சைவ சித்தாந்த ஞான போதம்
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unicellular organism called protoplasm to the highest and the most complex organism called man there exist from all eternity countless individual souls each having a distinct character of its own and each undergoing different degrees of development in accordance with its nature capacity and effort. All these souls are not the principles created out of nothing according to some religions, nor are they the splintered pieces of God itself according to some other religions, nor do they constitute so many evolved centres of unintelligent matter according to some material sciences, nor could they be pure fictions imagined in the infinite absolute according to some rank idealism. On the other hand they are as eternal as God and not even a single soul could, by any known or unknown power or process, be reduced into nothing nor could any one of them be transmuted into any other of the group. According to the Saiva Siddhanta, and ‘the pluralistic, as according to the Leibnizian view “says Dr. James Ward in his remarkable Gifford Lectures, "all the individuals there are have existed from the first and will continue to exist indefinitely."4 And the same authority, like the Siddhanta, holds tenaciously to the view that "individuals who have no 'doubles', whose like all in all we never shall meet again”,5 In upholding the eternal reality of inidividual souls Dr. F.C.S. Schiller has said even more emphatically as follows:
"The ultimate self-existence of spirits, the doctrine that existence are many, spirits uncreated, uncaused, that are and ever have been and can never cease to be, is the only metaphysical ground for asserting the immortality of the individual. And this metaphysical ground we have secured by the preference given to Pluralism over Monism."
Now, as regards the third principle the impure and dark Anavam, what the Saiva Siddhanta says is in the words of Dr. F.C.S. Schiller this: "Evil was potentially existent in the world” and "the world was created in order to remedy this pre-existent and precosmic defect.”7 If all had been perfect eternally like God, creation is unnecessary, and it may even be mischievous, like the mischievous actions of some wild boys who take plesure
