Live from #FB Bandstand Q&A on reincarnation with Chaitanya Charan Das

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Hello everyone.
I’m happy to be here with all of you at the Facebook office bandstand. I’m Chaitanya Cheran Das. I’m an author on science and spirituality and a speaker.
So, I’ll be speaking on the topic of reincarnation today based on my latest book Demystifying Reincarnation. And I have three Facebook pages, Chaitanya Cheran Das, The Spiritual Scientist, which is also my website, and Gita Daily, Wisdom, which is related to my website, Gita Daily, where I blog on the Gita every day. I am grateful to Ishant and Sapna from Phoenix and Vinila for taking care of my Facebook pages.
And today’s event has been organised by a fingerprint, Neeraj especially and Shikha. I’m grateful to them also. And today we will be talking on reincarnation based on some standard questions which come up whenever the topic of reincarnation comes up.
So I will address five or six questions depending on the availability of the time. Okay. So, Guruji, can you tell us how does reincarnation really matter to me as an individual or to anyone of us? I’ll start with how it began to matter to me, personally.
My first introduction to the Bhagavad Gita, which is a prime book talking about reincarnation, was through a Bhagavad Gita recitation competition when I was around five. So I had memorised a chapter of the Gita and then I won a prize at that time. And at that time, I read about the concept of the soul and its reincarnation.
I didn’t find it very relevant. But over the years, especially because death is such an undeniable reality in our life, the question pops up. What happens after death? Does anything happen at all? Woody Allen said that it’s not that I’m afraid of death.
I just don’t want to be there when it happens. Now, death doesn’t work like that. We will be there and we will have to die.
Not only we will have to die, our loved ones, we often see them departing in front of our eyes. So for me, when I was in the 10th, just after I cracked my 10th standard exam, within a month, my mother was diagnosed of blood cancer and she passed away. So that was the time when I started getting into metaphysics seriously.
So for every one of us, a sign of human intelligence is to prepare for the future. To look ahead to the future and prepare for the future. So the question of reincarnation matters because in the future for all of us, there is the end of our life.
That is death. And what happens after death? This is a question which I felt I wanted answers to. And anyone who has actually confronted death among their family, social circle, this question does matter to all of us.
So in that sense, when I started researching the subject, I found something very striking that everywhere people talk about living forever. There are millions of romance novels, romance movies, they all have this theme of happy ever after. So we want to live forever and to love forever.
So why do we have this longing at all? So it could just be sentimental wish fulfilment. That we desire to live forever. But I wanted to know what is the reality and is there any way to know what the reality is? So once in my teenage years, one of my fascinations was astronomy.
So I used to look at a telescope, through a telescope in the sky. And as I was looking at the stars, at one time it just struck me. I was looking at it and suddenly my thoughts went off in some other direction.
And after a couple of minutes when I came back, I realised that the stars over there are fascinating but sometimes the thoughts inside me can become so much more fascinating that they can take my attention away. So what is there inside me that is actually me. And does that survive death? So I would say the question of identity, activity, and destiny.
All these three are intrinsically related. So we are all busy with our activities in our life. I want to achieve this.
I want to get this job. I want to get this house. And we all want to fulfil our destiny, whatever it is we have decided.
But all this is related fundamentally to our identity. So who we are and what we are meant to achieve, this is the question that the philosophy centred on existence after death or existence before birth, which is what reincarnation is about. That’s what it answers.
So whether reincarnation is for real or not, that is a question that is of relevance to every single one of us. Because we will be confronted with whatever the reality is in due course of time. Okay, so are there any well documented cases that support reincarnation? And how do you basically know they are not fake or false? These are not frauds basically.
This was the question which actually got me into serious study of reincarnation. At one level it could be a sentiment and none of us want to die and therefore some people in the past imagined that there is something within us which lives on after death. But when I got into this field of scientific study of reincarnation, I found that many researchers who had done quite rigorous research.
The pioneer among researchers was Dr. Jan Stevenson from the University of Virginia and he was the head of the Department of Personality Studies and over 50 years travelling across all the inhabited continents, he documented several thousand cases and he had four levels of evidences. So the first of course was recollections that say children suddenly when they are 3, 4, 5 or sometimes even earlier, they suddenly tell mummy, mummy, I want to go to my other mum. Or sometimes they just start walking away themselves to some other place where they say they live.
