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Law of Karma
Pythagoras and Plato. In the system of Pythagoras, “The individual soul is an emanation of the one and assumes several bodies successively till it has been purified and is ready for liberation; then it returns to the Divine source from whom it originally emanated."40 Horace refers to it in his Odes':
Nor does the spirit dies but new life repeats. In other forms and only changes seats.
My name and lineage I remembered Well, And how is fight by Sparta's king I fell.41
Instead of going into it, we should first have a psychologi. cal insight into this belief. After a psychological analysis, we find that there are five important factors which causc men to believe in it.
Firstly, psychologically we are not only afraid of death but also cling to our personality. Human being wants the survival of his personality life after life. This makes him believe that he will be born again and again.
Second and third factors are holonistic and moral. It is declared by some of the religious teachers that when a man dies, his soul leaves his body and goes to the heaven or hell. When it is reborn it is rewarded or punished. One may raise a question here, “If a man has to suffer in this life for the sins committed in the prior life, what happened during his first birth on this earth when his soul had no Karma at all?"
This dificulty has been solved by the great thinkers by saying that the soul was never without Karma. Before its first birth, there was another birih and before that still another. And thus the universe has been regarded without beginning or end.
Fourthly, the intuition of the soul tells us that all is not over at death. Dissolution of the body does not necessarily imply that everything is annibilated at death. This intuition always establishes a life after death,
