________________
# The Jaina Philosophy impressions can come from the mind. People do not consider these things. They think they will use a mechanical method altogether, and that it can be done without the aid of mental purity. It is not possible. They must purify the mind or the interpretations will always be defective, and no truth can be obtained under those conditions. In the Eastern countries, they always lay great stress on the fact that a person cannot become clairvoyant unless he has a pure nature.
You have often heard of mediumistic or psychic persons reading figures or the numbers of pages in all inverted way. If I should ask such a clairvoyant to tell me the number of a certain page in a closed book, they will give it to me but the letters will be inverted. If it is, for instance, 159, they will say it is 951. If I should ask them for initials in an envelope, and those letters are G.O.B., they will read them to me as B.O.G. That only shows mental perversion. Perfect purity of the mind is necessary if one would see clearly.
Now we come to another point. It is not only the things of the present we see, but we see things of the past, and of the future. How does that come about? Suppose a force is set in motion. We are to do something with the aid of that force. That force as it is set into motion creates an activity in the ethereal world, and it will produce a result that will bear a relation or correspondence to the motion which is the cause of that result. Suppose for instance one man strikes another man. An individual sees the blow, but does not see any further – He sees only the result, the blow. Now that result was the result of a quarrel or of something which was of such a nature as to produce a blow and the result of that blow is that the one struck has been knocked down. How do we see the past?
Suppose there is only the blood which the blow caused to flow to be seen, the clairvoyant can see the blow, but it had already
194
Jain Education International
For Personal & Private Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
