Reincarnation and the Search for Meaning – Evidence Explanation & Evolution
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies.
So I am grateful to be here with all of you today and I will talk about this topic of demystifying reincarnation in three parts. I will talk about what is the evidence for it and then I will talk about what is the explanation for that evidence and then I will talk about the purpose of all this which is evolution. So it is three E's, evidence, explanation and evolution.
So with respect to evidence, I will start with the anecdotal and then I will move on towards the more rational or scientific evidence. So I was born and brought up in India where India right now is in a transition phase where it is becoming more and more modernized and westernized. So still reincarnation is a part of the broad world view of many Indians.
So when I was about maybe 12, my grandfather passed away and a couple of years later my younger brother was born and several of my relatives felt that he had several bodily marks which suggested that it is my grandfather come back. So at that time I was just very young and I was intrigued by it. But I was also quite interested in science.
So I just didn't accept it. I felt that yeah, there are some marks there and the complexion was remarkably identical and a few other things were there like that. So I didn't accept it but I didn't reject it either.
I just was curious about it. Then over the years I started becoming more of an activist. When I was in college, I did my engineering from an engineering institute in India and while I was studying there, I felt that I should also contribute to society in some tangible way.
I was more interested in science as a search for knowledge, as a search for understanding. I used to read the biographies of scientists, not just to understand what they discovered but how they lived and what was it that made them tick. And I was very fascinated by science as a means to higher understanding of life, as a means to living a more purposeful life.
So during my college days, I chose engineering because I felt engineering was more practical but at the same time also there was a lot of peer pressure in India. Science is not as lucrative a career as engineering and I found that there were many students who were actually intellectually much more brilliant than me. But I found that their life in a deep sense was not as meaningful as I had expected.
What I mean by not as meaningful is that I found that they were as vulnerable to bad habits as anyone else. My idea was that, I had maybe I could say almost like a simplistic or romanticized idea of the scientific knowledge. I thought that if we find out how the world works, how things work, that would be so exciting and so fulfilling, that would be such a higher joy, one would transcend the lower pleasures.
So one of the students who was about three years senior to me, he had been a university topper throughout his engineering career, he had eight semesters. In all the eight semesters, he had come first in the whole, not just our college but the whole university. He was a brilliant guy.
So when I met him, I naturally admired him. I was just a young student. But what struck me at that time was that he was also a chain smoker.
Now, I knew many people who used to smoke, but I found his smoking disorienting, because I thought it is so brilliant that he can figure out complex electronics and telecommunication stuff that, you know, it takes so much time to figure out. And why can't he figure out something so simple that smoking is going to hurt him? So after that, he passed out and he in the campus got the highest paying job in the history of our entire college. And unfortunately, in the first few months of his job itself, he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.
And within six months of taking up that job, he passed away. So it is tragic at one level. At another level, I also felt that there is somehow the search for scientific knowledge is not leading people to a meaningful life.
As one of my professors, I was, as I said, in a top engineering college. One of my professors, he committed suicide. So it was a big shock.
At that time, suicide was not so common in India. And we found that he had some frustration in his life, but he was also a brilliant person. So I realized that scientific knowledge itself, it's very powerful in terms of providing technological facilities, but in terms of providing a meaningful life, a fulfilling life, it is not that powerful.
Something serious seems to be missing. And then when I, in my childhood itself, I started reading the Bhagavad Gita. My first memory of the Bhagavad Gita is there was a Bhagavad Gita shloka recitation competition.
And I participated in that. I won a prize in that. At that time, I read about the soul and I was intrigued.
Something that survives beyond death. And as I said, it was normally understood. So it was after this top engineering student, gradually passed away.
So at that time, it struck me somehow that whatever meaning we construct in our life, I had a goal in my life that I wanted to be number one in my class. I was always among the toppers, but I was never the top, at the top alone. So I thought here this person is at the summit and yet he has ruined his life.
So that was the time I started exploring what is it that actually brings meaning to life? What is it that brings fulfillment to life? And if we consider death and the suddenness and the irreversibility of death, it's just almost like we are living a normal life and say all of us are sitting here and talking or we are all playing, say as Shakespeare said, this world is like a stage, we are all players on it. Now suddenly, some player disappears from the stage. So I realized that at that time, not with as much clarity as I am verbalizing now, but I had the sense that death is the ultimate frustration of life.
Death makes everything meaningless. We just live and every major decision in our life, we consider it so meaningful. Should I choose this career or that career? Should I choose this job or should I choose this job? Should I, you know, have a relationship with this person or that person? All these decisions, we feel that they're important, they're meaningful, they're going to shape our life.
But beyond it all, at a particular point, which we don't know when it will come, just everything is finished. So either life is utterly meaningless and we somehow try to construct meaning with life till the meaninglessness comes out eventually in the form of death. Or maybe there is some other meaning to life which survives beyond death.
So when I studied science, I also saw science as a search for understanding, a search for meaning. Last year, I had been to Cambridge. I was invited there to speak on science and spirituality at Cambridge University.
So while going to that place, we passed by the tree where Newton is said to have seen or felt the fruit falling. Of course, it's not exactly the same tree. It's a descendant of that tree, several hundred years ago.
But millions of people before Newton had seen that fruit falling. Not that fruit, but fruits falling. And most of them, they just picked up the fruit, ate it and went their way.
So Newton asked, what made this fruit fall? And that's how he postulated the theory of gravity. So I saw science as a means for understanding, understanding the world around us. And in science, if we see, we have a certain, based on certain observations, we come up with a certain theory about how things work.
And when we come up with further evidence, which makes that theory questionable, it is not that science rejects the theory entirely. Science first tries to neglect that evidence. Maybe it is some bad data.
But if that evidence keeps coming repeatedly, then science tries to revise its existing theory, to explain that which is not explainable with the current theory. So with the same Newton's laws of motion, they are what is called as classical physics. And that helped us to explain the world around us, that led to mechanical engineering, that led to trains and planes and even spacecrafts being developed, or at least the idea coming up.
But then the same theory just found that at the very small, the microscopic level, at the very large, the macroscopic level, it didn't work. And that's how we had quantum physics being developed to explain the behavior of microscopic particles. And we had a relativity developed to explain, especially the motion of large objects whose speed approaches the speed of light.
So without going into the technicalities of these theories, I'm just focusing on the principle that when we face some evidence that does not fit into the theoretical framework that we have, if we look at a method of sciences, it expands the theoretical framework. So William James is a prominent psychologist, and he makes this point that science advances at its fringes. Now what is within the mainstream body of science, where the advancement is there, that advancement is primarily in terms of technology.