Sometimes son tells to his father, papa I was big then, I am small now. So now this could just be childhood fantasy but several of the cases which Stevenson found were of clearly documented facts which could be verified. So recollections of verifiable facts is the first level of evidence.
The second level of evidence is recognitions. When the children are taken to the venue of their claimed past lives there they meet people and recognise them, they recognise places, they tell about events that happened over there that’s recognitions. Third is behaviours.
It means the children behave as if they were the person who had deceased. So they exhibit the appropriate emotions in the relationship which they had in the previous life. Not only that say if somebody had died because of drowning, then the children have hydrophobia in this life, fear of water.
Although there is nothing in their genetics which might predispose them towards that. And the strongest evidence which Stevenson found which he compiled in a huge tome called where reincarnation and biology intersect is of birthmarks and birth defects. Say for example if a child had been, if a person in the previous life had been run over by a truck, been knocked down and the truck had gone over the thigh and that had been a part of the wounds that caused the death.
Then the child is born with a very distinctive birth defect where the thigh is shaped like normal till a particular point and then it just becomes a complete hollow. As if it is flattened over because of running of a truck. And researchers have found that these cases of birthmarks and birth defects have no normal reason.
Scientists know that birthmarks and birth defects come from two main sources. One is they may come from genetics in some families, some people just have certain birthmarks, birth defects or they may come because when the mother is pregnant she may ingest some substances which may affect the body of the child. But in more than 50% of the documented cases of birthmarks neither of these factors are present.
So in such cases beg for an explanation. So I’d like to give one specific case which demonstrates this. So this is a case of Nesip Ullutaskiran.
He was born in Turkey in a place called Adana. And when he was around four, from that time onwards he started saying that my name is Nesip but my name is Nesip Budak. And he said I live in a place called Mersin.
So in Mersin he says I have a wife over there and I have kids over there. And I want to go and see them. His parents were bewildered.
His parents Turkey is primarily a Muslim country and his parents actually did not believe in reincarnation. So he just tried to dismiss and silence him, neglect him but he didn’t pay any attention. So finally as he grew older he started telling his parents if you don’t take me there I will go there myself.
Then finally when his mother had taken him to her father’s place. Her father had just recently got married and his wife, new wife happened to be from Mersin. And when Nesip mentioned to her that no I was Nesip Budak, this boy mentioned.
She said yes I knew a person named Nesip Budak. And he had been stabbed to death. So he said yes I am that person.
Then his grandfather was intrigued and he took him to their house, to the house of Nesip Budak. And when he went there although he had never been to Mersin he led them all the way exactly to the house. And there at that house lived a woman who was a widow.
And she had been married to a man named Nesip Budak. And not only did Nesip recognise her he recognised his children from their photos, he recognised the neighbourhood, recognised several other neighbours and along with that so there was the recollections which were accurate, there were the recognitions which were accurate along with that were behaviours. His widow she had remarried and when Nesip saw his former wife’s photo with her new husband he was so infuriated with jealousy that he picked up the frame and wanted to break it apart.
And when he saw his children who were actually older than him now, some of them, he started offering paternal affection to them, fondling their hair and treating them as if they were his children. More than that Nesip had been a very short tempered person. So one time when he had quarrelled with his wife he had got angry and had attacked her with a knife.
And she had dodged the blow but the knife had grazed her thigh and it left a lifelong scar over there. Now when Nesip mentioned this so Stevenson and his associates were investigating the case. They had one of their female assistants they took this woman privately and they found that she actually had a scar in her thigh area and she said that this had been given to her when her husband had attacked her.
