Man as he actually Is

“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).