We can use the knowledge that we have to make things better, to make devices faster, as is happening nowadays. But science in terms of gaining better understanding of things, that advancement happens at the fringes. So whatever is partially explained or is not explained by the current theories of science, in trying to explain that, scientific knowledge expands.
So similarly, we have a particular view of life. That view is, we identify ourselves with our bodies, we have our identities, and then we try to construct meaningful lives through our professions, through our relationships, through our achievements. And this is the way most of us live in our life.
And at the fringes of our worldview is death. But death periodically, unexpectedly, often unwontedly, just comes in, thrusts itself into the forefront of our worldview, and suddenly something unexpected, something tragic happens. And we are jolted.
But quite often, after that little jolting, we push aside that, and we go on with our normal life. So this is like the scientific tendency. The prominent philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, he wrote a very well-read book called, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
And he said that, basically, whenever science comes up with some evidence which doesn't fit in its existing paradigm, it dismisses that as bad data. So most of us, we also dismiss death as bad data. It doesn't fit into our worldview.
So we dismiss it as bad data, and we try to go on with our normal life. But then, death is something is going to fall upon all of us. And we know it's going to happen, although we not consciously deny it, but we don't consciously accept it also.
Just, I mean, if that's going to happen sometime in the distant future, it doesn't really matter to me. However, with this denial of death, we shrink our understanding of life. And just as science, physics advanced by examining the evidence which it could not explain.
So similarly, our worldview can expand. If we consider death and what it implies, is there something beyond death? So from the materialistic worldview, ultimately, what is the point of life? It is ultimately life is meaningless, because with death, everything is going to be lost. But within the ocean of meaninglessness, we try to find some islands of meaning.
Oh, my job is meaningful. You know, patriotism, that is meaningful. My eco activism, that is meaningful.
We all try to find meaning. But within, ultimately, it's an ocean of meaninglessness. So why should it be like this? Could it be that there is some worldview, different from our present worldview, which shows that it's not just there are some islets of meaning within the ocean of meaninglessness.
Rather, there is that ocean is also meaningful. But for that, we need to expand our theoretical framework. And reincarnation is what can help us, the concept of reincarnation can help us to expand our theoretical framework.
So what is the evidence? Is there any evidence? Like anecdotal, say, some people feel that their relative has come back or whatever. So when I started exploring this a little bit more seriously, so after I graduated from my college, I started working as a software engineer in a prominent multinational company. And at that time, I had also got introduced to the Bhagavad Gita in a more serious way, because I felt some need for looking for meaning elsewhere.
And I found the Bhagavad Gita's teachings very rational. And then as I started exploring it more and more, from a scientific perspective, I found that there was a significant body of evidence, which is quite scientifically sound. And then over the years, I kept studying the subject.
And that's how I eventually wrote the book, Demystifying Reincarnation. So specifically with respect to reincarnation, there are cases of, many cases of children with past life memories. Now there are many people who may have past life memories, but the serious scientific researchers, they're focused on certain cases.
So when we talk about evidence, there are various grades of evidence, like anecdotes, those are just largely sentimental longings. And there are some popular books, which involve celebrity reincarnations. So there are at least six girls who claim that they are Marilyn Monroe reincarnated.
Now, in such cases, there is a very transparent motive for the claim of reincarnation. It is to get some fame by associating with some person who is actually famous. So in the media, sometimes there are such cases that come up, and there are some authors who write books also on this.
And they may try to show this person's face is like this, and this face is like this, there's a lot of similarity, show some photos. But that's not a very serious evidence. Because if we look at a cross section of people, 1000 people, we can easily find 10 people whose faces look somewhat similar.
So the similarity of faces are very, it might be a visually catching evidence, but it's not a very rationally sound evidence. So serious researchers don't take this into consideration. Another body of evidence is hypnotic regression.
And especially it is hypnotic regression therapy. So there's a Ivy League doctorate who is Dr. Brian Weiss. And he has done a lot of work in this field, in curing people of phobias, and other mental disorders, mental issues, by doing hypnotic regression.
So basically, you sit with a person and tell them a trained hypnotic regressor, remember when you're five, remember when you're three, remember when you're one. And then beyond that, remember earlier. And then suddenly, that person starts remembering, you know, I'm a 35 year old man, and I'm, I've fallen into water and I'm drowning.
And then remembers further back. And then they find that say, if a person has hydrophobia, and then he does regression, and he finds that this person was actually had drowned in a previous life. That's why he's got hydrophobia.
And through hypnotic regression, many cases have been found of people who have been cured. So they had some fears. And that was because of something which had happened in their previous life.
Because the hypnotic regression therapy has cured many people of maladies which were not curable by conventional allopathic means. This has gained a lot of popularity, at least in some circles. At the same time, there are critical researchers who point out that when a person is under hypnosis, they're very vulnerable to suggestion.
So when they say that I remember something, is that a recollection that is coming from within? Or is that a suggestion coming from without? It's very difficult to say. And even if we say we have the evidence that this person was cured, that is fine. But that cure could just be a result of, we could say, a psychological equivalent of what in science is called as placebo effect.
The placebo effect is where a person is given sugar pills, but that person is not told that they're giving sugar pills. So many times people get cured because they simply believe that they're being treated. So we could have that the person believes, oh, I drowned in the previous life.
And that's why I have this hydrophobia. So now the danger is passed. So I don't have to be fearful.
So it could just be a psychological placebo effect. We can't know for sure. And so this is also, it could be evidence that hypnotic regression therapy helps in curing people.
But it is not necessarily evidence that there is a previous life which we have lived, or that whatever the person is recollecting is something which they actually experienced in a previous life. It could be, it might not be. There are some cases of hypnotic regression done under non-medical situations, non-therapeutic situations, where some people have exhibited xenoglossy and xenography.
Xenoglossy is the ability to speak in languages not known to them. And xenography is even stronger. Its ability to write in language is not known to them.
So there is Joel Witten, who is a researcher in this field. He has written a book called Life Between Life. And he used the case of a person named Harold.
He remembered a life, a previous life as a Viking warrior. And not only did he remember, he actually under record, he, while they were being recorded, he spoke many words. And when he came out of regression, he heard the recording, he couldn't make sense of those words himself.
