________________
135
According to the Mimamsakās God is that Almighty Power, Omniscient and Omnipotent, Just and True, who distributes the fruits of our actions according to the purity of our motives, the clarity of our conscience, the sincerity of our application, the faithfulness of our obedience to the eternal prescriptions laid down in the immortal Vedas. But, according to the Vedanta, much more intellectually satisfactory is the theory that the reaction of an action is not any. thing different from the action itself.
An action conditioned by the immediate scheme of time and place, fulfills itself, perhaps, in another place and in a future time, in its own fruits. A bud fulfils itself in its fruit, and there is no need for a fruit-giving supreme power's intervention for the petals to fall off and the fruits to mature ! The half-read history of a thought-expressed (action) is the immediate action, which in reality is concluded only in its reaction; 'action and reaction are equal and opposite is one of the laws of Newton, perhaps, with its application in the world of Philosophy also.
Thus, here it is said that result of actions undertaken and performed at the instance of our delusory attachment with the sense-objects, guides each ego-centre to its own selfdictated destinies of enjoyment or sorrow in future. Thought by thought, wading through actions, the ego creates for it self a future world wherein it can come to enjoy its own demands : be it the life of a pig or the life of a God. This is indicated here by the term 'carried up and down the ladder of evolution and devolution. Through right activity and through discrimination when we develop detachment, then the sense objects can no longer bind us, and our activities would be to end our ignorance through discovery and knowledge of the Eternal and True Principle of Divinity in us.
In Vedanta Šāstra, the possible wombs for taking births are considered to fall under two distinct groups, the higher and the lower. In the higher yonies, we are born only to enjoy the etherial sense-objects, which can provide, through the necessary instruments of perception and enjoyment, a