God Arises
Argument for the Life Hereafter
~ 190 ~
survives in his original form. At all stages of his life,
he thinks of himself as being the same ‘man’ that he
was in the past, and this, in spite of the fact that no
feature of his—eyes, ears, nose, hands, legs, hair,
nails, etc. — has remained the same.
Now if, along with the death of the body, the man
inhabiting it died too, he should be diminished or
depleted in some way by this total replacement of
his cells. But this is not so. He remains quite distinct
from and independent of the body, and retains his
identity notwithstanding the death and decay of the
body. Man is like a river. And the human
personality is like an island in it, unaffected by the
ceaseless flow of the cells. That is why a scientist
has regarded life, or the human personality, as an
independent entity that remains constant in the face
of continuous change. He asserts that ‘personality is
changelessness in change.’ Now if death means the
end of the body, we might well say that whenever
there is such a total replacement of cells in the body,
the man actually dies on each occasion. And that if
we see him moving about alive, he has really been
resurrected. That is, a fifty-year old man would
have experienced death at least five times within