Another time, while he was, so again he was taken into regression, and another time he was asked to speak, and he started writing something down. When he was recollecting, so Dr. Witten asked him to write down what he was recollecting. And he wrote down in some wavy, fine script, which Dr. Joel Witten couldn't make any sense of.
And after Harold came out, he thought this was gibberish. What did I write? But then Dr. Witten decided to investigate, and he showed that script to, that whatever he had written, to linguistic experts. And he found that that was perfectly perfectly constructed sentences in a language that had been extinct for 1800 years.
So it had languages from the 2nd century to 4th century, 200 years it existed. It's only around four to five people in the world who can actually write in that language. So, and Harold had no kind of training in that.
In fact, when, as I said, he didn't even write, he thought it's just gibberish. So this is somewhat strong evidence, because how could that person know something during regression, which they had no knowledge of when they were conscious. So this is evidence which is not just in terms of something which I feel I was, someone whom I feel I was, it is tangible evidence in terms of either recordings of audio or recordings of writings.
So when the evidence is more objectively observable and evaluable, then it moves more towards something which can be rationally considered and accepted. And Dr. Ian Stevenson was a pioneer in this kind of research. He was the head of the Department of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia.
And he spent almost 40 years traveling all the inhabited continents, exploring cases of reincarnation, of past life memory specifically. And he focused especially on cases of children. Because children, he felt, would not have the capacity to fabricate.
And even among children, he focused on, as he studied the cases, he found, he had a very rational approach to evaluating the cases. And he came up with four levels of evidences. First is recollections.
Second is recognitions. Third is behaviors. And fourth is birthmarks.
And so he wrote many books throughout his life. The last book he wrote was Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, where he focused primarily on birthmarks. So I'll just mention one case from that book.
It's a case of one boy, one young man named Nesip Unlatas Kiran. When he was around five or six, he started saying, since his childhood, he said, my name is Nesip and I want to go to my home. And many of these children, who remember their past lives, suddenly they start telling, mummy, I want to go to my other mummy.
What? Mother is shocked quite often. And they keep insisting. And they say, my mother is, she's my mother and this and that.
Then this is what happened to Nesip. So he would say that my name is Nesip. This is a curious case in which, in previous life also, his name was Nesip, his name was Nesip Budak.
So his mother would say, your name is Nesip? Yes, your name is Nesip. She couldn't figure out. But then when he started saying that, so he was living in a place called Adana.
And this was in Turkey. And he said, I actually live in a place called Mersin. And then he would tell his mother and he had some sister, he says, this small six year old boy, he says, I have a wife and she's prettier than all of you.
And then he started telling various incidents in his life, what had happened. And he had been born with seven birthmarks, several birthmarks on his body. And he would say, he would point to the birthmark and say, I was stabbed in my previous life.
And that's how I died. So not many, his parents tried to neglect him. They were from Muslim family and Muslims don't believe in reincarnation.
So he thought that by neglecting him, he will stay silent. But then, as he grew older, he started insisting that, I want to go to Mersin. If you don't take me, I will go alone.
So finally, his parents became a little alarmed. And his mother took him to a village near Mersin, where her father stayed. And her father had just got remarried.
And his new wife was from Mersin. And as soon as this boy Naseeb saw her, he recognized her, he identified her by name. And then he started telling his story to her.
And she confirmed, yes, there was a man named Naseeb Budhak and he had been stabbed to death. So this intrigued his grandfather. And his grandfather took him there.
As soon as he was taken there, he had never been to Mersin before in his life. But he led his grandfather straight to the house of a particular house. And there lived a woman who was a widow of a man named Naseeb Budhak.
And then he recognized her. And not only recognized her, now he, Naseeb Budhak, had had children, who were actually older than Naseeb only, Tashkirah, in this life. But he ran to them and he treated as affectionately as if they were his own children.
He was smaller than them, but he was fondling their hair. And not only that, when he went to their house, and now Naseeb Budhak's wife, the widow, she had remarried. So when Naseeb, this small boy, he saw the photo of his previous wife with her husband, he got so angry, he picked up the photo and wanted to tear it apart.
He said, you are my wife, not anyone else's wife. And then he told several details, which is this woman, she was taken aback when suddenly this boy comes and claims that I am her husband. But she asked several questions and he answered all of them.
And the most significant of the findings is that he told that once we had a quarrel, he and his wife, and in his anger, he had taken a knife and attacked her. She had dodged the blow, but the knife had grazed her inner thigh. And she had got a lifelong scar over there.
Now, Dr. Stevenson was doing this research, he got a female assistant, and he had Naseeb Budhak's widow examined in a private room. And he found that she had a scar on her inner thigh. And she said that my husband had once attacked me.
And that's how I got the scar. This is very intimate knowledge, especially in a conservative society, the Islamic society, for a man to know, for a boy to know of a scar on a private part of a woman's body. It's very unusual.
Most significantly, as I said, Naseeb had several birthmarks. And because, so what had happened was Naseeb Budhak in his previous life had been a very quarrelsome person, and violent also. So once he had drunk, and in the bar he had had a big, he got into altercation with another person.
Probably that person was also drunk. And they started fighting. And that person had taken out a knife and stabbed repeatedly.
And he had been rushed to a hospital, but he had died soon, because it had been a murder case. So there had been a postmortem done. And they had a record of where all he had been wounded.
And when they examined the postmortem report, they found that the location of the fatal wounds on the body of Naseeb Budhak correlated precisely with the birthmarks on Naseeb Anuradha's body. Now these birthmarks, which many people, many of the children have, they are not just some simple, somebody who has a small scar, a small mark on the body, some pimple or something like that. They're like very distinctive marks.
So for example, a person who might have been run over by a truck and died. So I have a powerpoint, which I have photos also. In the book also I have photos.
So basically they have something like, if they were run over on the thigh by a truck, then their whole body is normal, but just at the thigh, there is a circular shrinking, a ring of shrinkage. So it's a very distinctive and unusual birthmarks. So Ian Stevens then divided the human body using XY coordinate system into 120 parts.
And then he wanted to check how precise is the correlation between the location of the fatal wound in the previous life and the birthmark in this life. And if there is a precise correlation, the probability of that is 1 by 120. If you divide the body into 120 marks, 120 sections, 120 coordinates, and if there are 6 correlating birthmarks, as happened in the case of NACIP, the probability of 6 of them correlating is 1 by 120 raised to the power of 6, which is an extremely low probability.
So these evidences like this, they very strongly point towards the reincarnation as the only rational explanation. How could this child, as I said, all four are exhibited, recollections, recognitions, behaviors, and birthmarks. So just recollections, okay, that might just be, you might have heard it somewhere, you might imagine something, you got a guess right.
