Demystifying Reincarnation 01 – Incredible delusion or credible vision?

Podcast

Thank you. Hare Krishna. Welcome to the series, Demystifying Reincarnation.
Here, we’ll go on an exciting journey, exploring the mysteries associated with the concept of reincarnation and how all those mysteries can be unraveled. Initially, we’ll begin with an overview that outlines the scope of the subject, and then we will dive deeper into the mystery. We’ll look at the evidence of reincarnation from the scientific perspective.
Then we will look at it from a historical, cross-cultural, cross-religious perspective. And then after that, we will look at it from a philosophical perspective, trying to make sense of what people have experienced or believed in the light of timeless wisdom given in the ancient wisdom texts of India. Let’s begin with how some people can have such an extraordinary perception.
Today, many of us may think that reincarnation is strange. Maybe some people believe in it, and some group of people, because of their religion or whatever, believe in it. But here we have a respected European philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, saying, Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him.
It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life. So here, Schopenhauer is saying that the idea that this life is the only life we have, this is the beginning of existence, and for many people, this is the end of existence. This is an incredible delusion.
Whereas many people would consider reincarnation an incredible delusion. Here we have a respected philosopher saying that disbelief in reincarnation is an incredible delusion. And what is he saying? This is what Europe, he would define Europe as that.
That means it is only in Europe that the skepticism is there. And other places, people are not suffering from this incredible delusion. Of course, in the colonial times, it was Europe that spread its cultural influence practically all over the globe.
And the global skepticism, global disbelief in reincarnation, the spread from Europe. But even now, one third of the people in the world believe in reincarnation. And not only that, throughout history, if we look at the people who have accepted and even propagated reincarnation, they are like the who’s who of history.
We have Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher and mathematician, after whom the Pythagorean theorem is named. So we have him right in the BCs. Then we have subsequent another great philosopher, Plato.
Then if we come down to the medieval times, we have in Europe, the Giordano Bruno, the Italian philosopher. Then we have Voltaire. If we move from Europe to America, we have Benjamin Franklin, the pioneer U.S. statesman.
And then we have John Adams, the second U.S. president. We have coming back to Europe, we have Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet and dramatist. And if you look in Britain itself, we have William Wordsworth.
Then we have Robert Browning. Then in Germany, we have Richard Wagner. If we go to America again, we have Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
If we move further down to USSR, then we have Leo Tolstoy. Then of course we have, again coming back to Britain, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw. In USA, we have Walt Whitman.
We have Henry Ford of the Ford Motors fame. Then we have Rudyard Kipling, another prominent poet and writer. Then we have Dominic Somerset Maugham, a Nobel laureate writer.
And we have Carl Jung, the preeminent psychiatrist. And then we have Isaac Bashevis Singer, again a U.S. novelist in 20th century. So, this is just a quick preview and we will see that there are, in a later session, how throughout history and geography, many of the leading thinkers of the world have found reincarnation as the most acceptable, most intelligible, most coherent way of making sense of life.
Even now, the acceptance of reincarnation is increasing consistently. And what has caused, if we look at the surveys of belief in reincarnation, the Pew Religious, the Pew Forum Services, they describe that actually reincarnation belief is increasing, the graph is going up. What is the reason for this? Among various reasons, a prominent reason is science.
Scientific research itself is uncovering, in many significant ways, some striking proofs for the idea of reincarnation. And we will discuss three broad categories of evidences or scientific pointers towards reincarnation. One will be the past life memories, where there are certain children, certain people who remember their past lives and give striking details which are not normally knowable, bar for most people.
Or they themselves could not have known it by any normal means. And then there are similar near-death experiences, in which people who are near death, they see themselves from an outer body perspective and they describe details about events that happened when they were medically unconscious, events that medically they were incapable of knowing because they were unconscious. So these two, past life memories and near-death experiences, what do they imply? Past life memories imply that, say there is a person A, who lived at a particular time and he died.
And then there is a person B, who lives at another place at another time and who has no normal connection with A. But still this person B has knowledge about A, which he could not have had by any normal means. So that means A and B, there is something common between them, although there is nothing common between them at the material level. So that commonality could point to a non-material part that was present in A and that went over to B. So reincarnation, the word itself means, re is again.
Inkarna, the karna means flesh. So inkarna means to come in flesh. So reincarnation means to come in flesh again.
That means that to get a new body, to return in a new body. So the idea of reincarnation, if we go at it from the etymological perspective, it means essentially that the soul or some non-material part of us that was present in one body, it returns in another body. So past life memories point to the idea that there is some part of us that lives on after the body falls and then that goes into another body.
