Life, Afterlife and the Search for Meaning

[Talk at Calgary University, Calgary, USA]

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Are there any questions? Good evening, everyone.
So I’m happy to be here with all of you. I am Chaitanya Charan. So I am a monk from the bhakti yoga tradition.
I’m based in India, and I travel across the world. It’s a little bit about me over there. So I was introduced, I was introduced to Chaitanya Charan I was born in a devout Indian family.
But I did my engineering from a prominent engineering college. And I was never really interested much in religion or spirituality, although my parents were pious. But for the last 25 years, I have been studying and sharing the knowledge of an ancient yoga text called the Bhagavad Gita.
So today I will speak. Oh, you want to operate that. Yeah, life after life and the search for meaning.
I’ll talk about perspectives and afterlife from the bhakti yoga tradition, which is a part of the broad Hindu tradition. Before that, I would like to start with a little bit, as I said, it’s a search for meaning, which we all are trying to do. All of us want to have a meaningful life.
About 25 years ago, and first I studied different religions. I read a very interesting book by Huston Smith. And he said that if you want to study any tradition, begin with two assumptions.
That people everywhere are essentially similar. And people take to religion or spirituality as a support to getting on with the business of life. Everyone wants to move ahead with life.
And they adopt some kind of worldview because it helps them to move forwards. So how I started exploring this tradition, in which I was born, but I had neglected. I’ll start with that and then I’ll move on to the topic.
So when I was studying in my 10th standard in India, I was among the brightest students in my college. And in a particular category in my exams in 10th, I came first in the entire state of Maharashtra. So Maharashtra is one state in India whose population is probably twice that of all of Canada.
So I was elated. And the very evening on which in the morning I had got the result and the district collector of the whole district, he came to my house to congratulate me and felicitate me. And a picture of my family, my father, my mother, my brother.
And I said it came in local newspapers. So that very evening, after all this happened, my mother was diagnosed with terminal blood cancer. And within one month, it is all over.
So that shook me completely. Here I was, I mean, I achieved the pinnacle of success at that age. And the next moment, just shaken.
So that was the time I started thinking and reading to try to understand what is life, what is death. And we live our life, taking every decision in a way that is very serious and meaningful. Every relationship that we form, every career move that we make, we see it as very meaningful.
But by just one bug entering into our body or one bang, vehicle hitting against us, our life can just casually end it. So what is life? That’s when I started exploring and I came across the Bhagavad Gita, which is a primary sacred text of the Hindu tradition. The Bhagavad Gita itself does not use the word Hindu.
It gives universal spiritual principles. And I’ll summarise those principles which I discovered over the years of study of the Gita in three broad terms. Evolution, elevation and emigration.
So the basic point that the Bhagavad Gita explains is that, so I’ll speak on these three parts during the session. The first is evolution. So evolution means, the Bhagavad Gita explains that we are indestructible souls.
Beyond the body, there is something spiritual, something non-material. And that soul is on a multi-life journey of spiritual evolution. That evolution is towards, when we evolve, where are we evolving towards? That evolution is towards eternal life and eternal love.
Now this could seem to be just like the dogmatic belief of some tradition. It’s possible and yet there are logical inferences which could point towards this. Can you go ahead? If you consider, all of us have a very deep longing to live forever and to love forever.
Among the thousands and thousands of say movies or novels that are written or made, many of them are about romance. And most of what is about romance is ending in happily ever after. Now if we look at the reality of life, there is no ever after.
Everything has to end in death, sooner or later. And even before that, considering the kind of trauma that we experience because of relationships, happily is also questionable. But let’s focus on the ever after.
Why do we have a longing for this ever after, when nothing around us lasts ever after? Even the huge mountains don’t stay forever. Just a few weeks ago, I was in New York and I passed by the place where the twin towers were earlier. Now when the twin towers fell, it was not just this collapse of a structure.
It was what it represented, security, prosperity. So when the twin towers fell, the bubble of security and prosperity that had been built it crumbled. Now if nothing around us lasts forever, where does our desire to live forever come from? Why should we have such a desire at all? Suppose there’s a child living in some remote Canadian reservation where there is no internet, no phone, no connection with the rest of the world.
