Is reincarnation a Hindu belief?

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Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you. There is no cell in our body which is the same. So, who is it that is the same? If the whole body is changed, then who is it that is the same? Now, we know that I am the same, although the body is changed.
So, that unchanging self, that the Bhagavata says is the Atma. And the unchanging self, which stays the same amidst the change of the body, that is itself a phenomenon of reincarnation. So, karna means body, incarnation means to come in the body, reincarnation means to come again in the body.
So, we could say that even in this life, since we are changing bodies, so reincarnation is something which we all have experienced. Sometimes, if we meet some old friends, or if we meet a friend who did not know us in childhood, and we show that friend our childhood photo, maybe when we were 5, 6 or 4 years old, and especially if it was a school photo, they may not even be able to recognize us, because we may be quite different from what we were. So, or when we meet a relative after 10-12 years, they say, you have become so big.
What does this mean? You have become so big. So, you are still the same, but you also become big. As in there is something which is unchanging within us, something which is changing within us.
So, this is the fact that we change bodies, which is a sense of reincarnation, something which we all experience in this life. Now, what reincarnation states is that the same thing happens at the end of this life also, when we go to another body. Now, there is a significant body of scientific evidence which points towards this, that many researchers, especially led by the late Dr. Jan Stevenson, who pioneered the scientific examination of cases of reincarnation, and he found four levels of evidence for this.
First is that he found children especially who had memories of another life. A small child would say, I was small, I am small, I was big then, I am small now. This is normal opposite order.
I was small then, I am big now. That’s how we see in a normal course of life. And a child would say, I was big then, and child would give details.
I was so and so person, so and so place. And researchers would go and investigate and they would find that actually there is a person who lived and died the way this child did. So, first evidence is accurate recollection of a past life.
And many of these cases, in fact most of the cases that Stevenson investigated were long before the internet came out. And the children had no way of knowing, especially 3, 4, 5, 6 year old children, they had no way of knowing who lived somewhere else, in some other village, some other city, sometimes some other country also. So, the children got this knowledge and got this accurately.
And the knowledge was not even available to their parents. Their parents did not know that deceased person. This is one level of evidence.
The second is, not only were there recollections, but there were also recognitions. That is, these children were taken back to the life of the previous personality. Previous personality is the term that Stevenson coined for referring to who this person, who the child claimed to be in the previous life.
So, when they went there, the children actually identified. So, there was a boy, Titu Sharma, who was a 5 year old boy. He started saying that he was living in Lucknow.
He said, I am actually from Kanpur. And I own electrical shop, Verma Electricals. And I had a and I was married to a woman named Uma.
And I was shot in the head. And when he was taken to that city, actually they found there was a Verma Electricals studio, which was run by a widow by a widow named Uma. And the small boy went to her.
He ran up to her and he started behaving with her as if she were his wife. She was shocked when this small boy came and started speaking like this. But eventually, when he went there, he told, he not only recognized her, he recognized his father, his mother, other relatives over there in his house.
So, there are many cases where this recognition goes so far. And not only recognitions, a third level of evidence is also behavior. Behavior means that there are children who have likes and dislikes, phobias and phelias from their previous life which carry over to this life.
So, for example, if a child has been drowned, if the previous personality had died because of drowning, then in this life, the child will be having hydrophobia, very fearful of water. Or that person had been shot in the dark, then he is very fearful of darkness. So, in this way, and they are not only negative behaviors, they are also positive behaviors.
So, for example, there was a boy in Madhya Pradesh who was born in a lower caste family and he believed that he was an incarnational person born in a higher caste family. And as soon as they started speaking, he refused to take the food from his house. And for seven years, his father had to get a Brahmin to cook food for him and he said, I will take food only by Brahmins.
Now, why would the parents do a hoax like this? That they themselves would be embarrassed that their son is not eating food in their own house. So, this is the kind of behavior the children exhibit wherein they act not in conformity with the way they are expected to in this life but in some other entirely different way. And the fourth and the most strongest evidence is birth marks and birth defects.
So, for example, this boy Titu he had been surveyed by Suresh Varma in his previous life and Suresh Varma had been shot at close range when he had just come back from his office to his home and so the bullet had gone inside from the right temple and come out of the left temple. And this is the case of Titu, double birth marks, this was actually shown on BBC in a program called called 40 Minutes and in that they showed Titu being shaved and when he was shaved, he also had two congenital birth marks, swellings on his head and because it had been a criminal case of murder, the post-mortem reports had been done and investigators found that the location of the entry point and the exit point of the bullet, they exactly matched with the birth marks on the body of Titu. And not only that normally the exit part is usually bigger, so the bullet comes in from one point and goes on and makes a bigger hole on the other side.
So the birth mark on the other side on Titu’s head was bigger. And now there was a Nesip Botswana, there was a man named Nesip in Turkey who had died because somebody else had attacked him by knife and when he was born next life, he actually as a child had not one or two but seven birth marks at exactly the same location as what had been there in the fatal wounds of Nesip in the previous life. Now, Stevenson actually did mapping of the body into 128 coordinates and he found that within the 128 coordinates there is a precise correlation between the fatal wound of the previous body and the birth mark of this body.
Additionally he found the birth marks and birth defects have various causes. The known causes among them are primarily two. One is that they are genetic.
They come from the genes of their mother or the father. And the second is during pregnancy, if the mother eats something or undergoes some disease because of which the child gets marked. Now, they found that and Stevenson found that the kind of birth marks that these people had, there was nothing genetic which could have caused this birth mark.
None of their parents, grandparents, cousins or even their uncles had this kind of birth mark. And lastly, also the women had been very careful during pregnancy and they had not eaten anything. Many of these cases, women were religious or especially they would become more religious when they would be carrying a child in the hope that they would get a good progeny.
So, they had not exposed themselves in any way to any food or any habit which could have scarred the child. So, there is no genetic cause for genetic or biological cause for the birth mark. So, the soul who has gone who has died in the previous life that impact is carried on in the consciousness, in the mind and that impact, that registers as a deformity in the body in the next life.
So, in this way, by observing that we ourselves remain unchanging despite the change in our body in this life, we can see reincarnation happening in this life itself. And then that reincarnation happens from one life to next life. There are four lines of evidences.
One is accurate recollections of facts which the children could not have known by any normal means. Second is precise recognitions of people which the children had not known. Third is behavior which were radically different even contradictory in all patterns of behavior but which were similar to the behavior of the previous personality.
And last is birth marks and birth defects which correlated precisely with the fetal wounds of the previous life and which had no cause based in this life. So, all these points of reincarnation as a fact of life not a sectarian belief. Thank you.