"Man: means any human being; and although the subject
of consideration here is man, still the following theory applies not only
to us, but equally to plants, animals, birds, insects, fish, and any form
of embodied life, including devils, and angels.
Man is not a being of only one ingredient. He is a
compound of matter with soul. By reason of this compound man is what he is
actually. And from the point of view of what he is potentially, his
present life is an unnatural one.
The compound of matter with soul (bandha) is not
merely a mixture resolvable by a simple mechanical taking apart; but is
every subtle combination in which the two ingredients can be separated
only with difficulty if it is desired to separate them can scientifically.
But it is only each individual that can scientifically separate his own
soul and the matter combined with it. The separation cannot be effected by
another person. The characteristic nature of soul is consciousness (cetana)
or knowledge; and matter is unconscious, and it has the activities of
attraction and repulsion. The being resulting from the combination is
different in his characteristics from either of these two ingredients. In
him, the forces of attraction and repulsion natural to insentient matter
become respectively attachment and aversion. Aversion takes the form of
anger or pride; attachment become deceitfulness or greed. The more the
soul predominates in the compound, the less is the resulting being
ignorant and biased; the more there is of the influence of matter in the
compound, the more is the living being ignorant, angry, and greedy.
So the combination of soul with matter produces
energies (karma) the totality of which together with the soul
constitute the man or other mundane living being. These energies can be
considered with regard to there nature (prakarti) their duration or
how long they will stay with the soul (sthithi), their intensity
(anubhaga), and their mass (pradesa). Also with regard to the
generation of them; how they can be got rid of before their natural time;
and how the inflow of them into the being can be stopped.
Regarding these energies from the point of view of
their nature, function, or action, there are in us 158 of them, and they
can be grouped together under 8 classes, the nature of each class being
quite different from the nature of the other classes.
Before classifying these 158 energies the point of view
must be changed. To introduce the change we may say from Geo.T.Ladd's
"Theory of Reality", page 357 : How ready men are to recognize in their
own existence the presence of ideas and forces not consciously their own.
He (man) is very largely the product of other "Being" which penetrates his
self and yet which is known as not identical with his self. The point of
view is now changed from thing of man as a unit resulting from the
combination of soul and matter, and he is now thought of as an impure
soul; men are souls (with bodies).
