Jain Journal 1982 07

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 18

JULY, 1982
Kevalajñāna and Thanatology
A closer study of evidence on the "vision of knowledge" provided by subjects who have had near death experiences suggests at least three major convergences between these accounts and the Jain concept of kevalajñāna.
(1) Dr. Moody was told by a young man during an interview :
Now, I was in a school...and it was real. It was not imaginary.
If I were not absolutely sure, I would say, “Well, there is a possibility that I was in this place". But it was real. It was like a school, and there was no one there, and yet there were a lot of people there. Because if you looked around, you would see nothing ...but if you paid attention, you would feel, sense, the presence of other beings around ...It's as if there were lessons coming at me and they would keep coming at me...
That's interesting. Another man told me that he went into what he called "libraries” and. "institutions of higher learning'. Is that anything like what you're trying to tell me ?
Exactly ! You see, hearing what you say he said about it, it's like I know exactly what he means, that I know he's been through this same thing I have. And, yet ...the words I would use are different, because there really are no words ...I cannot describe it.
They all journeyed to the Plain of Oblivion, through a terrible and stifling heat for it was bare of trees and all plants, and there they camped at eventide by the River of Forgetfulness, whose waters no vessel can contain. They were all required to drink a measure of the water, and those who were not saved by their good sense drank more than the measure, and each one as he drank forgot all things. And after they had fallen asleep and it was the middle of the night, there was a sound of thunder and a quaking of the earth, and they were suddenly wafted thence, one this way, one that, upward to their birth like shooting stars. Er himself, he said, was not allowed to drink of the water, yet how and in what way he returned to the body he said he did not know, but suddenly recovering his sight he saw himself at dawn lying on the funeral pyre. The basic theme being presented here, that before returning to life a certain kind of 'forgetting" of knowledge one has in the eternal state must take place, is similar in the two cases (op. cit., pp. 12-13). It seems, however, that the two cases are not on all fours because whereas the first case dealt with timeless knowledge this case seems to deal with events of after-life.