Key of Knowledge

SR No.: 006702
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown
Publication Year: 1919
Total Pages: 1204
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 25 MB

Page 862

RE-INCARNATION.
841
is vitality and to what cause, or causes, is its impairment due ?
In order to understand the nature of vitality, it is necessary to bear in mind the fact that health is affected both by mental and material causes, so that harmful passions and emotions, such as peevishness, envy and the like, as well as unhealthy suggestions produce as much harm as unwholesome foods and poisonous surroundings. Vitality, it should be added, signifies the healthful energy of a living organism which is characterised by the presence of the soul, and is a term utterly inapplicable to a purely material compound. Hence, it is only natural that it should be liable to be affected by both the mental and physical stimuli. Accordingly, we find many of the ordinary ailments of life amenable to control by suggestion as well as hy proper medicament. That vitality is not a pure secretion or product of matter, may be seen by trying to infuse it into a body from which the soul has already taken its departure, when the whole of the contents of all the different pharmacopæias may be emptied into the belly of the corpse without making it move as much as a single muscle.
The modern mind whose outlook is limited by its ignorance of the nature of the law of karma, no doubt, seeks to discover the cause of the lowness of vitality exclusively in the influence of matter on a living organism, but religion points, in the first instance, to the operation of the forces engendered in the previous incarnation of the soul as furnishing the key to the solution of the problem. As already stated, the effect of the different kinds of activities of the individual
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