This Self cannot possibly be subject to any change, not even death. This is perhaps why belief in reincarnation died hard even in the West. It was a cherished belief not only in pagan but in various Jewish and Christian groups in the early centuries of our era, but was brusquely rejected by the emerging orthodoxy and seems an unsettling and unverifiable hypothesis to most of us today. Yet it differs only slightly, almost by a question of semantics, from the modern concept of evolution, which holds that the individual dies with the death of the physical body. Indian religious systems hold as a
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