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THE JAINA THEORY OF KARMA
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fall apart. The simplicity of the soul is evident from the fact that it is pure consciousness in essence so that if it were made up of parts, it would be a compound of many consciousnesses. But this is directly falsified by facts of observation, since no one has yet perceived many consciousnesses functioning in his being. All our conscious experiences, it is necessary to note, are individualistic; there is not the faintest trace of a congregational unity in any or all of the feelings, willing, memory, inference, and the like, in which our life truly consists. If many consciousnesses combined to form a being, there would be not one act of perception, but many, corresponding to the number of parts of which a soul might be composed. We, therefore, conclude that the soul is a simple, hence an indestructible substance; in plain language, it is immortal by nature.
The decreeing of Blissfulness, Omniscience and Immortality in favour of the soul is tantamount to declaring it to be its own God, since these are the principal attributes of Divinity. But the question is: why are not these divine properties manifested in the being of each and every soul, considering that they are its own properties and have not to be acquired from outside itself.
In order to be able to formulate an answer to this all-important question, we must acquaint ourselves with what we have termed the point of view of manifested nature which is concerned with the matters involved in the problem. Looked at from this particular standpoint, the soul is a reincarnating ego which passes from "life" to "life" in an unbroken succession, till nirvana be attained. This is evident from the fact that the soul is immortal by nature, so that it must have had a past, however much it might be ignorant of it in its present incarnation. The nature of memory, of the causes that obstruct it and of the process of its recovery have been explained in the Key of Knowledge to which the reader is referred in this connection. But when even the events of a few moments back are forgotten and cannot be recalled by us, what is there surprising in our inability to recollect anything of a past which has been since followed up by wholesale constitutional changes in our existence? Immortal by nature, the soul must have been in existence throughout.
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