Jain Journal 1989 01

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

Page 14

JANUARY, 1989
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83
emotions (rāga-dveşa). This kārman body is the root cause of all the other bodies viz. for our purpose, the electric and the gross. They are auspicious or inauspicious as is the nature of kārman body in operation. Further, on death it is according to the nature of this kārman body that a jiva transmigrates to some other birth to start his life afresh. The job of taijas (electric) body is generally said to provide lustre. In case of ascetics and yogis it may become very powerful to effect any desired benefit or destruction to oneself and others. Both these bodies kārman and taijas are permanently attached to the jīva in samsārika stage. They are made better or worse but they always stay. It is only in the case of the selfrealised souls, completely detached from anything other-than-their-souls that these bodies are totally shed away. These souls then become Paramātman.
Thus we see that the magnetic and electric bodies are really the paraphernelia of the soul through all its transmigrations. To call the magnetic body the soul of man is, according to Jainism, absurd. It is a physicists bias for physical monism that he wants to reduce every phenomenon to materialistic terms. The western minds, minds educated in their lines, and unsophisticated minds too, often get accustomed to one sort of reality and find it difficult to conceive any other sort. The word is either wholly material for them or wholly non-material. They cannot conceive 'ghost in the machine'. But there are some, and their number is fast increasing, in the field of psychology, parapsychology particularly, in the west who feel convinced of duality of matter and mind, essential to account for the phenomena of the freedom of will and to explain the distinct types of sensory and extra-sensory perceptions.? Even the biologist of Julian Huxley's eminence has coined the term 'psychometabolism' as contrasted to the phenomena of biological metabolism which is evidently a material process. Indeed, there is quite an evident rift in the west and materialistic monists are openly challanged and flouted today when they have the audacity to try to explain the nonmaterial conscious phenomena in purely physical terms.
In fact, the theories of the modern scientists have been mostly illicit generalisations which on later discoveries are proved false. To take an example, in some detail, the Darwinian theory of Evolution, which, in west, became basic to all bio-social thinking about man, provides a perfect frame of reference but it also prejudices man against the facts which
7 J. B. Rhine, New World of the Mind, p. 228. 8 Ibid.
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