But recognitions, how do you get that right? You might say that might also be guessed. But then, if somebody behaves in a particular way, like a child being jealous towards a woman who is almost like his mother's age, that's very unusual. And then even if we somehow try to explain that away, what about the birthmarks and the birth defects? So William James said that, again, when we study paranormal phenomena like this, he said that, what principle does science use for advancing? So the normal understanding is crows are black.
Now if I want to challenge the theory that crows are black, I don't need to prove that all crows are white. Even if I can observe one crow that is white, that is enough to challenge the idea that all crows are black. Similarly, the normal understanding that most of us have in our life is that we are our bodies, and we live for some time, and with death, life ends.
That's the materialistic world view. Now to challenge that, it's not necessary that every one of us has to remember our past life. Even if there is one white crow, there is one person who remembers a previous life in a way where the recollections cannot be explained in any alternative rational way.
Then that one white crow is enough to challenge the theory that all crows are black. That one case of a past life memory is enough to establish the idea that there is something more to us than our material bodies. That more is actually the soul.
And the soul is what reincarnates. The word reincarnation means to reincarnate. Karna is flesh.
Re is again. So to come back again in flesh. So reincarnation means that we return back in a body, in a fleshly body.
And what is it that reincarnates? The Bhagavad Gita explains that that is the soul. So the body is like, we could say, a vehicle. Let's say if we are going on a long journey, and if, say, we have hired a vehicle and somehow the vehicle gets damaged, the vehicle doesn't work properly.
So we say going cross country, across America, on the east coast to the west coast, and we have hired a vehicle from a company that if that vehicle breaks down, now we would just have the vehicle towed to the company, wherever their center is there, take another vehicle and we would move on. So the vehicle is a tool for us. But if the vehicle works, we use it.
If it doesn't work, we just use another vehicle and move on. So just as this vehicle is a tool for us when we are traveling, the body is like a tool for us on our evolution. So ultimately, what the Bhagavad Gita explains is that there is, say, this person Nesip Unluthas Kiran is, say, like a, if you consider mathematical set theory, he is one set.
Nesip Buddhak is another set. Now these two are, from the materialistic perspective, non-intersecting sets. They lived at two different times, two different places.
Materially, they had no contact with each other. One was born long after the other person died. Another was, their families didn't know each other.
They didn't know that the other person even existed. And yet if this person has memories of that person, there has to be something which is common. If materially there is nothing that is intersecting, then the intersection must be non-material.
And that non-material intersection point is the soul. Soul goes from one body to another body. And why does it transmigrate like this? Because the soul is on a journey of spiritual evolution.
I started by talking about how we all look for a meaningful life. And we all construct meaning in different ways. We may either have our career and we think, in my career I'll make a contribution, that's how I'll be meaningful.
I get some meaning in my life. Or we may have our family and we take care of family members. We help our children to grow up.
And as we see them becoming successful, that gives a sense of meaning in our life. We may all look for meaning in different ways. And these are valuable sources of meaning.
But at the same time, they are all temporary. They can and will be thwarted. So the ultimate sense of meaning comes when we understand our spiritual core.
And we understand that the spiritual core is on a multi-lifetime journey of spiritual evolution. So whatever meaning we construct at the material level, through our professions, through our relations, through our contributions, that's fine. But that's not going to be lasting.
The soul, the Bhagavad Gita explains, is a part of the whole. Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita that, Krishna is the speaker of the Bhagavad Gita. He is God descended in this world.
So the Bhagavad Gita says that we are all parts of God. And as parts, we are meant to live in harmony with the whole. So just as the hand, if it takes some food item, it can't enjoy that food item itself.
It has to feed it to the stomach. And when it is fed to the stomach, naturally the hand also gets nourished. So we are parts of the whole, of the absolute truth, who can be known by different names in different traditions.
But that absolute truth is the ultimate destination of our spiritual evolution. We love various objects in this world, different people, different hobbies, different things, different causes. And all these are markers on our evolution.
So the evolution that is, that actually the soul is on, is an evolution in our understanding of our ultimate object of love. As souls who are part of the whole, we are ultimately looking for an eternal object of love. We may not realize it right now.
So most of the romance movies, the romance novels, they all talk about happily ever after. Now actually speaking, there is no ever after for any relationship. But still we long for it.
Why? Because the soul has that eternal relationship with the whole, with the absolute truth, with God. And not knowing about that relationship, we look for enduring relationships with other people in this world. So as the soul evolves in the understanding of who is the ultimate object of my love, that evolution in understanding is what leads to the soul's elevation and ultimately the soul's liberation.
The soul is going through various material bodies on its multi-lifetime journey. So we have a particular body now, and in a future life we'll have another body. It's just like I said, if you're going across the continent, then we may use one vehicle.
If it breaks down, we use another vehicle. So now ultimately our goal is to reach the destination. So to the extent we learn to redirect our heart's love towards the eternal, to that extent we progress in our spiritual evolution towards the stage where we go beyond reincarnation.
Reincarnation is not meant to be eternal. We go through various bodies so that ultimately we can attain eternal life. To give another, I'll give two points and conclude.
First is say, if I said the body is like a vehicle, another example we could use for the body is that the body is like a home for the soul. Normally whenever people are living in a particular home, if it is a rented house, they like to have their own house, because a rented house means there's a certain insecurity. The owner may just throw me out at any time.
So the material body that the soul has is like a rented house for the soul, because we are here for a particular amount of time. And what that time is, we don't know. So it's like living in a house in which the owner may evict us at any moment.
So it's an insecure situation. And just as thoughtful people, they would like to have their own house where they can have greater security. So like that, the evolution of the soul is meant to move from a temporary body to an eternal body.
So there is, the Bhagavad Gita explains, there is the present material existence we live in. Beyond this, there is a spiritual level of existence where life is eternal. And that is where we belong.
So that, progressing towards that, at the spiritual level of existence, we have our own spiritual body, which is eternal, which is like a permanent house. And to the extent we learn to redirect our attraction towards the eternal, to that extent we progress towards attaining that eternal. So that's the purpose of evolution.
And ultimately, the different processes of yoga are meant to help us in that journey. The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit word yuja, which means to connect. So the idea of yoga is to connect the finite consciousness with the infinite consciousness, to connect the part with the whole.
