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Ethics of Responsibility
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secret thoughts and tendencies entertained by you, for it is your secret thoughts and tendencies which make up your subconscions and which are mainly responsible for the actual actions which you ultimately take. Like modern psychologists, Mahavira believed that our sub-conscious is not something separate and apart from us. He, therefore, called it Bhāva-karma and emphasised that outer manifestations of human actions are only the gross results of these Bhava-karmas which are lying in our sub-conscious-deep below the level of our thinking mind. Dr. Karl Jung, the great Swiss pioneer of the age of psychology, has called this the “personal unconscious where the individual stores rejected memories and emotional material.” According to this great psychologist, this murkey region stands between us and the deeper level of subconscious acting as a sort of dictator in both directions. It contains, according to Dr. Jung, not only our heritage of instincts and patterns from entire race but the ability to act on suggestions made to it. In the words of the great Dr. Jung "man has only to realize that he is shut up inside his mind, and cannot step beyond it, even in insanity, and that the appearance of his world or his gods very much depends upon his own mental condition.”
Dr. Jung's observations very much sound like the theory of Karma propounded by Mahá víra two thousand and five hundred years ago, because like Dr. Jung, Lord Mahāvīra also thought that self is 'shut up inside his mind and cannot step beyond it', if it does not make positive efforts to break open the closed doors behind which it is 'shut up'. What Dr. Jung calls deeper level of sub-conscious acting as a sort of dictator', Mahavira calls more simply, the Bhava-karmas, i e., the thoughts and tendencies, entertained and encouraged by you before or without giving them shape by outer actions. The recognition of this great stream of sub-conscious which is an essential part of our personality, but of which we are mostly unaware, has given Jaina thinking about the theory of Karma, a psychological and scientific gloss which is almost
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