Contribution of Twentieth Century

Initial impact of science with the commencement of twentieth century was the absorption of a concept after the theory of relativity. According to the theory, world had only two components– matter and vacuum. Human mind was conditioned accordingly and a common man wrote off soul or consciousness as unacceptable entity by the mid-fifties of the twentieth century. With the acceleration of communication technologies during the late fifties to early seventies, there was a spate of events and data, which were authentic and impossible to put in the materialistic jacket of scientific thinking. There were ‘Mysteries of the Unexplained’ (34) and also incredible events falling ‘Into the Unknown’ (23) territory of science. Many of the events, records or phenomena relate to consciousness or soul. At the same time, a conservative, materialistic conception of mind has continued in the garb of a scientific philosophy (35).

Seventies was also a period when western psychologists dared to look at the functions of mind or human consciousness as a manifestation beyond brain. To an Indian mind, soul is no enigma and its travel from one to another life falls under a common principle of all major religions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Indian psyche, in spite of penetration by scientific thinking of materialism, remained firm about data gathering on reincarnations, Yog and Tantra. They found a place due to them in magazines and journals.

In the West, with the concept of one time life in Bible or Koran, a psychologist needed courage to look into events like ‘Life Before Life’ (36). When it was done by Wambach, a marvelous statistical figure emerged on a comprehensive and a credibly large data. The document proves that we are in a mill of reincarnations, taking birth and living again and again. There is little role for any God in the whole affair, and even if it is, God has a relevance of only 0.1 percent in the life –death-life mill of nature. A knowledgeable conscious self or soul alone is the principal unit in the whole game of human life after life and interlude in between. The study also put to an end a hoarse claim of the materialist that life begins and ends only with our  organic body. 

By the nineties of the twentieth century, information was enough to place the consciousness in the paradigm of science covering life, death and evolution of human mind or soul. The ‘Consciousness of Science’ (2) documented the origin and evolutionary path of organic consciousness from anoxic conditions of initial life on earth to the same state reached by a Yogi – the man at the apex of organic evolution. The document also demonstrates that four types of invisible consciousness bodies govern our life.  At the level of soul, life is far more complex than conceived usually. Not only soul has a complex structure but it also undergoes sinuous mill of karms life after life. The new information constitutes a valuable basis for modeling the structure of soul.  Seemingly, man is created and supported by soul for its own ends.

We look at the contributions of   last century on our soul, in view of consciousness bodies and role of karms, in the third chapter of book.