a mockery and a contradiction in terms.
The penultimate and the ultimate duality
Therefore the Jiva, however reluctantly, however painfully, has to give up that first unity, and search for a higher one. In this search, his next step leads him, by means of a close examination of the multiplicity which presses on him from all sides, to a duality which seems to him, and indeed is, at the time, the nearest approach to that higher unity that he is seeking.
The forms of this duality, wherein he is centred for the time being, beginning with rough general conceptions of Spirit (or Force) and Matter, end in the subtlest and most refined ideas of Self and Not-Self.
These, the Self and the Not-Self, are the last two irreducible facts and factors of all Consciousness. They cannot be analysed any further. All concrete life, in cognition-desire-action, and substance-attribute-movement, begins and ends with these. They are the two simplest constituents of the last result of all philosophical research.
Existence of Self: no one doubts it!
No one doubts "Am I or am I not". This has been said over and over again by thinkers of all ages and of all countries.
न हि जातु कश्चिदत्र संदिग्धे 'अहम् वा नाहम् वा' इति ।
na hi jAtu kashcidatra saMdigdhe 'aham vA nAham vA' iti |
says Vachaspati's Bhamati (p.2) about the nature and existence of the Self.
"This (self) is known through indubitable, non-erroneous and immediate experience of the nature of "I," as distinct from the body, the organs, the mind, the intellect, their objects, (in short) from whatever may be designated by the term "this"; (this experience exists) in all living beings from the worm and the moth to gods and sages; hence the self cannot be the object of a desire to know. No one indeed doubts "Is this I or not-1?" or makes the mistake "this is not I at all". (Translation from The Bhamati Catussutri by S.S.Suryanarya Sastry and C.Kunhan Raja. This book can be downloaded at: http://www.archive.org/details/bhamaticatussutr029636mbp [25 MB]--sd)
Descartes' famous maxim, Cogito, ergo sum, 'I think, therefore I am,' reverses cause and effect. It would be truer to say, Sum, ergo cogito. The Bible logion, "I am that I am...I am hath sent me to you" (Exodus), should be noted.
The existence of the Self is certain and indubitable. It proves the existence of everything else that is provable. It is not and cannot be proven by anything else. The very instinct of language, in East and West, past and present, bears eloquent, insistent, irrefrangible evidence to the fact, in the words sva-tah-pramANa, self-evident, sva-yam-siddha, self-proven (the technical Samskritam name for the geometrical axiom), evident and proven in, by, and to it-Self, the finality of all testimony, on which alone the purely 'imaginary assumptions', 'metaphysical concepts', of even that so-called exactest and most certain of sciences, mathematics, in all its departments, are veritably and utterly founded.
Nature of Self: The changeless amidst the changing
The next question about it is: What is it? Is it black--white--flesh and blood and bone--or nerve and brain--or rocks and rivers, mountains, heavenly orbs,--or light or heat or force invisible,--or time or space? is it identical or coextensive with the living body, or is it centred in one limb, organ, or point or spot thereof?
The single answer to all this questioning is that "That which varies not, nor changes, in the midst of things that change and vary, is different from them";
तस्माद्वेषु व्यावर्त-मानेषु यद अनुवर्तते तत् तेभ्यो भिन्नम् यथा कुसुमेभ्यः ।
tasmAdveShu vyAvarta-mAneShu yada anuvartate tat tebhyo bhinnam yathA kusumebhyaH |
"Hence, that which is constant in whatever is variable, that is different from the latter, as a string from the flowers (strung thereon)."
-- Vachaspati's Bhamati (p.3)
therefore the I Consciousness, which persists unchanged and one, throughout all the many changes of the material body and its surroundings, is different from them all. 'I' who played and leapt and slept as an infant in my parent's lap so many years ago, have now infants in mine own. What unchanged and persistent particle of matter continues throughout these years in my physical organism? What identity is there between that infantine body and this aged one of mine? But the 'I' has not changed. It is the same. ( for the persistent Jiva-atom--footnote #1)
Talking of myself, I always name myself 'I', and nothing more nor less. The sheaths in which I am always enwrapping the 'I' thus: I am happy, I am miserable, I am rich, I am poor, I am sick, I am strong, I am young, I am old, I am black, I am white, I am a god in dreams, a very helpless human creature on waking--these are accidents and incidents in the continuity of the 'I'. They are ever passing and varying. The 'I' remains the same. Conditions change, but they always surround the same 'I', the unchanging amid the changing; and anything that changes is, at first instinctively, and later deliberately, rejected from the 'I', as no part of itself.
And as it remains unchanged through the changes of one organism, so it remains unchanged through the changes and multiplicity of all organisms. Ask anyone and everyone in the dark, behind a screen, through closed door-leaves: "Who is it?" The first impulsive answer is: "It is I." Thus potent is the stamped impress, the unchecked outrush, the irresistible manifestation of the Universal Common 'I' in all beings.
आमन्त्रितस्.ह् .अहम् अयम् इत्येव अग्रे उक्त्वा, अथ अन्यन्नाम प्रब्रूते यदस्य भवति ।
Amantritas.h .aham ayam ityeva agre uktvA, atha anyannAma prabrUte yadasya bhavati |
I-iv-1: In the beginning, this (universe) was but the self (Viraj) of a human form. He reflected and found nothing else but himself. He first uttered, "am he". Therefore he was called Aham (I). Hence, to this day, when a person is addressed, he first says, 'It is I,' and then says the other name that he may have. Because he was first and before this whole (band of aspirants) burnt all evils, therefore he is called Purusha. He who knows thus indeed burns one who wants to be (Viraj) before him.
-- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, I.iv.1
The special naming and description: "I am so and so," follows only afterwards, on second thought. So real is the 'I' to the 'I', that it expects others (who really are not 'others') to recognise it as surely as it recognises it-Self.
Again, what is true of the 'I' with regard to the body, is also true of it with regard to all other things. The house, the town, the country, the earth, the solar system, which 'I' live in and identify and connect with myself, are all changing momentarily; hut 'I' feel myself persisting, unchanged through all their changes.
Beginning or ending of the 'I': never experienced
'I' am never, and can never be, conscious of myself having ever been born or of dying, of experiencing a beginning or an end...
Births and deaths of 'others' are always felt as only 'incidents' in our life, 'my' life, which is always felt as permanent, impossible to begin or end 'I' never realize that 'I' was born or shall die. 'I' can only 'see' in 'imagination', a tiny infant body being born, and a grown up one dying, and, in thought, connect the two with "my-self', 'me', 'T'. So I can, and do, see, with physical eyes, the bodies of 'others' being born or dying. We cannot realize that 'I' shall die.
That we 'fear death' is really only fearing the loss of enjoyment of our possessions, especially of our body, through which we enjoy the possessions, with which 'I' have identified my-self, by means of which I feel my separate individual 'self'-existence. We do not fear sleep, nay, we welcome it, in its due time, and stand in terror of insomnia, because, and only so long as, our body and possessions are not menaced by or during sleep.
maasa abdaa yuga kalpeshhu gat aagamyeshh vanekadhaa |
nodeti na astamety ekaa sa.nvid eshhaa svayaM prabhaa ||
--Panicha-dashi i.7.
"In all the endless months, years, and small and great cycles, past and to come, this Self-luminous Consciousness alone ariseth never, nor ever setteth."
But as regards all the things other than 'I', that 'I' am conscious of, 'I' am or can become conscious also of their beginnings and endings, their changes.
"Never has the cessation either in time or in space of consciousness been experienced, been witnessed directly; or if it has been, then the witness, the experiencer, himself still remains behind as the continued embodiment of that same consciousness." (Devi Bhagavata III.32.15-16)
It may be objected "But this is only negative proof, show me positive proof, that the 'I'-Consciousness stretches through all time". The answer is: "First, it is not negative proof that is advanced here, but negation of negation of Consciousness , and two negatives make a positive. Second, in order that you may have positive proof of the kind you have in mind, i.e., witnessing the everlastingness of the 'I', you must watch it everlastingly, you can scarcely have direct positive proof of evcrlastingness compressed into a few seconds or a few minutes of answer to your query, can you?
Lack of memory of past births is no disproof of rebirth. Far the larger part of daily knowings, feelings, actings, is completely forgotten Yet nothing of them is wholly annihilated, it all remains buried in the sub- or supra-conscious; and is revivable under special conditions; as is proved by the work of hypnotists and psycho-analysts. How and why--the scientists admit they have no satisfactory purely physical or physiological explanation. The superphysical explanation, given by Indian and other yoga and mystic traditions, is that all, the minutest, details of experience are 'photographed' and 'phonographed' in the sUkSma sharIraM, subtle body, on which the successive physical bodies of the same soul are strung. The complete explanation is to be found in the metaphysical aphorism, sarvam sarvatra sarvadA, 'all is every where, every when, everyway or all-ways' (Yoga-Vasishtha IV.33.1--sd).
When-so-ever and where-so-ever I imagine myself, my consciousness, i.e., all Consciousness (for consciousness is always and only My consciousness), as ceasing, in that same act of imagination I see the subsequent time and the further space as devoid of Me--a contradiction in terms.
Every when and where, every then and there, every instant of time and point of space, at which I may try to imagine myself (i.e., the 'My-consciousness,' the consciousness which is Me, which is I, the subject, and not the body which is an object) as ending, is itself within me, in my imagination; I am all around and about and beyond it always and already. Thus may we determine what the 'I' is.
Omnis determinatio est negatio, "all determination is negation," is a well-known and well-established maxim (found in Spinoza’s letter to Jarigh Jelles dated June 2nd, 1674--sd). We determine, define, delimit, recognise, by change, by contrast, by means of opposites; so much so that even a physical sensation disappears entirely if endeavoured to be continued too long without change; thus we cease to feel the touch of the clothes we put on, after a few minutes.
Scrutinising closely, the enquirer will find that everything particular, limited, changing, must be negated of the 'I'; and yet the 'I', as proved by the direct experience of all, cannot at all be denied altogether. It is indeed the very foundation of all existence.
'Existence,' 'being', (using the two words roughly as synonymous at this stage), means nothing more than 'presence in our consciousness,' 'presence within the cognition of the I, of the Self, of Me'. What a thing is, or may be, or must be, entirely apart from us, from the consciousness which is 'I', of this we simply cannot speak. It may not be within our consciousness in detail, with its specifications; but generally, in some sort or other, it must be so within consciousness, if we are to speak of it at all.
**************************************************
Footnotes:
**************************************************
1. The persistent Jiva-atom
What truth there is in the view, that some one or more particles of matter persist with persistent consciousness (two forms of which view are the theosophical doctrine of the auric egg, jIva-kosha, and Weismann's theory of cell-continuity) may appear later. (See the chapter on Jiva-atoms, infra.)