And there are different forms of which have different emphasis. So Ashtang Yoga, it focuses on physical regulation, physical exercises, which is what most yoga focuses on nowadays. That is as a means, physical regulation, as a means towards decreasing our material obsession, our material misidentification.
Yoga is defined as the Patanjali Yoga Sutra as yogas chitta vritti nirodha, that the movement of the mind towards material objects. That is chitta vritti, that nirodha, that is stopped. So the soul is presently in the body.
And through the body, the soul goes towards various, soul is attracted towards various objects and seeks pleasure in getting those objects. But when that attraction stops, then the soul's entanglement in this world can be decreased by that, can be terminated by that. Now, among the various processes of yoga, there is also Bhakti Yoga.
So Bhakti Yoga, in principle, agrees with this point, that the soul, which is misidentifying with the body, the soul's obsession with matter needs to be decreased. But at the same time, the Bhakti Yoga also gives us an additional dynamic, that we as conscious beings can't just live by negation. We have to have some affirmation.
Like say, if I decide that this bottle is very cold, so I won't touch it. It's possible for me that I decide I won't touch it, I won't touch it. But actually, we can't do something similar with our thoughts.
If I say, I won't think of that. If you tell an alcoholic, don't think about alcohol. Okay, I will not think of alcohol.
When you're not thinking about alcohol, you're thinking about alcohol. So in that sense, we just can't live by negation. Because at the level of the mind, to not think about something also involves thinking about that thing.
So we need an affirmative object to think about. And the whole process of Bhakti Yoga involves not rejection of the material, but rather redirection of our heart from the material to the spiritual. So it involves the spiritualization of our emotions.
And there is a process for that. Like we were doing the singing of mantras before we started. This is a part of Bhakti Yoga.
And the idea here is that we can, through spiritual sound, which is a central part of Bhakti Yoga, we can spiritualize our emotions. We can redirect our attraction from worldly objects towards the source, towards the absolute, towards the whole, towards the infinite consciousness. And to the extent we do that, if during the course of our life, we through the practice of Bhakti Yoga, learn to redirect our heart from the world to the source of the world.
And if by the end of our life, our love for our source becomes greater than our love for the world, then we no longer return to the world. Rather, we return to our source for a life of eternal love, for a life of eternal happiness. And that evolution of consciousness from the level of temporary material reality to eternal spiritual reality, that is the ultimate purpose of reincarnation and the purpose of life at large.
And this purpose is supremely meaningful and supremely fulfilling, because it can never be thwarted. We may have various purposes and meanings in our life. Now I have my career, I have this hobby, I have this cause, I have this family, all these are good.
But we need to incorporate that, integrate that within an ultimate framework. That I'm doing all this, why? Because I am a part, if I'm taking care of my hobby, if I'm taking care of my family, if I'm taking care of my country, if I'm taking care of the ecology of my planet. All this is because we understand that all this is something which is coming from the source.
And we do it in a mood of loving service. Not just to take care of this planet because it is my planet, or take care of my family because it's my family, but rather we are all parts of the whole and this is the way I serve the whole. So when we have that attitude, then activity may remain the same, but the mentality changes dramatically.
We're not doing it in material level of consciousness thinking that because this is related with me, so I do it. But rather we see that we are all related with the whole. And when you do it in spiritual consciousness, then whatever sources of meaning and purpose we have in our life, they won't be thwarted by the ultimate meaninglessness of death.
Rather they will be integrated into overall meaningful life, a meaningful existence, which extends over multiple lifetimes and which culminates in the attainment of eternal life and eternal happiness. So I'll summarize. I started by talking about how there are anecdotal evidences, anecdotal ideas about reincarnation, that some dead relative comes back.
And there is, on the other hand, science, which is a very rational and evidence-based body of search for knowledge. But still, the scientific search for knowledge doesn't necessarily lead to a meaningful life for many people. Because even people who are good in science, good in technology, still sometimes they succumb to self-destructive habits.
Because they don't have a, there could be many reasons, but one reason is that it doesn't really give them a deep sense of meaning in life, some fulfillment. But what is, death is the ultimate meaning destroyer in life. So when we face some evidence which seems to destroy the meaningfulness of our worldview, we have two alternatives.
Either we just sideline that evidence and go on with our normal worldview, calling that as bad data, or we try to expand our worldview. So science advances by examining the data at its fringes. Like Newton, when he observed the fruit falling, what makes it fruit fall? That was the question of why do things, how do things work? It's a question of what is the meaning of it all? But when particles moving at a very microscopic level, at a very macroscopic level, couldn't be explained, the science expanded its theories.
And so by the expansion of those theories, then now we have a better understanding of the world around us. Similarly, rather than death as bad data, we try to expand our worldview. And reincarnation, and especially the past life memories which point towards reincarnation, they can be evidences for expanding that world, for prompting us towards exchanging our theoretical framework of life.
I discuss various levels of evidences, anecdotal evidences, then celebrity reincarnation cases, and then hypnotic regression therapy. And these are, relatively speaking, stronger evidences. Hypnotic regression is possible, but it could be a recollection, it could be a suggestion.
We don't know for sure. If there are cases where there's xenoglossy and xenography, foreign languages being spoken or written, then that's more tangible. But the most tangible evidence is, with respect to past life memories among children, where there are four levels of evidences.
Recollection, recognition, behavior, and birthmarks and birth defects. So we talked about the case of Naseer Boudhak, who reincarnated as Naseer Boudhak, and how he exhibited all these four things. Actually, the six correlating birthmarks are very strong, biologically tangible evidence.
And similarly, his knowledge about the scar on his ex-wife's body, or his behavior in terms of dealing with his wife or his children, they are not so easily explainable within the materialistic worldview. So just as one white crow is enough to challenge the idea that all crows are black, even one case of a person remembering a past life is enough to challenge the idea that we are simply our bodies and death is the end of our existence. So this is, I talked about three points, evidence, explanation and evolution.
This is the evidence. What is the explanation for this? The Bhagavad Gita offers us a model of the self, model of the human person, where we are not just our bodies, but this body and the soul. So for the soul, the body is like a vehicle.
And if a vehicle gets damaged, the soul, just as we take a different vehicle, the soul takes a different body. Or like if we have a house in which we are living, if our tenancy period gets expired, then we just go to another house. So the soul moves from one body to another.
And the explanation would be that at material level, the intersection between them is something non-material and that is the soul. So if there is a soul which reincarnates, then that is the most rational explanation for past life memories. And then focus on evolution.
