Jain Journal 1989 01

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

Page 18

JANUARY, 1989
give them pain or merely to identify oneself with his insentient gross body. The mal-intentions may not directly harm our gross bodies but they must invariably create unauspicious effects in the fine electro-magnetic field. We may check the harm to the gross body with the help of men and medicine, even with the help of mantra-tantra, if we have acquired that efficacy but we can never hope to check the definite reactions of our motives and thoughts in the electric and magnetic bodies by any external efforts. Their medicine is spiritual only, the purification of the mind of all the evil thoughts, harbouring auspicious ones instead or absorbing onself in the 'supreme consciousness', to use the phrase of Dr. Kasliwal.
2. (a) External actions not to be neglected
The importance given to the inner spiritual life of man by the discovery of the 'field' does not mean the neglect of man's external actions. Those actions that are quite necessary for the healthy existence of the gross body we must do. But those which are not so necessary must be done as symbolising the inner auspiciousness of one's motives and thoughts giving them concreteness. They must not be done unspiritually in a blind conventional manner. They may be intended with wider effects on society, but it is good to know, the surest effects can be expected in one's 'field' and one's psycho-metabolic process only and on no one other in the world. One will feel consoled if he is aware of this fact even though his actions have gone defunct of the intended external effects.
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With such an ethics when man has learnt to give primary importance to his inner spiritual life, identifies himself with his pure conscious being; if he cannot stay on this level comes down to the level of auspicious thoughts and knowledge of things and does external actions not primarily to 'move' others but that they 'move' oneself and believing in the chain of automatic reactions-thoughts reacting on the 'field' and the 'field' reacting on the gross body and the environment, the individual is probably but on sound rational ethical footing. He does not require to be mystified with the intervention of God in giving the fruits of his good or bad actions in a distance of time, if there is any such 'God' and electric bodies and which Jainism has been calling kärman and taijas bodies.
(b) Individual is an evolving immortal entity
Further, to combine the discovery of the 'field' with the authentic case of reincarnation and the theory of evolution, as interpreted above through births and deaths, we find that an individual has its own history passing from one birth to another sowing seeds of either good or bad