Jiva

MIND, MATTER AND GOD : JIVA, JADA AND ISVARA
M.M.NINAN
Among the early Greek philosophers, the Eleatics, and modern advaitic
Hinduism
asserts that sense- perception and the knowledge so gained is untrustworthy, and
reason alone is reliable. Sense perceptions are nothing but interpretations of the sense
experience by the perceiver. Thus they reached the conclusion that change, plurality,
and origination do not really exist, and only that Being is one, immutable, and eternal
who perceives. This being need not necessarily be identified with God. Hence it is
often referred to as idealistic monism. Examples of this type of thinking is found in neo-
Platonism, Spinoza and rational absolutism of Hegel.
“There is one great question,” Lord Betrand Russel writes in 1911. “Can human
beings know anything, and if so, what and how? This question is really the most
essentially philosophical of all questions” (quoted in Slater 1994, 67).
Besides idealistic Monism there is Monism of the materialistic type, which proclaims that
there is but one reality, namely, matter, whether matter be an agglomerate of atoms, or
a primitive, world-forming substance.
There is another form of metaphysical Monism, which ascribe material and mental
properties to an unified monad.
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