What is the purpose of reincarnation? It is to evolve in our understanding of life and ultimately of what is life's purpose, what is it that we are meant to live for. So evolution is in our understanding of what is the eminently worthy object of our love, object of our devotion and dedication. And the Gita explains that we are parts of the whole and ultimately we are longing to love an eternal object.
Not knowing about our source, about the whole, we seek to eternalize our relationship with different people in the world. And that's what leads to romance novels or romance movies talking about happily ever after. But that happily ever after, it's not just fantasy, it can be actualized when the finite consciousness, the three souls, unite with the infinite consciousness.
That is the whole. And the purpose of reincarnation is to redirect our love from the world to the source of the world. So all the yoga systems are meant for that purpose.
The system of Ashtanga Yoga focuses on bodily regulation so that we can get emotional de-infatuation from the world. And Bhakti Yoga takes this forward and says that not just de-infatuation from the world, but rather we want to develop devotion to the source of the world. So just as we may say for the soul to simply be detached is not possible because the mind has to think of something.
And if you say no, this world is, I will detach from the world, I won't think about the worldly objects. But even in not thinking of something, we're thinking of something. So we need an alternative object to devote ourselves to.
And in the process of Bhakti Yoga, say, involving activities like chanting sacred mantras, this is meant to elevate our consciousness, to help us increase our devotion for the source of everything, source of the world, source of us all. And if by the end of our life, our love for the source of the world becomes greater than our love for the world, then we go beyond this world to the eternal world. And that is life's ultimate meaning.
And whatever gives us meaning right now, if we spiritualize that, see it not as an independent source of meaning, but see it as integrated with the ultimate source of meaning, our own spiritual evolution towards eternal life, then we can see that life is meaningful, not just in patches, not just islands of meaning and ocean of meaninglessness, but rather islands of meaning, which point us towards an ultimate landmass, eternal life, which is where enduring meaning and fulfillment can be found. Thank you very much. So any questions or comments? Yes.
So when we talk about, say, we have a tendency to blame others or blame our environment, and then by forgiving, we can go beyond that blaming mentality, we can overcome the scars. How exactly does this happen? Actually, it's not just blaming in itself is a bad thing, is that we have to objectively analyze what is the cause of a problem. And if somebody else is responsible, yes, they are responsible.
If we are responsible, we are responsible. But whoever is responsible, ultimately, we have to move on. And what has happened in the past is, it's gone.
Mahabharata says that lamentation about the past keeps us locked in the past. So lamentation becomes like a wall, which locks our consciousness in the past, prevents us from using the present properly and prevents us from preparing for the future. So we have to break that blockage of our consciousness, so that we can flow onwards.
And forgiveness is a vital part of breaking that blockage of consciousness. Now, if someone has hurt us, then forgiving itself is not very easy, because the wounds run deep. And how exactly we forgive at different times, that will be dependent on time, place, circumstance.
So there can be some situations where the person did something wrong, but it's a one-off event. Then we forgive, and we just move on in our life. Okay, that happened, that person has apologized, that person has rectified.
There's no need to hold that one mistake forever in their face, and let that come in between the relationship. So that's when they themselves have rectified and apologized, and this is a one-off event. But sometimes, so if we just hold it back, then it chokes the relationship, it chokes us from going onwards.
But what if that person did a one-off mistake, but we don't know, they may do it again also. Are they going to rectify? Are they not going to rectify? So there is, sometimes we equate forgiving and trusting, but the two are very different things. Forgiving is for the past, whatever they have done.
Trusting is about the future, what they will do. And forgiveness can be given, but trust has to be earned. So it's only if somebody has hurt us, and we again, not just forgive them, but start trusting them.
Then we simply set ourselves up for being hurt again. So there might be a period when we just have a distance. You know, we don't reject the person, but we can't just accept them at the same level where we were before the hurt happened, before we were hurt.
So then at that time, we just forgive, but don't trust. And over a period of time, by observing how they conduct themselves, they may move towards the first level. We may want to forgive and just move on in our life.
That trust also comes back over a period of time. But the other could be that that person is just not only done the wrong, but sometimes they don't even apologize. They have no intention of correcting the wrong.
They're just going on doing the same thing again. So at that time, if we just simply keep forgiving them, then that means simply we are hurting ourselves by that, setting ourselves to being hurt by them. And at that time, we may need to take some action.
So that action can be done in a vengeful mood, or it can be done in a dutiful mood. So when it's done with vengefulness, then that still keeps the negativity within us. I want to get back at you.
And what happens is, if we let that vengefulness stay within us, even if we get back at that person, vengefulness becomes a habit of the mind. And then after that, we'll find some other wrong with someone else has done and then we'll become vengeful about that. So instead of having that vengefulness, so there can be forgiveness as a attitude of the mind or the disposition, and there can be forgiveness of the action.
So in a sense, we can forgive a person, okay, you did this wrong. I'm not going to hold it against you. But at the same time, if you keep doing this wrong, you're going to hurt other people.
You're going to hurt me also. And ultimately, if we consider the law of karma, whatever goes around comes around, and you're going to hurt yourself also. So we have to stop that.
So we can do it in a sense of duty that I have to protect this person. I have to prevent this person from hurting me or hurting others in future. And then whatever, sometimes we may have to take an action also for that purpose.
We may do that. It's a legal action or punitive action or whatever. But we do it in a non-vengeful mode.
It's more in a dutiful mode. And so now in this case, once we do this act of forgiving, so forgiving is not just an emotion that we feel. It's a decision that we make.
That you know, I'm not going to hold this. I'm not going to let this hold me back anymore. I'm not going to let this choke me.
This is a chapter of my life that is over. I've done what I could to deal with it. Now I'm going to move on in my life.
So then when we do that, then there is not so much of an emotional investment in that. Or not investment, there's not so much emotional fixation in that particular happening. So just like if say I have a wound on my hand and it's a festering wound.
Then if I touch it or someone touches it or it touches the floor or touches the wall, it's pain. Now if it is a bad wound, even after it is healed, some scar will be there. But sometimes some scars are just dried up.
They're there but they don't hurt. They're just there. So like that, you know, if we have been badly hurt, the scars will be there for lifelong.
But after we forgive, then basically it's like a festering wound becomes like a passive scar. We remember, but because there's no emotional fixation, there's not so much agitation by that. Okay, that is something bad happened to me.
And you know, we learn in life, we grow in life. But as long as you're not done and you're not forgiven, then that recollection of that hurt is like a festering wound. It keeps agitating us.
