Does reincarnation explain why some people feel they are in a body of the wrong gender?
Some people feel as if they are in the wrong body as if they try to change their body they become transgenders so can reincarnation play a role in this yes it can see as I said that the soul normally identifies with the body which it has but sometimes if the attachment to a particular body is very great if the event of death is not processed properly then the soul continues to identify with the previous body so to identify with the body which we have is bad enough to identify with the body which we don't have that is even worse so it is a difficult situation when a person is in that situation see the whole focus in today's world is on horizontal change whereas in the spiritual culture the whole focus is on vertical change by what I mean horizontal change by horizontal change I mean that everybody feels dissatisfied with their situation in life nobody can say that I am fully satisfied they may say at one moment I am fully satisfied and next moment something says I want that now why is that happening so actually dissatisfaction is a fact of material existence and the whole process of spiritual knowledge is meant to help us to channel our dissatisfaction most constructively Prabhupada in a lecture to hippies he says you know all of you hippies you are not appreciated in America because they consider you frustrated but I appreciate you human life is meant to be frustrated he says only when you are frustrated with life will you enquire about spiritual life so this is Prabhupada's brilliance but nobody translated human life is meant to be frustrated but it's true most people they enquire about life's higher side when they are frustrated about what they have so the point is that the dissatisfaction with material existence is the norm now in modern materialistic civilization the whole focus is on removing that dissatisfaction by changing one's material situation so that means horizontally if I am here if I am dissatisfied I move here and maybe I am better over here I move here and sometimes some material change may make things better but ultimately no material change provides lasting happiness if I fall in the ocean and I am in a stormy part of the ocean and you go that part of the ocean looks so peaceful I just want to go there and make great effort swim against the waves and finally get there but after sometime the storm comes there and where do I go after that so now if there is somebody in a helicopter above and they offered us a rope come out of this ocean and we are so caught in going to the other part of the ocean that we don't even look at that rope we miss the rope that is extremely unfortunate so in the human form of life we have that rope that capacity for spiritual enquiry and the capacity for spiritual growth that is the rope especially if we come in contact with spiritually minded people they help us to raise our consciousness upwards so unfortunately in today's world because the propaganda is so much on material change do this you will become happy do this you will become happy but actually yes some material changes may make some things better but where will the material change stop and no material change makes people fully happy or forever happy so the dissatisfaction which is there some of us may be dissatisfied with our looks some of us may be dissatisfied with our relatives some of us may be dissatisfied with our gender that may be more unusual but ultimately it is just another specific variant of a generic problem so in today's world what has happened is the attempt to exert one's own sexual orientation that has become a whole movement in itself and then whether that is right or that is wrong there is a big ethical debate between religious people and non-religious people but the whole point is missed out that that dissatisfaction is generic and the solution to the dissatisfaction is to raise our consciousness upwards so yes we may feel dissatisfied disoriented in the body we are in but whichever body we may be in we will still be disoriented so it is best to raise our consciousness upwards spiritually and by practicing bhakti yoga by connecting with Krishna we will be able to deal with whatever discomfort we might have with our material situation in a reasonable way but unfortunately the propaganda about material change is so great that we forget that there is a rope which can take me out of this ocean itself so our focus should be not on saying this is right or this is wrong, see as soon as we get into this is right or this is wrong the moral issue becomes people say who are you to decide what is right, what is wrong people become very rebellious as soon as the judgment is passed in moral terms but if we talk in terms of what is real progress this progress is not going to power the lasting happiness this vertical progress, raising one's consciousness above one's body level to a spiritual level that is what is truly progress and the spiritual wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita opens doors and provides methods for us to make that spiritual progress thank you very much.