YJA Convention 1994 07 Chicago IL First

Author(s): Young Jains of America (YJA)
Publisher: Young Jains of America YJA USA

Page 31

animals have life, but he also shared the Jain belief that they have a soul as much as a man has:
"A motion and a spirit, that impels, All thinking things, all objects of all thought And rolls through all things."
will become one with God. Karmas are fine particles of matter that gather around the soul and keep it in bondage. The inflow of the karmic matter and the shedding-off of the same is occasioned by our thought-activity which causes vibrations in the soul. The child has very little thought-activity and bears no ill-will towards others. His soul has therefore, little karmic bondage and is nearer Godhood.
Wordsworth also believed in the transmigration of the soul. The soul never dies-it enters into different forms, sometimes in the body of an animal and at other times in the body of man:
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy, Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy"
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's star, that had elsewhere its setting And comes from afar."
Shelley also shared Wordsworth's belief in the transmigration of the soul:
The saints and the ascetics are the nearest to the child in that they develop a dispassionate and detached outlook on life. Their meditation is directed to one end to avoid all inflow of fresh karmas, to have minimum of vibrations around the soul, to concentrate on only one thought of Godhood. Wordsworth has fully realized this deep mood of meditation in his Poet's Epitaph:
"I change, but I can not die."
"A moralist perchance appears; Himself his world, and his own God; One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling Nor form, nor feeling, great or small; A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual all-in-all."
Once the karmic bondage is shed off, the soul stands pure in its resplendent glory; it is allknowledge and all-knowing:
These poets also rightly understood the purpose of transmigration. The soul has to be born and born again in this world, till all Karmic bondage is shed off and it stands pure in resplendent glory to be one with God. The march of the soul from lower forms of life to higher is but a process of evolution. The soul in a frog or toad has no chance of final redemption or salvation; it has to rise up to human form. Man is the highest stage in the evolution of the soul and from it the next step is Godhood. But that does not mean that once the soul has entered the human-form there is no climbingdown. It is a constant game of "Snake-andLadder". We enter into inferior or superior forms of being according to our actions in the past life. Good actions in one life are rewarded by better birth in the next life and vice versa. Even among human beings, the differences between the rich and the poor, the diseased and the healthy, the lucky and the unfortunate is the immediate result of our past actions. So once the soul has entered the human-form, the summum bonum of existence, our constant effort should be to avoid any possibility of any "climbing-down". Our righteous conduct will push us on and on, till all karmic bondage will be shed off and the soul
"The power ... which nature thus To bodily sense exhibits, is the express Resemblance of that glorious faculty That higher minds bear with them as their own. This is the very spirit in which they deal With the whole compass of the universe."
The purified soul is God himself. To a Jain, God is not the creator of this universe; nor the arbiter of our destiny:
"we fall by course of Nature's law, not force Of thunder, or of Jove."
Man is his own redeemer. We are all potential 29
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