IV Religion and the Life Hereafter

tiny cells, the number of which in an average body is placed at fifteen trillion. These cells disintegrate each moment, but our diet makes up for those destroyed cells and they are replaced with new ones. The body is thus like a building which is composed of billions of bricks, but which is in the process of replacing its bricks at every moment. Now, if the soul is a phenomenon of the body, then with the disintegration or changing of the cells of the body, the soul should simultaneously undergo the same transformation, just as a whole machine is affected when one part of it is broken, or as the breaking of a single string affects the tone of a musical instrument. But such is not the case with the soul. This shows that the soul is independent of the body and has its own existence. That is why a scientist has said, “Personality is changelessness in change,” that is, the human personality is self-existent (as compared to the body), keeping its existence in changeless form amidst continuous changes. Further proof of the truth of this concept is provided by the discovery in the field of psychology of the ‘unconscious’ or the ‘subconscious’—a major part of the human brain. It has been established that the thoughts stored in the unconscious remain in exactly the same condition until death. Freud writes in his thirty-first lecture: The laws of Logic—above all, the law of contradiction, do not hold for processes in the Id. Contradictory impulses exist side by side without neutralizing each other or drawing apart; at most they combine in compromise. There is nothing in the Id, which can be compared to negation, and we are astonished to find in it an exception to the philosophers’ assertion that space and time are necessary forms of our mental acts. In the Id there is nothing corresponding to the idea of time, no recognition of the passage of time, and (a thing which is very remarkable and awaits adequate attention in philosophic thought) no alteration of mental processes by the passage of time. Conative impulses which have never got beyond the Id, and even impressions which have been pushed down into the Id by repression, are virtually immortal and are preserved for whole decades as though they had only recently occurred.