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MILLENNIA BEFORE DARWIN
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make up the environment. Western science is now becoming aware of such things [Read for example the chapters on the heart in The Secret Teachings of Plants by S.H. Buhner].99 But what western science has not yet done, is to trace the transfer of the subtler energies from incarnation to incarnation, when a physical body with all its specific characteristics is temporarily nonexistent. Here again, ancient knowledge is a step ahead of modern science.
Further there are karmas which determine the general physiognomy of the body: general perfection, or aberrations in symmetry or proportions. The next category is especially concerned with the six types of joints which occur in animals. In addition there is a category which describes all external features which do not belong to the basic form, structure and physiology of the body. These are the secondary characteristics which can be perceived by the senses (excluding hearing); in other words, how the body feels when touched, or tastes, smells or sees. This is how the colors of the bodies are determined: white, black, blue, red and yellow with their various shades; and also the surface structure of the body: to the touch it may be hot (for example the sun) or cold, soft, rough, hard, or be light or heavy. Tastes can be bitter, sharp, sour, and sweet. There are only two smells: pleasant and foul.
Then there is a category of karmas which is of special importance for invisible beings, and which the Tattvārthadhigama Sūtra describes as “the ability to maintain (after death) the form of the body in its most recent incarnation during the passage of the soul from one condition of existence towards the next" (i.e. the hellish, subhuman, human or celestial condition). There are karmas which determine whether the body is too heavy to move, or too light to be stable, or whether an organ grows in such a way that it becomes the cause of the body's death. There are also karmas which result in the growth of fatal weapons in the animal kingdom, such as the sting of a scorpion or the poison of a snake.
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