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Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi
75
manifestation of body, life and mind. When the gross physical body falls away, the vital and mental sheaths still remain as the vehicle of the soul. Rebirth is a law of nature. Like corn, a mortal being ripens and like corn again is he born.
When Crito asks, “In what way shall we bury you, Socrates?” Socrates answers, "In any way you like, but first, you must catch Me, the real Me. Be of good cheer, my dear Crito, and say that you are burying my body only, and do with that whatever is usual and what you think best.'
In fact, birth and death are only transitions of the self from one body to another like its transition through the states of childhood, youth and old age in the same body. It is the body that is subject to disintegration and destruction, but not the soul. The soul is eternal, immovable, immobile and uncaused. It is beyond the reach of the senses and the mind, and it is above all changes.
Individual soul in its real nature is a conscious and eternal reality which does not really possess any physical or mental quality. As eternal and unchanging, it has no activity or movement in it. So, all actions take place within the material world and the self consider itself to be an agent or doer only when it is deluded by and wrongly identified with the ego.
The soul is different from the ego. All thoughts and feelings, all pleasures and pains, all joys and sorrows really belong to the mind-body. It is the mind and not the soul, which feels pleasure and pain. In short, all moral properties belong to the ego, which is the doer of all acts. What belongs to th essence of soul are thus pure existence, consciousness and bliss. The soul is the transcendental subject of experience whose very essence is eternity, freedom and immortality.
The soul is neither in space nor in time, governed by the law of clusality. Only particular things, made up of parts, arc in space and time. The self being not a particular physical thing is beyond space and time. Being above space and time, it is not subject to the law of causality. So, it is essentially and eternally free. It is also eternal and immortal, because it is not produced by any cause and cannot be destroyed in any case.
