Reflections on the Self Unfoldment Book by Swami Chinmayananda

This chapter extends the idea of trying to understand yourself as a science. In the chapter on religion, we focused on the idea that religion should facilitate a better understanding of oneself. Let us deviate a little bit before we come back to the original focus of this chapter. In order to better understand the world around us, we focus on defining each element carefully. So let us ask a simple question that many of us have learnt in early phases of studying biology. Why do plants breathe ?  The common explanation of why plants breathe is that they absorb carbon-di-oxide (co2) from the air, and water from the ground, through the roots and then the chlorophyll processes these as a transaction -- in the presence of sunlight. The thing to note in this example is that we do not observe this with naked eyes ! However, through detailed study, scientists have managed to break down this transaction into its components and understand the interactions between these components to lear