Stop Treating Self as Body
— By Rajyogi Brahmakumar Nikunj ji
….. continued from last week
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that "all human beings are endowed with reason and conscience" and it asks all "to act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood". This forms the very basis of the Declaration and has been numbered as Article 1. The Preamble to the Declaration says that "the people of the United Nations have, in the Charter, re-affirmed their faith in the dignity and the worth of the human person". These three important truths, namely - that the human person has reason and conscience, that it has inherent worth and dignity and that the human beings should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood, together mean that the human person is a soul and a child of Supreme, for then only can human beings act towards one another as 'brothers' and then only do they have inherent worth and dignity.
All human beings cannot be termed as 'brothers' on the basis of their physical relationships nor is their worth and dignity based on any physical consideration because the moral dimension is related to the non-physical soul. The soul has inherent dignity not because of any gross possessions but because it is a child of Supreme Almighty who is the most exalted and illumined One. The soul has worth also because it is the inheritor of HIS treasures. So, in a way, the Human Rights Declaration and all the Laws that declare justice an obligatory act of all human beings have a spiritual basis. Furthermore, the Law, whether it is international or national, asks us to discard all kinds of distinctions, based on race, colour, nationality, gender, social origin, property, language, birth, etc., because these are based on the body of a person and not on the person.
This implicitly and explicitly means that the real human person is a soul in a human body. It makes distinction between body and soul and wants us to keep in mind the soul and forget his or her physical particulars while treating another person. Now this aspect of law has been forgotten in course of time and it has become a mere ritual or a formality to say that there should not be any discrimination, based on body. Also, it is very unfortunate that while one set of laws makes it mandatory to give up all sorts of discrimination, another set reserves certain rights and privileges for certain sections of the society, based on birth, social origin, gender, caste, etc. ….. to be continued