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There are two distinct categories of soul: Perfect and Imperfect. The pure disembodies soul alone is perfect. The mundane, matter-clad soul is imperfect. By perfection here is meant a condition than which nothing is better for ever. Perfection is where there is no want, no desire, no room for further improvement or betterment. Perfect desire lessens, complete non-attachment  imperturbable Vit-rag-ta are connotations of perfections. Thus it is that Jainism dose not believe God, an Almighty, Perfect, Conscious Soul to be a Creator. Creation means bringing about something which was not before. The mundane soul when it becomes a Perfect Pure Soul, at the end of the 14^th Spiritual Sage, certainly creates its own perfect condition of Infinite Perception, Knowledge, Power and Bliss. In this sense, and in this sense alone, God or Siddha may be said to be the Creator of all the universe, present, past and future, for the Siddha is Omniscient; and all the universe, with will its substances, with all their attributes and modifications, in all times and places becomes subject to this All-Seeing Omniscience, and thus it may be said to create the universe. Here creation means the attainment of Perfection, of Omniscience, of Omnipotence, of Godhood, of Siddhahood. In no other sense, creation is possible in Jainism. If creation means the making or bringing into existence of something which was not before, (excepting that becoming perfect means bringing into existence the condition of Self-perfection and Omniscience, which was not before), it implies the conscious creation of something necessary and useful, or of something unnecessary and useless. If  the former, why was a useful thing not made before; if the latter, the Creator is a frivolous wastrel, or simply  puerile in making, and then breaking the universe.  
  If the Universe is created by God as an absolutely new thing, it must follow that before its creation God was not Krita Kritya, one so perfect that nothing remained to be done by him. If he only recreates a destroyed universe, then the Jaina explanation (that the universe is uncreated and passes through a sort of birth and death at the junction of Avasarpini and Utsarpini semi-cycles of time) is simple and sufficient. If it be said that there must be some creator (as distinct from some cause or co-existence or sequence) of everything, then there must be some Creator of God, and so on ad infinitum. Further, like creates like. God as Pure Soul can create only Living Soul. How then can He create non-living unconscious matter out of Himself?  
  The Jaina doctrine is that the lifeless, non-living, unconscious Universe is eternal and uncreated and it evolves and revolves within its own countless attributes and modifications for ever, and that it undergoes even radical, catastrophic changes in Space and Time, which the history of all nations records as the Deluge, the Mahâbhârata, the Great War, the Pralaya, etc. etc. Is this doctrine not more soul-satisfying, simple and stamped with cogency and Truth than an attempt to explain things by the doctrine of Creation ? Creation thus being only the creation of its Perfect condition by the Pure Soul, it is easy to see that all else in the Universe, from the point of  view of conscious, living, knowing Soul, is Imperfect.  
   Obviously Imperfection is only tolerated because and so long as we cannot get rid of it. Therefore all worldly endeavor, being the child of the living Soul’s union with non-living matter, is to be merely tolerated, to be shunned, to be renounced. When renunciation is impossible or impracticable, it has to be merely tolerated and controlled and regulated so as to keep it within the limits of the most minimum harm to Perfection. A clear intellectual perception and a persistent, practical pursuit of this in our daily life is essential to keep us true to the Centre of Truth. No verbal jugglery, no pious deception of self or other will save one from error and harm if this Central Truth is lost sight of. All Politics, Ethics, Laws and Economics will be engulfed in stygian, chaotic darkness, if once the human mind, the soul, loses or loosens grip of this First Fact of Life.  
   On the other hand, if this beacon-light is kept in view, nothing in the world can delude us long or deep. Our joys and sorrows, our successes and failures, our illness and health, births and deaths of relations and friends, victory and defeat, prosperity or adversity, - all these will be easily and instinctively referred to the Central Guide, and dealt with in their own proper perspective. All our worldly  valuations depend upon our angle of vision. Ugliness is beauty in the wrong place, or seen from the wrong angle. High treason is patriotism from the wrong view-point. The State and Politics create chaos in an attempt to save the country and citizens from disorder and disruption. Marriage sanctifies apparent monogamy and not seldom becomes an effective cloak for mental and even physical polygamy. Trade and commerce meant for natural and equal distribution of things of necessity and use, often result in extravagant waste or stagnation of such things in the hand of the rich few, to the agonizing misery of the poverty stricken many. Even religion, the sign and mantle of God, has cloaked Satan more than the Light-ever-lasting against whom Satan rebelled for ever. Indeed there is nothing good or desirable in the world, which to some extent or other is not locked up in the arms of its contradictory. Verily, the extremes meet literally. Life means death. Death breeds life. The extremely rich are extremely poor. The possession less are the richest. The crown of thorns is ever the real, ultimate adornment. The cup of misery is the only joy-giving nectar. Purusa and Prakriti are inextricably interlocked. Brahma and Mâyâ lie mingled together; none can say which is which. There is only one way out of the den of this Duessa. It is to recognize the reality of this den and also of the flower glade of real roses outside. Till the rose glade is gained, the dark den must be tolerated and regulated.  