So past life memories, if they are found to be true, would comprise the strongest evidence for reincarnation. Now normally the mainstream materialistic idea is that our consciousness emerges from the body, somehow from the brain, and when the body is destroyed or when the person is unconscious, they cannot be conscious. So consciousness is seen as something emerging from the body.
Now when the consciousness falls, when the body falls and dies, then consciousness also is supposed to end. But even when the body is unconscious, if a person stays conscious, as it happens in near-death experiences, then that means that there is a part of us which continues to be conscious even when the body is not conscious. Even if the brain waves are flat, indicating that there is no consciousness, it indicates that at that time someone is conscious.
That means consciousness does not come from a brain. Consciousness comes from a source different from the brain. So whereas past life memories point to a connection between one body and another body.
They point to the idea that the non-material being goes from one body to another. The near-death experiences point to something else, that the non-material part of us continues to exist or can continue to function even when the body is no longer functioning. So that is near-death experiences.
That’s what they prove. Now, we may say, okay, these are evidences. But how do you make, what is the theory behind it? Science is not just about evidences.
Science is also about theory. So is there any theoretical explanation about how consciousness could exist separate from matter? How the consciousness could exist separate from the body and the brain? Actually, there is strong evidence for this and there is stronger evidence and reasoning and theoretical analysis of how the opposite is not possible. That means, if we try to explain consciousness in materialistic terms, if we try to explain it in terms that matter produces consciousness, that runs into brick walls, that kind of hypothesis.
So we will in later, so in the spirit of science, science, there is theory and there is experiment. So we could say there is evidence and there is theoretical postulation. So what we will do is, we will discuss the evidence in our initial sessions.
First evidence for past life memories, then evidence for near-death experiences and then we will go into a little technical theory where we will analyze the theoretical perspective of where does consciousness come from? Now, let’s begin this journey of exploring the past life memories. So past life memories are something which just fascinate the human mind. Often there are movies which are based on lovers who somehow could not unite in one life and they reincarnate in another life and then they are united in that life.
So the idea of reincarnation has been popularized in the mainstream culture largely by pairing it with the idea of romance. So romantic reincarnation is a theme. In many movies, in recent times there is a Bollywood movie, Om Shanti Om, before that many other movies which all talk about how a couple who could not be united in one life, they are united in another life.
And this leads to the idea of a soulmate. That there is a soul and the soul has a mate and that is united lifetime after lifetime. So this idea has, it can appeal to some people’s sentiments but that often does not explore critically the possibility that someone could have, is it really possible that someone can reincarnate? Is it just a tool, an imaginative tool for novel writers and movie script writers? Or is there some reality to it? So let us look at it first from a first person’s perspective.
A person who, a celebrity who considered oneself to be reincarnated and then we will look at it from an objective perspective, from the perspective of researchers. So Winston Churchill said that man will occasionally stumble over the truth, usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it and carry on. We may very well encounter the truth that there is something more to us than our body.
But when the evidence comes for it, we just dismiss it off as entertainment and move on. But there are some people who don’t do that. So here we have the Arab Sheikh Saud bin Muhammad Al Thani, cousin of the ruling emir of Qatar and one of the world’s biggest art purchasers.
He is a billionaire. Once in an art exhibit, he saw the picture of Eshwantra Holkar, a late Maharaja of Indore, India. And as soon as he saw that, the similarity in the faces struck him.
So there is the same oblong face, the same broad forehead, the same sharp equine nose, the same pencil moustache. Just this sight triggered a flood of memories in Al Thani and he remembered his past life as Holkar or as he was known as YRH, Eshwantra Holkar. And as soon as this memory was triggered that he was an art collector, so his whole art collecting zeal became directed towards getting YRH memorabilia.
He started getting everything connected with YRH. Al Thani is a billionaire and YRH was also living a very luxurious life. At his time, he sponsored a whole cricket team for India.
He had yatches in helicopters and everything that was available related with him, Al Thani started getting it. So for Al Thani, he earlier would go to art museums and purchase everything that he liked no matter what it cost him. And now he directed his whole art collection zeal towards getting everything related to YRH.
And when he came to India and actually searched around, sent agents to search around for the remains for whatever objects memorabilia was there of YRH, it came in the news. And now here, for Al Thani, this was not just a sentimental idea, it’s a multi-million dollar truth. He is putting his money where his mouth is and he is taking it seriously.
