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will push us on and on, till all karmic bondage will be shed off and the soul will become one with God. Karmas are fine particles of matter that gather round the soul and keep it in bondage. The inflow of the karmic matter and the shedding-off of the same is occasioned by our thoughtactivity which causes vibrations in the soul. The child has very little thought-activity and bears no ill-will towards others. His soul has, therefore, little karmic bondage and is nearer Godhood.
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy;
Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy"
The saints and the ascetics are nearest to the child in that they develop a dispassionate and detached outlook on life. Their meditation is directed to one end to avoid all inflow of fresh Karmas, to have minimum of vibrations around the soul, to concentrate on only one thought of Godhood. Wordsworth has fully realised this deep mood of meditation in his Poet's Epitaph:
"A moralist perchance appears;
Himself his world, and his own God;
One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling
Nor form, nor feeling, great or small;
A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,
An intellectual all-in-all."
Once the karmic bondage is shed off, the soul stands pure in its resplendent glory; it is all-knowledge and all-knowing :
"The power...which nature thus
To bodily sense exhibits, is the express
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Resemblance of that glorious faculty
That higher minds bear with them as their own.
This is the very spirit in which they deal
With the whole compass of the universe.""
The purified soul is God Himself. To a Jaina, God is not the creator of this universe; nor the arbiter of our destiny:
"We fall by course of Nature's law, not force Of thunder, or of Jove."8
6 Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. Wordsworth's Assent on Snowdon.
7
8 Oceanus' speech in Keats' Hyperion, Book II.
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