   In fine, there is no aspect or detail of practical life where the teachings of Sri KundaKunda will not be of immense utility. Everywhere they will lay bare the deepest truth about the question in hand, and give the most lucid and clam guidance in the handling and solution thereof. Obviously the touchstone of the eternal Truth as laid down in the book is to be applied by every man or woman according to the point in hand and in the light of surrounding circumstances of substance, place, time and the object in view. In this sense, Jainism may be said to be the apotheosis of relativity with which Eastern has made the Western world familiar.  
  Dravya, Kestra, Kâla and Bhâva form the eternal quaternary for our practical guidance. The same question can be and even must be answered differently according to the differences in substance, place, time and circumstances. This gives a knock-out blow to rigid consistency, and conservative orthodoxy, social or political, and perhaps indicates the wonderful essential sameness of religion and true conduct in different forms, in different countries and ages.  
   Great is the power of purity and truth. The ten aspects of religion supreme forgiveness, humility, straightforwardness, truth contentment, self-control, austerity, renunciation possessionlessness and chastity or self-absorption are of eternal value, guidance and inspiration. They are God-given and God-given. We reach God through them. They negate the sine and passions of anger, pride, deceit, greed etc. Sin and sorrow are also as eternal and infinite and indestructible as soul and salvation. You cross the ocean of Samsâra. You never destroy it. The Bhavyas or Liberals only attempt to follow the path laid down by the Arhatas. But mundane misery must ever remain unkillable in its extent and length.  
  The motion and movements of matter are not necessarily the signs of life. Matter may be moved by soul. Then also it is moved by the non-soul partner of soul in its embodied condition. For pure soul has no desire or need to move matter of any kind. Thus in a way matter is moved by matter only. In other words, soul is not the cause of any motion, except when the soul is impure, soiled with its connection with matter and then it becomes the cause of motion. Even love and art, and the noblest and highest forms of endeavor in life are material and renounce able. A beautiful form is matter born a result of the physical body made of assimilative molecules (Âhâraka Varganâ). Love is only an effect open the mind produced by this form of beauty. The soul may also be affected by deep, devoted love owing to this love reinforcing a pure kind of delusion which again is Kârmic matter. Similarly art. The artist’s unity with his all-absorbing aim in painting, poetry, melody, sculpture or architecture is only a child of matter, which is subtle, pure, non-harming but all the same matter, which soils the soul and stands between it and its full realization. Similarly, religious practices, worship, postures of asceticism etc., all the ladders to spirituality are material and matter-born. They fall into category of  non-soul. They are obviously not the soul in its entire fullness, in its perfect purity. They are helps for the soul to achieve self-realisation. But they are not the soul. As pneumatic belts or upturned floating pitchers are helps to a swimmer in water, but are not the swimmier, the practices of religion, even the highest of them, the sincerest and most earnest pursuit of right belief, right knowledge and right conduct are all mundane matters. They have no place in the region of pure souls. They are material, mundane, cis-liberation. As long as the soul is fascinated by or dependent upon or even in association with any of them, its connection with matter, with Karma, with Samsâra is not severed and the mundane soul dose not achieve the dignity and status of selfhood, of being its own pure self, of being a liberated soul, pure for ever. 
   Latest science has begun to perceive the existence of millions of atoms in a pin-head, revolving in a terribly continuous fashion. This is a great help to understand Jainism. Jainism posits the existence of an infinity of matter, i.e. of infinite atoms and molecules. If a pin-head has millions of atoms, how many atoms must a hut or a place or a street or a city have ? How many atoms must there be in a whole country or continent, in an ocean ? How many our earth, in the moon, in the sun ? In our solar system ? In all the solar systems in the starry sky ? How many in the whole universe ? Certainly, infinite.  