Now for a boy who has never seen a woman who is living in a conservative culture for that boy to know about a scar on a private part of her body it’s impossible. Most significantly for Nesip in Nesip’s case he had seven birthmarks on his body not one not two but seven and these seven birthmarks indicated that he would say that this was the place where I was stabbed and Nesip actually had been a quarrelsome person he was also a drunkard so one time he had got an altercation and the person to whom he had quarrelled the person had stabbed him multiple times so Nesip would point to his birthmarks and he would say this is where I was stabbed in my previous life. Now because it had been a case of murder there were police records of the post-mortem had been done and they had the location of the exact places where the fatal wounds had been inflicted and Stevenson divided the human body into XY coordinates 120 XY coordinates and then he correlated how precise is the matching between the position of the fatal wound in the previous life and the birthmark in this life so if the two match the probability of that is 1 by 120 now if seven birthmarks match the probability of that is 1 by 120 raised to the power of 7 so that is an astronomically low probability such cases so cases like these are not just one or two there are hundreds of cases where all four are strongly present recognitions, recollections behaviours and birthmarks and birth defects and these comprise very persuasive evidence for reincarnation that there is something which existed in the body of Naseer and that something left his body and came into the body of Naseer so that is what reincarnates so if there are so many cases with strong evidence about reincarnation and all of reincarnation as a concept if it is real why is it that not all of us can remember our past lives actually we can’t remember our past lives for multiple reasons first is that it is just our nature to forget if we consider what we were doing five years ago if I ask even just what somebody was doing at this particular time one week ago it is very difficult for us to remember this life, five years ago, ten years ago there might be phases in our life which we don’t remember at all so forgetting is a natural feature of the human body of the human body the human mind, whatever you want to say along with that we have an innate psychological defence mechanism by which memories that are traumatic although they remain in our mind very intensely for some time but over a period of time for healing to take place, those memories fade into the background so for the soul death and then birth both of these are traumatic events death means the rupture of the soul from a setting in a life in which it is completely entrenched and birth means suddenly being launched into a new place, a new family in a new body so both of these are very disorienting events and that’s why it’s normal that the memory of our past lives gets blocked out, so a new life is a chance for us to make a new beginning and if we had too many flashbacks of everything that happened in the past we would not be able to move forward with this new beginning in spite of our natural forgetfulness, in spite of the psychological defence mechanism of forgetting traumatic events it’s still significant that many children do remember their past lives and that is despite a phenomenon which researchers have documented called as childhood repression of past life memories so especially in those families where the parents disbelieve in reincarnation in those cases the parents often actively try to discourage their children from speaking about the past life memories and now for the children if they speak or do something which displeases their parents and especially we are talking about very small children not the children who have come to the age of rebellion 3, 4, 5, so for those children if their parents strongly disapprove something, they stop speaking about it most of the time, they stop doing that thing so many past life memory cases get suppressed because of this so it’s amazing that in spite of all this some people are able to remember their past lives and many of these cases who remember their past lives are despite concerted attempts at suppression now there are cases say of reincarnation among people from different religions so in my book I narrated a case of one Naresh Kumar who claimed to be Mushir Ali Shah in his previous life now because of the religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India neither family there were new people which is also a little holotype neither of them wanted a reincarnation connection between the two families from different religions and many times parents they try to take their child to an exorcist they try to star their child they often out of superstition they put their child on a wheel and rotate the wheel counter clockwise hoping that that will undo the memories and in this way they make concerted efforts to suppress those memories and there was a case of one boy Jaisbir Singh he one day when he was just about two, two and a half, he told his parents that you know I belong to a Brahmin family and I cannot eat the food cooked in this low class house can you imagine a child who is just barely two and a half what does he understand about clean and unclean food, where the food is cooked and he was so adamant that his father for the next several years actually had to pay a Brahmin to cook food in his house and get to his house three times a day so these are cases of extraordinary resilience among the children because of which they are able to remember their past lives so we need to turn the question around rather than asking why most of us are not able to remember our past lives now how is it that still a significant number of people remember their past lives and just as we can from some indicators infer the reality just like when we are cooking rice we don’t need to eat the whole rice to know that it is cooked just by the fact that we have some people just a few grains are cooked then that’s enough to know that the rice is being cooked like there is one documented case of a child who remembers the past life that is enough as evidence for reincarnation now William James is a psychologist he gave the scientific principle for this, he said if you want to disprove the idea that all crows are black you