Jain Shwetambar Conference Herald 1913 Book 09

Author(s): Mohanlal Dalichand Desai
Publisher: Jain Shwetambar Conference

Page 294

422
Shri Jain Conference Herald.
conscience though the warning is never heard or if heard never heeded. This is true of a large majority of men who typify in themselves this dreary experience. They rapidly career through their life without bestowing one thought on the why and wherefore of their continuous exertion.
A day at last dawns when his exhausted limbs refuse to move. He makes one supreme effort to rouse to action his earthly tenement a day or two yet longer; but the vitality has all but ebbed out. He yields to the fell Destroyer and is hushed into his last grim repose. This is the tragic end of his career of toil. It is a horrid scene to picture before our mind's eye or even to contemplate the last struggle of deathbed, as it daily occurs under our very eyes. Their daily occurance bas deadened our feelings; but it is none the less horrible for it. This is the sad fate of the ignorant masses.
But some reflective souls halt and reason with themselves the final upshot of human pursuits. It becomes a dead certainty to them that sooner or later, now or then die they must. Sages have observed that the consciousness of the certainty of death and the ignorance of the precise time of its occurance is the first step from the region of the known into that of the unknown. When this conciousness dawns upon him, all his joys and pleasures are vitiated by the spectre of death to him is now a stern reality and not a remote possi: bility as with the common herd of mankind. Man would have never cared to dive deeper for. Light within, were it not for the certainty of death. Try as he may he cannot succeed to defy it, and at last over-powered by it he sets up enquiries in right earnest into the nature of eoul and death.
The origin of innumerable systems of philosophy, psychology and metaphysics may be traced to this one common source, which are so many modes of search after the One Absolute Truth from different standpoints as the seekers' frame of mind dictated.
In the west they try to delude themselves into the belief that end of life is the end of everything, and that nothing