If a person is attached to a family member will he be reborn in the same family?

From: Ganesh Pandian
As per B.G verse  in whatever state of mind one leaves the present body, the same state he achieves without fail.
1. If one of the family members has attachment to particular person in the family then will he come back in the next life to the same family if not immediate sometime later?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Question from Ganesh Pandya and Prabhu.
As per the Bhagavad Gita, whatever state of mind one leaves the present body, the same state he achieves without fate. If one of the family members has attachment to a particular person in the family, then will he come back in the next life to the same family, if not immediately, sometime later? Answer. It’s possible, but there is not just the karma, but also the karma that determines our next life destination.
So karma refers to the desire. What is our attachment? And karma refers to our qualification. What kind of karma have we done? So both karma and karma combine together and determine the result.
So if somebody is attached to a family, which most people are, and if that were the only factor, then all people would be reborn in their own families. But that doesn’t happen very frequently. So generally speaking, the soul will get the next body based on one’s karma.
Prabhupada gives an example, an extra instruction of how a wealthy person was reborn, merely because of attachment to the house, as a cobbler. But when that wealthy person came to his own house, which he had built in the previous life, his sons drew him away, drove him away by beating him. So he was not allowed to enter also.
So the point which Prabhupada makes is that this kind of attachment is futile. So we work so hard to achieve material things and then we lose them. In next life we have no authority over them.
So it’s certainly possible that a person can be born. And there are many past life memory cases studied by researchers like Ian Stevenson and others. And generally, when people recollect their past lives, it’s generally because they get some stimulus.
One of the reasons is because they get some stimulus about their past life memory. And then they want to go over there. But whether a person will be born in the relative’s family or nearby, the same family again, that is difficult to say.
When Prabhupada was asked about this, Prabhupada quotes his Chitraketu past time purport indirectly. He says, sometimes family members say that, you know, the grandfather has now come back as the grandson or the great grandson or something like that. Now, there is practically no way for us to know whether that is true or not.
There might be some physical similarities, which by which some people may infer that, OK, there was a mark like that on the back and another mark over here. Now, it’s not necessary that mark may have come because of genetic factors. And it’s unlikely that a physical mark had created such great scars, such impressions on the subtle body, the mind.
And the mind eventually, when it came back in the next body, it created similar marks on the gross body. It can happen, but it happens only when those marks are very prominently there in the mind of the person, not just on the body. So, the physical marks, when they create a psychological mark on the subtle body, then the psychological mark can in a future life be expressed as a physical mark.
That’s how birth marks and birth defects happen in past life memory cases where a person has been shot by a bullet. So the bullet hole is there in the dead body of the previous life. And then the child is born next life.
Child has a swelling at the point where the bullet had entered or where the bullet had exit. So this happens, but this is rare. But basically, unless there are multiple correlating memory, correlating factors and the person has strong memories of the previous life, which the child could not have got without any proper, without any normal source.
And the child got those memories based on memory, not on information heard from others. Then it might be possible to say that this was the same elder relative who has come back. But Shilapurova basically said when people start going to the zone, this indicates that there is excessive family attachment.
So it’s possible that a relative can come back, but whether a relative has come back or not, it’s nearly impossible to find that. And this whole zone of trying to figure out whether the relative has come back or not, that indicates excessive family attachment, excessive material attachment, basically. So we should focus on, if we allow some relatives, we should focus on praying for their spiritual welfare.
And by that, whether they are reborn in the same family or born elsewhere, they will be spiritually benefited. And that is the best thing that we can do for them in the present situation,