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THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION
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feels itself sorry for or delighted at a corresponding unhealthy and unpleasant or healthy and pleasant state of the body and mind. Because of this identification, the Spiritual self is being continually disturbed by their transitory states. To take even the figurative sense of identification: a mother who is in deep identification with her only child suffers and feels intense pain merely by the very hearing of her child’s probable or real death, whereas she may feel no such pain if she hears of the death of a neighboring mother’s child with whom she has not identified herself. Now we can imagine the consciousness when the identification is real and not figurative. Thus the sense of identification with the transitory body and restless mind is the source or root-cause of our Spiritual self’s misery.

Identification of the Spiritual self with the body and mind being the primary cause of pain, we should now turn to a psychological analysis of the immediate or proximate causes of