So in that sense, forgiveness is, it's not about forgetting. It's about remembering in a new way. Remembering in a new way, which does not involve the emotional fixation, which does not involve the agitation which would otherwise feel.
And that can be, when we can remember in a new way, then we can actually learn from it and we can grow in our life. Otherwise, we stay stuck over there emotionally. Does this answer your question? Thank you.
If reincarnation is a movement towards eternal life, what exactly is the eternal life? Yeah, basically the Bhagavad Gita says that this world is like a reflection of the spiritual world. So it gives the metaphor of a tree. If we have a tree in which the roots are upwards, the branches are downwards.
And we would see such a tree in a reflection, say in a reflection, in a river. So it says this world is like this. That means whatever is in the tree, it is there in this reflection also.
But the reflection doesn't have the real substance. If I want to eat a mango, if I dive into the river, try to catch the reflection, I won't get it. But if I climb up the tree, I can get the mango.
So this world is like a reflection of the spiritual world. And whatever is present in the reflection is present in the reality, in the object, in its pure form. In the reflection, if some stone is thrown, then the shapes may get distorted.
But the reality is undisturbed. So just as we have relationships in this world, we have the roles and responsibilities and a life of interactions in this world. Similarly, it is there in the spiritual world.
So the difference is that here it is all self-centered, where I relate with other people based on how much pleasure they give me. They stop giving me pleasure, then the tendency is that people often want to end the relationship. Whereas in the spiritual world, it is not self-centered in the sense of body-centered.
It is God-centered. There is love, there is pure love. And in that pure love, there is eternal reciprocation.
So just as we are persons here, we will be persons there also. Just as there are loving reciprocations, relationships which you have over here, they are there also. But because the loving relationships here are tainted by selfishness, so often there are problems, there are conflicts.
And ultimately, because everything here is temporary, there is great frustration. In contrast, in the spiritual world, because there is no selfishness, and because everything there is eternal, so there is no frustration in the relationship. On the other hand, there is eternal fulfillment in those relationships.
So basically, the eternal life is also a life like the life in this world, but without the misery and the temporariness of life in this world. Some people may want to, if they have some emotional issues, some hurts, some psychological problems, they may feel that by going to their past and understanding what caused those, they can deal with them. So they may want to do something like channeling for that purpose, channeling or healing through those.
On the other hand, in bhakti, spirituality, we focus primarily on connecting with our source. So does that itself lead to the healing? Or do we also need to go backwards and revisit the past in order to heal? I wouldn't say there's a one general answer for all of this, because different people's emotional wounds are different. And some people may feel the need to process their emotional issues by going back to the past.
But the challenge is that there is no guarantee that by going back to the past, one will be able to actually heal those issues. Because there are some cases, like in medicine also, when we're treating, sometimes you understand what is the cause of the disease, and then we treat the disease. But sometimes in the body, it's so complicated.
But okay, these are the symptoms, and this could be the cause, this could be the cause, this could be the cause. We basically start a treatment, and the treatment works. And sometimes the cause is not really possible to know.
But this treatment works, and we move on. So one time I was having a fever for many days, and the doctors were not able to diagnose it. For six months, I used to keep getting fever every evening.
And finally, the doctors said that it is… I went to one doctor, and I got the reports, and he said in the diagnosis P-U-O. So I thought, is this some disease I have not heard of till now? P-U-O. P-U-O is… what does it mean? It's pyroxia of unknown origin.
So pyroxia is fever. So fever of unknown origin, that I also know. There's nothing new to be known in that.
So ultimately, they just gave some medicines, and I got cured. We just don't know. Sometimes it's not always possible to know the cause.
The cure, we can say it will work most effectively when we know the cause. But life doesn't work in such logical, rational ways. Because our knowledge itself is finite.
So we have to… we cannot wait to get complete knowledge to move on in our life. If I have sickness, I have to take some treatment. If I can understand the specific cause of the sickness and take the cure, that's good.
But if it doesn't happen, that doesn't mean that I will not take any treatment. I keep taking treatment, and eventually, something works and we move on in our life. So there are cases of people, as I said, through hypnotic regression, who have been healed.
But there are cases also of people who… not many, but there are cases of people who have got aggravated psychological trauma because of that. So in fact, Ian Stevenson on his website, he strongly disapproves of hypnotic regression therapy. He says that by going into the past, sometimes you may remember some further hurts of the past.
And that could cause greater agitation. And that happens in what you do after that. So there is a case of one past life memory involving the ship Titanic.
This Titanic, why it drowned so suddenly, before any aid could reach it, that is, for a long time, that was an unresolved mystery. So there was Thomas Andrews, who was one of the main designers of the Titanic. And he was on that ship and he drowned.
And after some years, another person was born, William Barnes. And he started remembering about the Titanic. And then he started, during one lecture of recollection, he got an insight that actually I was Thomas Andrews.
And then he started telling many facts about the Titanic, which were true, but which were not known in general. And till date, he has given the most satisfactory explanation, most rational explanation of why the Titanic sank so quickly. Now, when the Titanic was made, it was advertised as if like the ship, which even God can't sink.
It is so strong. So this William Barnes told that as Thomas Andrews, before they were going on their maiden voyage, he was testing the ship. And then he was at different points, he was just like testing the hull by hitting it with a hammer.
And at a few places, when he hit it with a hammer, ummm, like a loud noise, which is like resonance. And then when he pointed this out to one black, he was, that is the name of the person, he was one of the main financers for this project. And I told him that this, these points of resonance, they are where the ship's hull is very vulnerable.
And we need to thicken the hull of the ship to prevent this resonance. And this black, he just dismissed, he says, you know, we already spend enough money, the whole cruise is all set up and we have to go. So, he just pushed over his obstacles, objections and he went on the ship.
And eventually, the iceberg that hit the Titanic, it didn't just hit it, it hit one of the resonance points. And because of that, what happened was, if the Titanic had just got one hole, it would not have sunk so fast. But it had multiple cracks.
And when the water seeped in from multiple places, it sank much, much faster than what it normally has. So, this was the explanation that he gave. And it's a very rational explanation.
So, there are many people who are, not everyone, but many people are convinced that William Barnes was actually Thomas Andrews reincarnated. But I'm not focusing on that case, the evidence whether it is sound or not. The point which I'm making is that this William Barnes, he is fully convinced that I am Thomas Andrews reincarnated.
But he has no interest in anything spiritual. Although he has the understanding that I was this person and this person, that means there's something which continues on your bodily identity. But he says, the mission of my life is to clear the good name of Thomas Andrews.