don’t have to show that all crows are white just showing one crow that is white is enough, so similarly even if there is one case of documented past life memories which is strongly established then that is enough to strongly support the understanding that there is something beyond the body which survives the body and reincarnates so does reincarnation mean that all of us have a soul mate basically I answer questions on Quora, so one of the questions I was asked when I wrote on this reincarnation was this that one boy asked that I love a girl and we want to marry but our parents are not agree so I want to know what karma can I do by which I can marry her in my next life so now when he asked this question, I gave an elaborate answer the point here is that the notion of reincarnation has been taken by Bollywood and it has been romanticised sensationalised and trivialised romanticised means there are many movies in which say the hero and heroine are somehow not able to unite and both of them die and the same actor and actress they do a double role and they come back in exactly the same forms same looks and then in the next life they take revenge against whoever hurt them in the previous life and they unite so this romanticisation of reincarnation actually makes reincarnation into simply another fictional tool just like in some movies there may be ghosts, there may be vampires so reincarnation also becomes like that and it drives the attention away from the serious research that has been done about reincarnation so the important thing is what reincarnates if at all there is a reincarnation what reincarnates is not the body it is the soul reincarnation means that re-in-karna, karna refers to flesh like we have in carnivorous animals in means to come inside, re means again so to come back again in flesh, that is reincarnation and when you come back again in flesh you don’t come back in the same body so a person who has died and they reincarnate they will never come back in the same body and that’s why the romanticised depiction of reincarnation is actually a distortion so when we talk about the concept of a soul mate the focus because of the romanticisation of the concept is on the mate whereas if we approach it with a more serious and philosophical or even a scientific point of mind the focus should be on the soul the soul is who we are, the soul is what survives death so rather than focussing on the mate part if we focus on the soul part then that will help us understand ourselves better now having said that as far as the mate part is concerned the soul has an eternal longing for love and the spiritual wisdom traditions of the world and especially the bhakti wisdom tradition of India explains that we may get different amounts of love our longing for love will be fulfilled in different ways by different people and wherever this longing for love is fulfilled that’s wonderful there is a traditional prayer which says it’s a prayer offered to god you are my mother, you are my father you are my brother, you are my friend you are my wealth, you are my intelligence you are my everything now what does this mean literally does it mean that it’s not saying the mother is god rather you are my mother you are my father what this means is that actually during our life journey we get love care, shelter from different places, different people and whoever offers us any love this bhakti wisdom explains that it is god offering their love through that person so when a mother breastfeeds her child that is one of the most sweetest and selfless expressions of love and yet the mother did not do anything special when the child was born to produce milk from her breast the same god who sent a child into her womb and brought that child out also provided milk for that child through the breast of the mother so the point which I am making here is that we get love from various channels our mother, our father, our friend our partner, our spouse some people may get a lot of strength and security from their money from their intelligence yes we may get this but ultimately it is god who is offering it to us through these sources, through these channels rather and the nature of the world is that whatever relationships we have they will last for some time and then they will end and some relationships will work out, some may not work out so actually the soul’s enduring relationship is with god it means actually the soul is longing to love forever and live forever and that enduring relationship of love is meant to be fulfilled through god that doesn’t mean that we reject our other relationships it means we spiritualise those relationships so the ultimate soul mate for the soul is not a person of the opposite gender or whatever in this world, actually the ultimate soul mate for the soul is god and the purpose of reincarnation is to reunite with that eternal soul mate, the bhagavad gita explains that god is present right now also in our hearts and even the person who holds us in the tightest embrace, that person cannot be as close to us as god always is in our heart so yes we can have satisfying relationships with people in the world, to whatever extent they work out, that’s wonderful but no relationship is going to last forever and our longing for lasting relationship will be fulfilled when we harmonise our horizontal relations in the world with our vertical relationship with god so he is our soul mate and during our life journey if we find a compatible partner with whom we can move forward in our spiritual evolution, that’s wonderful alright, there’s one more question that I wanted to ask, so now so far we’ve been talking about you being and us being reincarnated does this mean that animals also have a soul does this apply to them as well yeah animals also exhibit consciousness the symptom of the soul is consciousness just like if we are in a room which is dark how do we know whether there is a sun risen outside we see the sunlight so sunlight is a symptom of the sun similarly consciousness is a symptom of the presence of the soul so wherever consciousness is present that’s where soul is present since animals clearly have consciousness so therefore they also have souls now there are some traditions which hold that only humans have souls because humans have a spiritual faculty we can enquire about higher truths of life and animals have not been seen to