Jiva

MIND, MATTER AND GOD : JIVA, JADA AND ISVARA
M.M.NINAN
Earth as a cylinder with a height one-third of its diameter, the flat top forming the
inhabited world, surrounded by a circular oceanic mass.
Parmenides of Elea (c. 515 - 450 B.C.).
Parmenides of Elea was an early Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and founder and
chief representative of the Eleatic School of ancient Greek philosophy. He defined the
ultimate as. One an unmoving perfect sphere, unchanging and undivided
He argued as follows: "What-is-not" does not exist. Since anything that comes into
being must arise out of "what-is-not", objects cannot come into being. Likewise, they
cannot pass away, because in order to do so they would have to enter the realm of
"what-is-not". Since it does not exist, "what-is-not" cannot be the womb of generation,
or the tomb of that which perishes. The "no-longer" and the "not-yet" are therefore
variants of "what-is-not", and so the past and future do not exist either. Change, then,
is impossible.
Equally, his argument continued, multiplicity is unreal, because the empty space
necessary to separate one object from another would be another example of "what-isnot".
And since things cannot be anything to a greater or lesser degree (which would
require "what-is" to be mixed with the diluting effect of "what-is-not"), the universe must
be homogeneous, a single, undifferentiated, unchanging unity. Also, it must be finite
and spherical, for it cannot be in one direction any more than in another (and the
sphere is the only figure of which this can be said).
Thus, by a strictly deductive argument, Parmenides asserted that change is impossible,
and that coming-into-existence or ceasing-to-exist are likewise impossible, so that
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