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Para-psychology and Jainism
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Before we discuss the relation between para-psychology and religion, let us have a word about para-psychology itself. What is it? Is it a 'recrudescence of superstition' or an organised attempt at deceiving the masses with the superstitious nonsense in the interest of the bourgeois reactionaries. 1 Supporters may argue that such big names such as Sidgwick, Myers, Prime Ministers Gerald Balfour and Gladstone, Wallace, Thomson, Rayleigh, Ledge, Curie, Bergson, W. James, Tennyson, Ruskin, Crookes etc., are associated with it. But then a clever critic might retort, “Sir William Crookes was a great physicist but it does not preclude the possibility of his having been hoodwinked in the matter of psychic matter."2 Is it then a "tendency to the third order of knowledge largely a search for an aesthetic satisfaction”3 or a sheer ‘mystification'4. To the natural scientists, it is 'a convenient asylum ignorantic's. Let us close this chapter by recalling Goethe's remark to Eckermann, “If anyone advances anything new.. people resist with all their might.”6 Supporting this psychological explanation for the opposition of para-psychology, Tyrrel says that “there is undoubtedly an instinct which urges us to reject the unusual and the inexpli
1. West, D. J.: Psychical Research Today, Gerald Duck
worth, London, 1954. 2. Parija, P. : “Inaugural Address to the Symposium on Reli
gion", Indian Journal of Para-psychology, Vol 1, No. 4,
Ganganagar, 1959. 3. Jastrow, J. : “The Animus of Psychical Belief”, The Case
For and Against Psychical Belief, Massachusests, 1915. 4. Houdini, H,:"A Magician Among the Spirits", The Case
For and Against Psychical Belief, Massachusets, 1915. 5. Tischner, R. : Telepathy and Clairvoyance (Eng. translation,
W. D. Hutchenson ), Kegan Paul, London, 1925. 6. Barrett, W. F. : Psychical Research, Home University
Library, London, 1911.
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