The purpose of this post is only to generate a little curiosity 🙂
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I recall that the real reason why I got interested in jainism ~20 years ago was actually physcis for the most part. Here is why?….
Just like many other folks who love science, I have always had a fascination for physics because its goal is to explain the mechanics of everything that we observe. So when I heard from someone how Jainism explains the mechanics of living, non-living etc I got interested a little. My interest level really spiked when I heard that Jainism explains “Karma” as a real physical non-living matter with real physical properities. That was a true “Wow!” moment for me because until then I had always thought of karma as a fuzzy idea that meant action and also I always thought of religion as a fuzzy idea about what we should and shouldn’t do. This was the first time I realized that Jainism expalins or hypothesises things in a true physics sense. And once that happened I obviously got super curious to know what else is in there that is like this?
Before I say more, a word of caution :)……I only know a very little about Jainism and am only an amateur when it comes to science as well. So if this sounds interesting to you then you should talk to real jain scholar and/or a real scientist to confirm what I am writing here.
I putting the hypothesis in very few words skipping the gory details.
So based on my understanding, here is how Jainism explains the mechanics of brith, death and re-birth cycle of living beings in this universe.
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The universe has a real physical “substance” called soul. The soul is “living” i.e. its “aware”. ALL the other matter in their “purest” form in the universe are pretty much non-living i.e non-aware. There is definition of what aware means but I won’t go into it.
Soul has certain properties that are not typical matter like properties and I won’t go into that part either but its very interesting to know what those properties are because that really takes you to the absolute core of Jainism.
There are countless souls in the universe and they are each in primarily 2 high level states. One that have karma particles (again these are true physical matter) “glued” to it. When i say glued I really mean glued in the true physcial sense and not some fuzzy thing. These souls have a body (physcial matter) and they go through the cycle of life and death. There are other souls that are called “pure” souls that don’t have the karma particles glued to them at all. This is when a living being achieves what is called as “moksha”. Basically a state where the “glue” gets destroyed and hence no karma particles can then get attached and that state is permanenent and nothing can put a soul from its pure form into non-pure form.
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Thats all for this post and one final thought is that one thing I will always appreciate about Jainism is its concept and quest of what is called as “pure” knowledge. As I heard a lot from scholars I was truly amazed at the amount of emphasis there is on that purpose. For a science geek, its very appealing because thats precisely what a scientist would say. The true goal of science is really pure knowledge i.e. understanding how things work.
Lastly, Until there is a concept of an amorphous substance like “soul” in the sciences, in my view, its not much use to try and force the jain view of universe on science’s and vice-versa. Just take them as-is. Again, the idea behind this post is to keep the curiosity going.