Reincarnation 1 – Preview of scientific, historical and philosophical analysis
Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies.
Hare Krishna. Welcome to this discussion on the mystery of reincarnation. Reincarnation, the idea that we have some aspect to our being which continues to live after death in some other body, at some other place.
The idea that we have lived before and that we will live again. The idea that life doesn't begin with birth or end with death. The idea that we are immortal beings and our present lifetime is just one stop in a multi-lifetime journey.
This idea of reincarnation has fascinated the human mind since time immemorial. In this series, we will try to unravel the mystery of reincarnation. What is the mystery? The mystery essentially is, is death the end? Is death the termination or is death the transition? And if death is the transition, is this just a matter of sectarian religious belief or is there empirical evidence? What does science say about this? What do the greatest thinkers in the world say about this? And does reincarnation happen to just a few select people or does everyone reincarnate? If everyone reincarnates, then what is the mechanism? What are the principles by which our future body is determined? We will discuss all these questions over a series of brief talks in the series on the mystery of reincarnation.
This introduction will also serve as a brief overview of the journey that we will take. Our journey will essentially have three broad divisions. In the first one-third, we will discuss the scientific pointers to reincarnation.
In the second one-third, we will discuss about the global prevalence of reincarnation, discussing about how thinkers across history and geography have accepted and even respected reincarnation. And in the third part, we will discuss from the Vedic wisdom tradition, a coherent and systematic explanation of the mechanism and principles for reincarnation. So, in the first one-third, the scientific pointers, we will discuss three parts again.
We will discuss firstly, the mystery of consciousness. We all exist and we know that we exist. The camera which is recording me exists, but it does not know that it exists.
What is the difference between us and insentient objects like a camera? It is essentially consciousness. Where does consciousness come from? This is one of the biggest scientific mysteries that confronts mainstream science today. We will tackle this mystery head-on by considering how materialist explanations of consciousness, that means the attempt to explain consciousness in terms of neurochemical phenomena, in terms of the chemical transformations in the human, in the brain, these such explanations of consciousness turn out to be seriously inadequate.
We will discuss astonishing cases of how some people who have barely 2% of brain substance in their cranial cavity, whose brain cavity is essentially filled with water and yet they have above average IQs. They have no brain and yet they have brain capacity better than what people with full brains have. Their living examples demonstrate that our intellectual capacity and our consciousness does not necessarily depend on the brain.
The very presence of consciousness points to a non-material source of consciousness. After discussing the theoretical inadequacies of neurochemical explanations of consciousness and establishing the acceptability within the scientific mainstream of considering alternative explanations, we will then look at empirical pointers towards the existence of a non-material source of consciousness. The first pointer will be near-death experiences.
When people come very close to death because of heart attack or because of accidents or trauma, some of them experience themselves rising out of their bodies and looking at their body from an out-of-body perspective. So, within near-death experiences, some subjects experience out-of-body experiences and during some of these out-of-body experiences, the subjects give astonishingly precise reports of not just the surgical procedures but also the discussions between the surgical staff, details that they could not have known even if they had been conscious. We will discuss evidence of how some subjects reported events happening not just to them but events happening several rooms away, events happening outside the hospital which they would not have had any means to know even if they had been conscious.
We will discuss near-death experiences among blind people who could not see before or after their near-death experience but during the near-death experience they saw and we will discuss about one case in which the person was brain dead, the brain was entirely inactive and still the person was conscious. So, near-death experiences provide strong evidence that the consciousness can exist independent of the brain. For reincarnation, the consciousness needs to not only exist independent of the brain but consciousness needs to also transit from this body to another body.
Is there any evidence for that? Yes, that is provided by past life memories. We will discuss cases of celebrities having past life memories and how credible they are. Then we will focus on scientifically documented cases of past life memories.
We will first discuss briefly about the credibility of hypnotic regression while recollecting past life memories and we will discuss crypto amnesia and we will discuss xenoglossy. Xenoglossy means the capacity of people to speak foreign languages and to write in foreign languages and in one amazing case, a subject wrote in a language that has been extinct for 1900 years. That person had not even heard of that language before and yet he wrote coherently in that language.
How? The only reasonable explanation is that that person had lived in the second, third century millennia ago when that language was spoken and during hypnotic regression, the memory that was there was activated. Then we will discuss about past life memories and especially past life memories in children and we will discuss various normal explanations. Could the children have just guessed it? Could the children have known? Children often tell astonishing details.
They tell four things. They tell that I was so and so. I was small, I was big then, but I am small now.
They tell the name of who they were in a previous life. They tell the names of the relatives. Not only do they have memories, if they are taken over there, the second level of evidence is recognitions.
They are able to recognize a young man who is just a young boy who is five years old, sees a 35-year-old woman and says to her, you are my wife. And not only are there recognitions, there are also behaviors. A person who had been killed in his previous life by say drowning now exhibits hydrophobia, great fear of water.
A person who had a great taste for tea in a previous life, in this life is attracted to tea. And there are cases of Muslims being born as Hindus, of people who are born in non-believing cultures and still remembering previous lives. And most persuasive evidence is of birth marks and birth defects.
A person who was stabbed multiple times has in the next life wounds right from the birth at the very places where he had been stabbed in his previous life. So this, the mystery of consciousness, near-death experiences and past life memories comprise powerful scientific evidence for reincarnation. And people, we will discuss about the global prevalence of reincarnation and then the systematic explanation of how reincarnation occurs.
What is it that reincarnates? What are the characteristics of that non-material source of consciousness? And what are the principles by which a future body is determined? If we don't end at the time of death, then is there a deathless realm to which we belong? How does the Vedic model explain past life memories and reincarnation and near-death experiences? How does the knowledge of reincarnation affect our day-to-day living? If a reincarnation-centered worldview became mainstream, what benefits would it have individually, socially, ecologically? And ultimately, how would our answers about who we are and what is the purpose of our life? How would those answers change if we were understood to be non-material beings? All these questions we will discuss in our future sessions. Do join us. Thank you.