Jain Journal 1989 01

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

Page 13

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JAIN JOURNAL
spiritualist thinkers. Sri Aurovindo talked of conscious force'. Jainism maintains anant-sakti as one of the anant-catuştayas which charactrise jiva in pure state. We do feel 'will' as force and talk of strong and weak will. But we should distinguish spiritual and material force or energy as Julian Huxley distinguishes the former as poychergy.5
To proceed further with the field, the physicists are not in a position to doubt the fact of rebirth and survival of human soul. The famous Shanti Bai case of rebirth and host of cases of survival as 'spirits' have disabled the physicists and biologists to assert their old Carvaka convictions of death as a total negation of human personality. According to Dr. C. D. Broad the survival of a poychic-factor must be admitted. To Dr. Kasliwal, and probably to other physicists, the electro-magnetic field is that 'factor' which transmigrates and takes rebirth somewhere, or otherwise survive. Indeed it has been discovered a fact that on death the gross body gets devoid of the electro-magnetic field ; it may very well be said to have transmigrated though we wonder how the physicist can identify the "field" as the same taking rebirth keeping it in the view that it must be a constantly changing phenomena.
In fact, to call the unit magnetic field as the soul of man is a very weak hypothesis. With the constantly changing particle the identity of the 'field' can only be a matter of form. The individual that remembers himself always the same through the biological and psychometabolic changes would not like himself reduced to mere 'form' which with every new grouping of the particles is to be lost for ever, such a concept does tell a lie to the feeling of oneself as definite, unitary or simple, substantial conscious being.
Except for the theory part, we find in the discovery of the 'field' a further confirmation of Jaina beliefs from the studies of science. According to Jainism every man, animal and vegetable life has two other bodies apart from the one gross or audārika body. They are kārman and taijas bodies. Kārman may be called the magnetic body while taijas the electric body. With our every action of physical, vocal or mental sort the kārman body is stirred and attracts karmic molecules to incorporate in itself. The incoming molecules are incorporated with a particular effectivity and duration according to the nature of the action and the accompanying
5 Essays of Humanists, p. 64. 6 Gardner Murphy, 'Field Theory and Survival', Indian Journal of Parapsychology,
Vol. 1 No. 3, 1959, p. 107.