________________
86
JAINISM. AND WORLD) PROBLEMS
following from Dr. Mandsley with free and full assurance :
“ To live for ever, having got rid of the flesh with its appetites and lusts, would be to have a vapid and joyless immortality,—the one long bootless desire of which would be an impossible suicide."-("Physiological Psychology,”p. 117).
It will be a surprise to Mr. McDougall to be told that the ancients not only knew the soul to be immortal but some of them actually acquired that iminortality, and were "filled with it; they found that Life apart from the body was divine --blissful and endowed with all-embracing knowledge, and lacking nothing !
The Jainas will not also find acceptable the notion of an hierarchy of conscious souls existing in the body of man, and obeying the orders of one of them, as they do that of a head in an office. The Jainas know that deliberation is not possible without the dravya-mana (the organ of thought), which is only one in each human body, and can only be used by the one soul that is attached to it (see my "Jaina Psychology'). The supposed hierarchy of souls will not be able to carry on their work, with deliberation, for the lack of this organ of thought.
I am also not much impressed by the notion of the coconscious souls. It is unnecessary to postulate more than one soul in cases of multiple personality. These are appa. rently only cases of split up personality, under the influence of powerful emotion or thought. If the psychic functions are restrained in some way under one set of circumstances and yet are able to function fully under somewhat altered conditions, an emotional being might, not unnaturally, set up a duality of personalities in his consciousness, which personalities will henceforth begin to function more or less seemingly independently.
In other words, if a man fall into the way of contemplating his sentiments in the abstract, he will be apt to think of
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org