So, the remembrance of the past is now guarantee that it will either lead to emotional healing or whether it will lead to, it will comprise the prompting for spiritual growth. So, that's why we cannot continue living in the past. So, it's best to try to move ahead in one's life.
And if you consider the mind to be like a wall on which graffiti has been written. Now, if a graffiti has been written, then the police or the authority will try to find out who wrote the graffiti over it. We try to catch them and we discipline them.
But in some cases, we just can't find out who wrote it. The important thing is, you know, you remove the graffiti. So, what do you do is, one is scratch it out.
But if it's too much there, then the solution is overpaint it. Overpainting the graffiti goes off. So, the process of Bhakti Yoga is like overpainting.
So, what we do is, there are past emotional issues which are there within us. But if we just put in spiritual impressions in our mind through singing songs, through going to holy places, through beholding the sacred forms, through getting in spiritual wisdom, all this also creates impressions in the mind. These impressions, as they become more and more strong, they overpaint the previous impressions.
And as those past hurts go further and further into the background, they hurt us less and less. So, the much safer and more reliable way of emotional healing is not to go back and revisit the past hurts, but rather to move ahead and to get more emotionally enriching experiences. And Bhakti Yoga, because it connects us with the supreme reality, it gives us very enriching experience.
And that way we can heal ourselves much better. Now, the example of one white crow disproving the theory that all crows are black. This also comes from a scientist.
It's also part of science. And still, why is it that the evidence for reincarnation and the concept of reincarnation are not accepted, are not even entertaining mainstream science? Answer, it's because of a particular way in which science has developed. Most of modern science operates on the principle called methodological naturalism.
Naturalism is the idea that the natural world that we see around us, and by natural, it's often physical, it's material or more physically physical. That's what is, that's all that there is. That's the idea of naturalism.
So, there is metaphysical naturalism, which says, philosophically, there's nothing beyond the natural world. But methodological naturalism means, as a methodology, science will look only for natural explanations for natural phenomena. So, Newton, when he saw the fruit falling, he himself believed in God.
But when he wanted to know what caused the fruit to fall, he didn't say God caused the fruit to fall. That is true. God, we could say, God has set up all the systems and God is the explanation.
But at that point, he wanted to understand the material mechanism that made the fruit fall. And that's how he came up with the idea of gravity. So now, science, in general, when it adopts methodological naturalism, then it looks for material explanations for material phenomena.
And scientists argue that bringing in non-material explanations is a scientific progress stopper. They say, the example which they give is, say, in the past, there was a black plague. And people believed at that time that the plague was caused by some evil spirits haunting people.
Now, if there is an evil spirit haunting people, if we accept that explanation, then science can't do anything about it. But what do you do? You can't examine a spirit under a microscope. You can't create an antidote for it.
But by refusing to consider such explanations and by focusing on trying to find a biological explanation, scientists found the germs that caused the plague and then they developed a counter for it. So their theory, the approach of methodological naturalism is that even if a material explanation is difficult to find, still we should find a material explanation and that is what will lead to the progress of science. Once we start allowing non-material explanations, then that will lead to, we come up with explanations over which we have no control and that leads to the blockage of science progress.
So this is often the argument that is used to stop and to not entertain non-material explanations. And some scientists say that, now of course this argument is not necessarily true, because even scientists say in fields such as archaeology, when they are looking at, say they find some spherical object that has some grooves on it, they look at whether some natural phenomena could have caused those grooves, but those grooves are very fine, very particularly shaped. And they say, okay, this could not have come by a natural cause and probably that means it is an intelligent cause.
So the opposite of natural doesn't have to be a supernatural cause. Intelligent cause means it's a human being who has made this spherical object. So there are fields of science where this rigid insistence on natural causes is not adhered to all the time.
Now even in criminology, if a person has died because of a knife wound, then the way the knife has gone in, we may observe and we decide whether it was accidentally the person just fell on the knife, the knife fell on the person or somebody inserted it. So there are cases where science also does look for non-natural explanations and that is what leads to the advancement of knowledge. So in that sense, it's not a rigid principle.
Secondly, some scientists say that the idea that there is something non-material such as a soul, this is an extraordinary claim. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidences. And therefore, they say that the evidence for reincarnation is not enough.
It's not strong enough, they say. One of the features of the scientific method is what they call as controlled experiment. In a particular environment, when we control the parameters, say if I say an acid and base come together and they make a salt, then I can put the two in a controlled environment, not have any other chemicals and see what happens.
So the problem with phenomena like reincarnation is that you cannot put it in a controlled environment. It's more of, of course, Ernst Hinesen did try to create some controlled environments. For example, he tries to ensure that when the child goes back and meets the previous family, he tries to ensure that it stops the meeting.
It shouldn't happen before the past life researcher comes and interviews both of them. So then there are some cases where the whole meeting has been also audio recorded. That's even before video recording became so common.
Now researchers are using video recording also. So then who said what exactly? So what did the people say before the meeting took place? What did the people say, what actually happened during the meeting, what happened afterwards? So all that can be controlled. So in that sense, controlled experiment can also be done, but not exactly in the sense that we cannot control all the parameters involved in reincarnation.
But again, that is not a very serious objection because in all sciences which involve, which involve events from the past, controlled experiments can't be done. So for example, how the universe originated, whatever theories scientists have, we cannot do controlled experiments to replicate those theories, to replicate those scenarios rather. So a different method is required and science itself is open to that other method.
So it's rather than induction where you do a hundred experiments and then because you get the same consistent results, so you conclude it. So in historical sciences, induction cannot be done. So they use an alternative method called IDE, inference to best explanation.
And if you use that, that means this is the evidence, what is the best explanation for this? So if you use that, reincarnation does come off as the most reasonable explanation over there. Still the problem is that also that there are a good number of researches done, but much more research needs to be done and a little more rigorous scrutiny. And over a period of time, the acceptability will increase.
So at least we can say that as compared to 30 or 50 years ago in the western world, and today, reincarnation has definitely become much more, at least, idea worth considering. It's not become mainstream, but it's definitely something which is being considered. So gradually that will increase as more research is done, more evidence comes forward.
And currently the centers of knowledge are the western world. It's America, Europe to some extent, but America. And there have been not that many cases of past life memories found among American children.
But Ian Stevenson's successor, he is focused on cases among Americans only. And he has become quite influential in his own way. So I think it's gradually happening, the reincarnation becoming more and more accepted.