enquire about metaphysics about life’s ultimate questions and based on this they infer that animals don’t have souls however from the perspective of the Bhagavad Gita this difference is not because of the absence of the soul it is because of the presence of a less evolved consciousness of the soul so basically we as souls are on a multi lifetime journey of spiritual evolution and the souls in animal bodies their consciousness is relatively under evolved and that’s why they function just for the basic bodily drives they look for food, they look for sex they look for sleeping and they look for power, show of strength fighting, defending themselves we humans also have these four drives but along with this because our soul is more evolved in the human body we can also enquire about the ultimate purpose of life so the difference in consciousness between human beings and animals is not because animals don’t have souls but because the soul is less evolved but wherever there is consciousness soul is present over there so you just said that our soul goes through basically a spiritual evolution we evolve with every stage can reincarnation in this aspect help us address the current world problems we have such as social discrimination or terrorism or even climate change for that matter whenever we talk about any philosophy what does it matter at the ground level that’s what we all would like to know if we consider what is the practical implication of reincarnation it will imply that we are at our core spiritual beings and spiritual beings means that we will find everlasting fulfilment through spiritual growth through spiritual evolution not through material gratification now consider climate change and ecological catastrophe that is set to fall on the world largely this has been caused because of excessive materialism because people are indiscriminately wanting to enjoy exploit dominate the resources provided by nature without due consideration of the ecological balances so the more we human beings live materialistically the more we damage the ecology the prominent scientist E.O. Wilson he found out that actually all species make some constructive contribution to the ecology so for example if the grass gets burnt out the herbivores animals will suffer, if the herbivores are wiped out the carnivores will suffer but there is one species which makes no constructive contribution to the ecology if that species were wiped out there will be no ecological problem for anyone in fact most ecological problems will be solved that species unflatteringly for us is a human species so we humans are actually contributing in a destructive way to the ecology that’s because when human beings are materialistic then they exploit in a disproportionate way so growth is natural but cancer is unnatural growth when cancerous cells grow in the body they grow in a way that destroy the cells around the body and ultimately the body so when we human beings live materialistically the way we progress is not harmonious natural growth, it is disharmonious cancerous growth and even prominent ecologists have said that if we are to move towards ecological sustainability we have to equip people to find non-material enrichment by which they will stop chasing after the culture of consumption that is leading to the destruction of the ecology and that non-material enrichment can be very powerfully provided an intellectual foundation through the understanding of reincarnation so that’s how reincarnation can address the fundamental roots of the materialistic worldview that is causing the ecological crisis now if we consider social discrimination that’s also based on an understanding that people belong to particular race, particular gender particular nationality particular class and we discriminate but if we understand that we at our core, all of us are souls then that has a profoundly unifying effect the Bhagavad Gita says that the person who is spiritually enlightened that person sees not just all human beings equally but all living beings equally in 5.18 in the Bhagavad Gita it is said Vidya Vinaya Sampanne Brahmane Gavi Hasti Chunichaiva Swapakecha Pandita Samadarshi Naha so whether it is an elevated human being whether it is a morally degraded human being whether it is a dog, whether it is a elephant, whether it is a cow, person sees the same spiritual essence in everyone and this seeing the spiritual essence in everyone that can bring about a culture of inclusivism, so more and more there is an attempt towards egalitarian society nowadays now that egalitarianism is a longing that we all should be going together but that longing needn’t be just sentimental, it can actually have a philosophical foundation when we have a world view centred on reincarnation because it helps us to see that in actuality we are all same living beings, all of us are of the same spiritual nature so today two countries may be fighting say USA and North Korea are on the verge of a war but a reincarnation centred world view can help us understand, a soldier who is thinking of killing a North Korean, American soldier who is thinking of killing a North Korean soldier may in the next life be born a North Korean and a Korean person may be born as a US person, US citizen so our present identities are temporary and there is an essential commonality among all of us so when we understand this this can actually break down the barriers that we have created based on identifying ourselves with the body and thus discrimination based on material designations can be broken down through spiritual realisation and that spiritual realisation is fostered by the reincarnation centred world view.
The ancient sages of India have said that let all people be happy let there be auspiciousness in the lives of everyone let there not be any distress for anyone this is not just a sentimental expression of good wishes it is a philosophical world view which can give us the intellectual conviction and the practical direction to bring about this aspiration for universality and inclusiveness into actual reality. Thank you Alright Chaitanya ji it was nice having you here you spoke about demystifying reincarnation his book is available online so you can also go and buy it it was great having you here with us and thank you for doing this Q&A on reincarnation with us and we hope to see you on more lives in the future soon.