   Again, it is clear that a pin-head has no life, when by life we mean a manifestation of soul or consciousness or attention by means of the five senses respiration etc. The presence of millions of atoms in a pin-head or in a speck of dirt, on the paper or the pen or the chair dose not prove that the pin or paper or pen or chair are alive or have a soul. The multitudinous movements of matter and its uncountable variations and transfigurations do not demolish the eternal wall of distinction between soul and non-soul, between the living and the non-living. The Living now, as ever, has consciousness and attention. It alone has this. None else can be or is conscious (chetana) or capable of attention (upayoga). The non-living never possessed this soulless; never can and never shall possess consciousness. It shall never have the capacity of attending to anything; it shall never have knowledge of anything. It cannot know. Jňâna is not its forte and never can be. 
  This is the one primary distinction between living and non-living, the ignorance of which is the fertile mother of many pitfalls in Philosophy and Metaphysics. The great teachers of Jainism insist upon this distinction in very lucid, persistent and un-mistakable language. They emphasize with ceaseless repletion that the pupil, the disciple, the earnest seeker after Truth must have a firm, un-faltering, unloseable grasp of this basic FACT of the universe, that the living and the non-living substances quite exhaust the universe, and make up a perfect division of it by dichotomy, and that the living is the living and never anything else, and the non-living is itself and never living. This lesson was taught in the great, soul-purifying gâthâs of Samayasâra by Sri Kunda Kunda Âchârya in the first century B.C.
   Samayasâra is full of the one idea of one concentrated divine unity. It is as persistent and emphatic about the Soul’s identity with Itself, being the only living Conscious Reality, as pure Mahomedanism is about the Vahdâniyata of God, or Monistic Vedântism about Para-Brahma. This is the only One Idea wich counts. All Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Reality, Morality, Freedom is in this. The Self and It alone is true, good, lovely, real, moral. The non-Self is error, myth, mityâtva, ugly deluding, detractor from and obscurer of reality, immoral worthy of shunning and renunciation, as bondage and as anti-liberation. This Almighty, all-Comprehensive, claim of SELF-ABSORPTION must be perfectly and completely grasped for any measure of success in understanding Sri Kunda Kunda Âchârya’s works, indeed for the true understanding of Jainism. 
   To guard against any misunderstanding of Jainism, this central teaching, this clear golden must ever be kept in mind and in view.  It may well and legitimately be asked : what is the practical use of this Jaina idea of self-absorption ? 
  The answer is : The mere insight into and knowledge of this Reality, is of everyday use in the conduct of our individual and collective lives. It is a true and the only panacea for all our ills. Its rigor may be hard. Its preliminary demand may occasion a wrench from our cherished habits, customs, and fashions of thought and action. But its result which is immediate, instantaneous and unmistakable, justifies the hardship and the demand. The relief and service, the sure uplift of ourselves, the showering of clam balm, by practices of self-realisation, upon the sore souls of our brethren and sisters, justify the price paid. Indeed it is merely the temporary yielding of a hollow, fleeting pleasure for the attainment of a real, permanent happiness and peace, which once gained, can never be lost. Once the soul has had its first dip into is own milk-white nectar Ocean of SELF; in Christian phrase, once the soul has been the presence of God, it never go away from it for ever. It must come back to the presence sooner or later, and oftener; till in the end it is always THERE and nowhere else. 
  To this an obvious criticism would be directed that this is making men angels or at least faultless supermen, whereas humanity consists as best of frail, feeble, faulty human mortals. This is quite true. Humanity can never become a community of angels. Our passion-tossed hearts must keep us generally deluded weak, imperfect. But the practice of self-realisation makes us less deluded, less weak and less imperfect, and it brings us one or many steps nearer that condition of our purified and strengthened consciousness which is free from delusion, weakness and imperfection. Self-realisation deals with our inner warring impulses and feelings by suppressing some, eliminating others; and by self-control, self-discipline and self-respect,  regulating the others into a self-guided harmony, which is a helpful reflection of God Himself. 
  Once you sit on the rock of self-realisation, the whole goes round and round you like a crazy rushing something, which has lost its hold upon you and is mad to get you again in its grip, but cannot. The all-conquering smile of the Victor (Jina) is on your lips. The vanquished, deluding world lies dead impotent at your feet.