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Jaina Eschatology :: 203
of responses to stimuli but as governed by a field, the organismic field of interacting forces, a field that is selforganized into definite though changing patterns." Conscious experience is often influenced by the rest of the field as unconscious or vaguely conscious desires. “For Levin, the field means the life space containing the person and his psychological environmemt."? According to the Jaina the germs of such an extension of the self in the field' are rooted in the structure of the self in the form of the environmental karmas. The presence of these karmas with the soul makes the latter capable of extending its effect outside the organism. Inside the field some objects may be supposed to have a positive valence, while others have a negative valence. The environmental class of karmas of the Jaina philosophy must generate such a field through which they may contribute to the course of things. Action-currents may be supposed to emanate, on account of the presence of the environmental karmas, from the self to effect changes in the external world. These karmas work so secretly that they allow an intelligible explanation of the physical events in terms of physics and chemistry. Above all as the Jaina is not a believer of absolute opposition, for him the cosmos is a harmoniously organized system of elements. There is an aspect of the world which makes us hold that every element coordinates its function with those of others so as to make the entire cosmos a coherent system. Then it is not very surprising that the self and its environment are found to function in coordination with each other.
Coordination among Different Types of Karmas
Again a question may be raised as regards the coordination among different types of karmic energies. The karmic energies have been grouped under eight types, according to the traditional exposition of the karma theory,
1. Ibid., p. 137 2. Ibid., p. 153
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