Most past-life memories involve people who lived sinfully in their previous lives – shouldn’t such people have gone to animal bodies not human bodies?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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Thank you Question In your book, Demystifying Reincarnation, you talked about many cases of people who have remembered their past lives but if you look at the lives of those people, most of them were living materialistic sinful lives so wouldn’t such a lifestyle make them degenerate into human species if they have reincarnated as human beings then are such cases compatible with scripture Answer There are principles of causation which when we study scripture we understand that in real life however, it is rarely that only one principle acts so for example say in systems of justice we may say that if a person kills another person that person should also be killed should be hanged or executed murder is a crime for which there should be death sentence, capital punishment but then what if there was simply a fight but there was no intention to kill just simple blow was given and that person victim who hit the blow that person got a brain hemorrhage at that time or got a heart attack at that time which could have come at any time or what if the person who was killed was an intruder who was trying to steal something and the person in trying to protect one’s position tried to hit back at that person the person got killed what if that person was attempting a rape and a woman in trying to defend her honour killed him what if that person was a terrorist and the police killed him in the encounter so now the act of killing is the same but there are other principles which will need to be considered while determining what is the action to be taken against the killer that for killing a terrorist a police person may be given an award leave alone any punishment so the point is that when we come to the complexity of real life we cannot necessarily expect that what we see will be simply an enactment of one principle so with respect now bringing this whole point to reincarnation reincarnation cases yes it is our karma in this life that determines our next life and to what extent is the karma which will be determining what result so if a person has only occasionally a person has occasionally eaten meat but has lived a life piously according to one’s own religious conceptions according to the religion that they were brought up in in which meat eating is not considered bad so can the act of meat eating be divorced from everything else the person has done if that person has offered namaz everyday throughout most of the life has done so many if a person has gone to church has given taithi has done various other religious pious activities but has been eating meat so now we cannot there are actions which have consequences but in scripture when one action is described as having an unconsequence that is indicative that is not necessarily universal that in all cases this action will always have this consequence only it is our overall karmic balance that determines our future destinations so there are certain actions which comprise bad karma and certain actions which comprise good karma so when we look at some people we may see only one particular action which they are doing which comprises bad karma but we really don’t know what all they are doing in the remaining part of their life and sometimes they may be pious in the other part of their life or sometimes somebody may be pious in one particular activity but they may be doing vicious activities otherwise which you don’t know anything about so for us to make a categorical statement about the post-mortem destination of someone is presumptuous we can say that certain actions have certain consequences but the specific destination of person will depend not just on a specific action that they have done but the overall kind of life that they have lived and also there is the principle to consider that our karma doesn’t come only from this life it also comes from previous lives so not all the karma of the previous life is exhausted in this life so the next life that we get is not determined only by our karma from this life some aspects of it can be determined by karma from a previous life also so for example associated with the Mahabharata there is a story of how Mithrashtra had been a hunter who killed 100 bird lids viciously when he was trying to catch the birds and when the birds he bird and she bird fled he got angry and he just killed their 100 bird lids and thereafter as a reaction to that Krishna tells Mithrashtra that you had to you had to bear the agony of seeing your 100 sons die just the way as you had caused the birds he and she bird to see their 100 offspring die and Krishna told him that this had happened 50 lifetimes ago so Mithrashtra asked why did I have to wait for 50 lifetimes to get the reaction so Krishna said you had to do punya for 50 lifetimes so that you could have 100 sons in one lifetime and then you could get that reaction so that means if Mithrashtra had been doing punya for 50 lifetimes then that punya and papa can be done only in the human form animals do not have a moral sense and they just act governed by instincts so that means in the intermediate 50 lives also Mithrashtra was a human being and if before that he had been a hunter that means he had been killing animals most likely hunter don’t just kill animals they either deal in flesh or they eat flesh themselves or they do both so and he had done not only as a hunter hunting itself is a sinful activity but along with that he had also done a particularly vicious activity of killing baby birdlets who were not of any use to a hunter also a hunter may kill for flesh may kill for skin but baby birds what is the use they are so small so he had committed hunting itself could be called a sinful profession a vicious profession and within that also he had committed a particularly vicious activity and yet for the next 50 lifetimes he got a human birth so this implies that that the way in which karma works is complex and that is why we don’t have to we can’t confidently say that this person is going to get this kind of destination in future and whenever we are going to use empirical knowledge to exemplify any scriptural truth we have to know that we should go in with a limited aim that we will never we will never find a ideal case which fits all the principles so if you are going to talk about the principle of karma it’s a different principle when you are talking about past life memory let us talk about past life memories when you are talking about reincarnation let us focus on reincarnation karma and reincarnation are related but by the arrangement of Krishna through material nature these principles are something which have to be learned primarily from scripture sometimes there is pratyakshana anandama to demonstrate to substantiate certain things that pratyakshana anandama will be specific just like when we look at the evidence of organization and order in the world from that we can come to a limited amount of inference we may be able to infer that there is some extraordinary intelligence behind it but we cannot infer that that intelligence is a blue skinned cowherd boy who wears a peacock feather so there is rational theology and there is revelational theology and revelational theology definitely takes us much further than rational theology rational theology also has its utility in being persuasive to people who are rationally minded who have not yet accepted the authority of revelation but by rational inference there is no way without talking about scripture without drawing on scriptural authority that we can ever establish that Krishna is God or rather the super intelligent designer of this world is a blue skinned cowherd boy who wears a peacock feather now this is we have to rely on revelational theology so when we talk about rational theology it has a purpose it has a limitation also so we cannot expect rational theology or rational philosophy now we are talking not about God but we are talking about the soul and its reincarnation when we go into empirical inferential examples for demonstrating revelational scriptural truths there is always going to be a limitation we cannot prove, we cannot demonstrate all of scripture through one case so to whatever extent we get inference, so we accept that so if a person has lived sinfully and still got a human life our purpose when we are talking about past life memory cases is not to prove the law of karma it is to simply focus on establishing that there is something which goes from one body to another and the reasonableness of inference is that it is the soul so when it comes to talking about the law of karma and how it can be inferred, how it is logical, how it is reasonable that is a whole different subject I have given, I have written several articles about it, given some talks about it the Unraveling the Mystery of Karma I have planned, Krishna willing to write a future book on the topic and then a set of reasonings given for that in my book Leadership Sutras there is a whole set of reasoning given for karma but at this point in the book Demystifying Reincarnation my focus is primarily on on a very focused focused point that is that people who are able to remember previous lives there is no reasonable explanation for it other than the fact that they themselves were the individual in the previous life and that indicates that comprises reasonable persuasive evidence for the idea that there is a soul which goes from one body to another body so we can look at the past life memory cases primarily for demonstrating the principle of reincarnation, not for demonstrating the principle of karma because the principle of karma is complex and many factors are involved in how a person, in what destination a person gets after this life or after a particular life in the next life