The managers of YRH estate, when they came to know that suddenly so much money was being offered for things related to YRH, they enquired, why is it? He said, it’s because Al Thani believes that he is Holkar reincarnated. Now he has, after seeing pictures of how Holkar was living, Al Thani refashioned his own house, his gardens, his walkways, his courtyards to model the palace which he had, which Holkar had. So he would give elaborate photo shoots wherein he would pose like Holkar.
Now we may say that this is just one person’s fantasy. He is a wealthy person and he can throw his money wherever he wants. And he is just doing it because wealthy people do like that.
It’s possible. But you have to consider several perspectives over here. First point is that as far as Al Thani is concerned, his religious belief does not support reincarnation.
In fact, as we will see later, although the broad Islamic tradition is compatible with reincarnation, but largely today’s mainstream Islamic teachers, they don’t accept reincarnation. So it is not because of his religious belief that he is doing it. He is doing it rather when he does this, when he claims that he is YRH reincarnated, he is doing it and standing up against his religious beliefs.
So for a person in India to claim that I am so and so person reincarnated, that might give some fascination, some prestige in Indian society because we may say that in India many people believe in reincarnation. But for him, he has to go against his culture, he has to go against his religious beliefs. And all the more so in India we have, broadly speaking, there has been a lot of religious tension between Hindus and Muslims.
And because of this, for a Muslim to believe that he is a Hindu king reincarnated, that is not considered the most flattering idea in Muslim society. So both from the religious perspective as well as from the political perspective, this is not an idea which is going to win him many friends. And the fact that in spite of that he is going ahead and he is doing it, it indicates that there is something which is driving him.
There is something which is making him do this. And there is also, similarly, if we consider in the World War II, there was a famous general, this US general who led troops to one of the most decisive victories in the Second World War, George S. Patton. He was a US general, but after the invasion of Normandy, thereafter when he led the attack into France and Germany and he brought decisive victories, he was a person who strongly believed in reincarnation.
And often while he was taking his leaders, taking his troops, taking his assistants on some fighting expeditions, sometimes you take a detour, you go to some distant place, just open war field or open field and just sit there and simply get lost. He said, this was the place where I fought a war long ago. This is the place I was killed in a previous life.
This is the place where I fought and won. He would have these memories. And he felt that it was through the experience that he had learned in all these lives that he had become a very competent general.
So he believed, for example, that he had been in the past a prehistoric mammoth hunter, a Greek hoplite, a heavily armed soldier, foot soldier who fought the Persians, a soldier of Alexander the Great who fought in the siege of Tyre. He was Hannibal. He was a Roman legionary and a Julius Caesar.
He was an English knight during the Hundred Years War and he was a Napoleonic marshal. And what do we make of such people who are influential in their own fields and who accept the idea that they had lived in the previous life and they even identify, remember who they were in previous lives. Pythagoras would also, his biographers described, that he would tell elaborately about who he was in the previous life and not just one previous life, many previous lives.
So how can we, today when we live in the scientific world, how can we make sense of this? Is there any way in which such people’s beliefs can be more critically investigated? We do not have access to such memories. Most of us don’t have access. So how can we be expected to accept this just based on testimony of certain people? Are there some objective standards by which such memories can be investigated? That indeed is what many scientists, scientific researchers who explore the field of past life memories have tried to do.
They have subjected these studies, these cases, not just relying on the first person testimony and the strength of evidence and the influence of the caliber of those people, but actually evaluating their memories. So for example, if somebody claims that I was Hannibal, now there is no practical way in which that could be verified. But if somebody gives some facts about some other person which are not knowable by any normal means, then that can be evaluated, that can be either found to be true or false.
So in our next session, we will discuss about the scientific scrutiny of past life memories and how it has progressed. And for this session, a quick recap. We started with how today we might consider belief in reincarnation as incredible.
But in the past, it was disbelief in reincarnation which was considered incredible because most people believed in reincarnation. And Schopenhauer called Europe as the, you define it as a continent which suffers from the incredible delusion that this life is all that we have. Discussed throughout history how people have had acceptance, have accepted reincarnation.
And then we discussed the case of a person who puts his money where his mouth is, Al Thani, who believed that he is Ishwant Rahul reincarnated. And then we have General Patton, one of the most successful generals in the Second World War, who believed that he had learned fighting and martial skills in many previous lives which he also recollected. So join us in the next session where we’ll discuss the scientific scrutiny of past life memories.
Thank you. Hare Krishna.