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JAINA PSYCHOLOGY
Beliefs, attitudes, emotions may come and go but the soul is always there. It is found in various forms owing to the rise of karma. As the situation of karma changes, so also the form of the soul alters. To put it in a psychological form, personal immortality is indeed an impossibility. But individual immortality is one of the deepest truths of life. 'For the personality, made up of mental and physical characteristics of a person, belongs to the changing world of time, whereas the individuality consists of those enduring qualities which belong to the spirit of man and of which, as the word itself tells us, the personality or mask self is only the outer garment." To sum up: We are, perhaps, justified in stating that man is in essence immortal and eternal. He is spirit, and this spirit, however, projects itself into the extended worlds of matter under the deep influence of karma. The extraordinary maturity of some children even at an early age, the high degree of psychological and physical development of a very ordinary person, and the like compel us to believe that something must have existed before physical birth. It may also be extended beyond physical death.
✔Those who have worked on scientific lines on this problem also admit the possibility of individual survival after bodily death. Hereward Carrington who has devoted his whole life to the study of psychic phenomena writes: 'Practically every psychical researcher agrees in thinking that the evidence in favour of the spiritistic hypothesis is now so strong that it may be justifiably employed as a working hypothesis. . . . There is a strong evidence to prove survival.' Flammarion, a French investigator on the phenomenon of death, establishes the same fact: (1) The soul exists as a real entity independent of the body. (2) It is endowed with faculties still unknown to science. (3) It is able to act at a distance, without the intervention of the senses'. There are other psychical researchers as well who uphold the same view. We need not quote their opinions.
SOME OBJECTIONS TO REBIRTH
Imigrati
The first and the foremost objection to the doctrine of transmigration or rebirth is that had there been our previous lives we
1 This World and That, p. 45.
2 Quoted from the Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth Indian Philosophical Congress', pp. 59-60.
