Key of Knowledge

SR No.: 006702
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown
Publication Year: 1919
Total Pages: 1204
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 25 MB

Page 292

TAE KINGDOM OF GOD.
271
man. Ignorant of its own true individuality, the fountain-spring of immortality, and deluded with the false idea of the body being the man, it dreads the approach of death, and imagines it to be a complete annihilation of all that it called itself. As the coils of death tighten on the body, as the certainty of extinction becomes more and more impressed on its mind, and as the sense of its utter helplessness increases in its consciousness, it wrings its hands, as it were, in despair, at the unwelcome but inevitable calamity which stares it in the face. Its torments continue, till, at last, the cords of mental equilibrium snap under the combined strain of its terrible anguish and worry, and it is thrown into the blank and dismal void of insensibility. Nevertheless, the soul does not remain unconscious for any great length of time on shuffling off this mortal coil; for its natural consciousness speedily dispels the blankness of despair, and makes it conscious of its new surroundings which have arisen mechanically in the interval, by the operation of the force of its karmas. There is only one exception to this rule, and it is furnished by those who go to the outer darkness,' in the language of the Bible. They descend to a region of the universe which is even below the lowest hell, and pass their days in a state of existence which, though not absolutely devoid of consciousness, has yet so little of conscious manifestation in it as to deserve being called unconscious. The rest either go to heaven,* or hell, or re-incarnate immediately in this world, according to their karmas.
*According to Vedanta, heavens and hells are both as much forms of illusion as is the waking world, since their immediate knowledge only consists in states of consciousness. From the