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T. G. Kalghatgi
of moral prevalence. That would be looking at it in a narrow sense. It transcends moral implications and expresses the process of evolution from mind to spirit. Rebirth, in this sense, is not merely a cycle of recurrence, 'a hesitating fluctuation' within a few set types, but it is a soul experience, a progress towards higher realisation. And rebirth tells us that what we are is a soul performing constantly the miracle of self-embodiment. 68 "What we are is a soul of the transcendent Spirit and Self unfolding itself in the Cosmos in an evolutionary embodiment of which the physical side is only a pedestal of form corresponding in its evolution to the ascending degrees of the spirit, but the spiritual growth is the real sense and motive. What is behind us is the past terms of the spiritual evolution, the upward gradations of the spirit already climbed, by which through constant rebirth we have developed what we are, and are still developing this present middle human term of the ascension."69
"The soul needs no proof of its rebirth any more than it needs proof of its immortality. For there comes a time when it is consciously iminortal, aware of itself in its cternal and immutable essence. Once that realisation is accomplished, all intellectual questionings for and against the immortality of the soul fall away like a vain clamour of ignorance around the selfevident and ever-present truth."70
We have so far surveyed the whole field of investigation of the problems of Karma and Rebirth. We have found that the Western approach to the problem was mainly on the basis of empirical investigations and from discursive reasoning. It has, therefore, become fashionable in the philosophical world to discredit the belief in Karma and Rebirth. The principle of verifiability has become an attractive criterion of truth. To the modern mind the principles of Karma and Rebirth have never been proved by the methods of modern science and to the satisfaction of the new critical mind brought up in a scientific culture. But neither has it been disproved. "Modern science knows nothing about before-life and an after--life for the human soul, knows nothing indeed about a soul at ali, nor can know; its province stops with the flesh and brain and nerve, the embryo and its formation and its development. Neither has modern criticism any apparatus by which the truth and untruth of rebirth can be established."71
But reason cannot go beyond the limits of discursive thinking. As Bergson said, thinking cuts reality into pieces and cannot grasp the inner essence
68. Shri Aurobindo : The Problem of Rebirth, p. 45. 69. Ibid., p. 53. 70. Ibid., p. 13. 71. Ibid.
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