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Vol. XIX, No. 1
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exists only in the meso-cosmos. Like a person who is in sleep does not know of his sleep until he wakes up, the person who is dead, never knows of his death until he is re-born; he or she is not dead for himself or herself; he or she is dead only for the living of the meso-cosmos, who measure phenomena with the yardstick of time. Deaih is as relative as the serpent in darkness, or the wave upon the sea. For the Self, which is in resonance with the cosmos, the Brahma-anda, there can be no death, but only transformation as passage from state to staie. The Karmic Continuity
Sheldrake presupposes, as noted before, this passage taking place through the medium of some sort of unseen dream body transmitting the memory field from one birth to the next, or from one stage of the Ego to the Self or another Ego.
According to Jain philosophy, the agent of transmission is a Paramāņu, which is infra-psychic vibrating or energy and resonances. Zen Buddhism presupposes some kind of kayas or astral bodies. Sri Aurobindo sets forih the hypothesis of the descent of the Overmind.
Ken Wilber (1985), who in line with the oriental spirituality sees that Evolution is presently going through its half way point, envisages its further course taking place in Consciousness and describes its advance through the kayas or the causal hodies of human inwardness.
Evolution is the unfolding of this Shakti, this Consciousness, as collective karmic potency. History is the sum total of the individual karmic potencies collectively configuring themselves upon the progressive hierarchies of villages, communities, nations, civilisations, and the world order. Evolution is blocked when these karmic potencies are blocked. They are blocked when individual refuses to go beyond his Ego and transcend towards his Self and when societies refuse to accept any other reality beyond the empirical reality of the material world. The contemporary world crisis is an evolutionary crisis. a karmic
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