BASIC SOUL PHILOSOPHY

This is the basic philosophy of Jainism about all living beings. Every living being, be it a human, a sheep, a bacteria, a mango plant, has a ‘soul’. And this soul can take many forms, from a human to a goat or a lion and vice-versa. The body dies but the soul never dies. So. Once you die your soul takes another form in another ‘gati’ and continues to live, and it continues to travel until it reaches its ultimate destination ‘moksha’, the way to which will be clear in the following posts. So, the deeds you do affect your future. If you perform good deeds such as kindness, helping others, etc. your soul (atma) gets good future, your luck improves and your destiny is fair to you and vice-versa . In other words, one has to pay for what one does. And the reward/punishment for good/evil deeds is many times what you did. Actually, the readers migh be confused at this point of time, but it will become clearer with more posts.

Eg. All of us know of ‘Sita’, yes the one in Ramayan. The truth is that in her some previous birth, she had locked a ‘sadhu’ in a room for 14 days, and that’s why, she had to suffer a 14 years exile in her known-to-all birth. So you see, the punishment for 14 days became 14 years, i.e. many times.

There are four ‘gati’s. They are:


Note: tiryanch gati is the animal gati, i.e. the souls of all animals are in tiryanch gati.

So every soul takes the form of one or other gati. We presently are in ‘manushya gati’ but who knows, in future, we may take birth as a snake or land up in ‘narak’. Yes! Hell and heavens exist, and not only that, there are 12 heavens and 7 hells. The one who does evil deeds, or houses evil feelings towards anyone goes to hell (7th being the worst) and vice-versa(12th being the best). So, to stop our soul from suffering, it has to go to ‘moksha’; this is the ultimate destination of every souls, which causes rebirths to stop. So, keep ‘samta’, do good deeds and aim towards moksha. What one achieves in each life is of no consequence.

If you have any queries, please leave them as a comment to this post. Everything told above will be elaborated upon in the following posts.