And suddenly, one day such a child goes to his mother and says, Mom, I want a pizza. What do you think the mother would ask? Where did you hear about a pizza? There’s nothing in the child’s environment which would prompt that child to know anything about a pizza. If something is nowhere in the environment, naturally the question comes up, where does it come from? If while going out of this room, you suddenly found a gold bracelet lying on the ground, immediately you would get the question, there’s nothing golden over here.
Where did this come from? So similarly, for all of us, our longing to live forever is deep-rooted within us, but it’s completely out of place with everything around us. So where does this come from? So what the ancient yoga text called the Bhagavad Gita proposes is that this comes not from our externals, but from our internals. Inside us, there is an indestructible soul.
And that soul, which is eternal, is the source of our desire for eternal life. This is not a proof, but this is an indicator. It is an inference that can be reasonably drawn that our longing for eternity comes from a part of us which is eternal.
So this is a conceptual representation of the model of the self that the Bhagavad Gita talks about. It says our existence is three-level, body, mind, and soul. These we could compare in the computer system to the hardware, the software, and the user.
When we work on a computer, all that we see is the hardware. Similarly, when we look at each other, all that we see is the body, the physical side. But beyond the body, beyond the hardware, there is much more in a working computer system.
Similarly, beyond the body, there is the mind, which is like the software, and beyond the mind, there is the soul. Many of the mental health problems that we face in today’s world, they are like the corruption of the software of the mind. Now, in this three-level model of the self, as I said, what we observe externally about each other is the hardware, the physical self.
With this model, let us try to understand what is death. Can you go ahead? So this, another way of depicting this, there are three levels of being. There is the body, which is the outer layer, physical.
Then there is the mind, which is another layer. And then there is the core, which is the self, the soul. And these three levels of being right now are also there.
They are all together as one unit. Can you go ahead? But what happens at death is that the physical body is left, and the soul along with the mind goes out. And then from there, the soul along with the mind will go to another body.
So this death basically doesn’t mean destruction of the self. It just means the separation of the self from its physical covering. That means we don’t die.
Actually, it is our body that is subjected to destruction. And we move on to another level of reality. This is how we are evolving, going from one body to another to another.
And while we are evolving thus, the purpose of all this is evolution is meant to be upwards. We are meant to raise our consciousness, get better understanding of ourselves and our purpose in life. Can you go ahead? Yeah.
So let’s move on to the second part now. I talked about evolution and now about elevation. So the yoga text Bhagavad Gita, it explains, can you go ahead? Yeah, that our body is like a dress.
So, and we get a dress, let’s consider, say if you want to go and buy a new dress, what are the factors based on which you buy a dress? There are two factors, the price and the preference. What you like and how much you can afford. So in Sanskrit, these two terms are, Sanskrit is the language in which the Bhagavad Gita is spoken.
It is the broad language of the many Indian traditions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism. So it explains that the price is how much can we pay, that is what is determined by our karma. The word karma, how many of you have heard this word? Yes, thank you.
It’s almost there in the mainstream English lexicon. So karma often, it refers to action and the reaction that we will get for the action. So the kind of actions that we have done, that will determine how much good karma we have.
And based on that, we can get a new body. It’s like if we have a particular dress and we do some job, we work and then the dress gets torn. Then we have to leave that dress.
We want to get a new dress. So based on how much money we have earned and what kind of desires we have, we’ll buy a new dress. Similarly, when the soul leaves one body, you remember the previous diagram, the soul has come out of the body, the physical shell.
The soul has to go to a new body. Which body will it go to? That is determined by these two factors. Karma and kama means desire.
So that’s, you can call it as preference. What do we like? Just as you buy a new desire based on the price and the preference, the soul gets a new body based on its karma and its kama. The kind of work it has done and the kind of desire it has.
And this way, the soul moves forward. So this is meant to lead to elevation of the soul. Now we may wonder, okay, so when I said we are dressed by and for our desires, what does that mean? The kind of desire we had in the past, that is the kind of body we have got right now.
All of us have distinct bodies. Even twins, they’re physically similar, but they’re psychologically dissimilar. The personalities are different.
So this difference, where does it come from? If we have identical twins, then their genes are also completely identical. I was in London giving a talk. And there, in the audience, there were two identical twins.
And when I explained this, they said that we are so different. One of us is introvert, other extrovert. One of us likes driving, another likes music.
They’re very different. They were telling, till now we couldn’t figure out. Why are we different? So our personality is not just determined by the genes that we have got from our parents.
It’s not determined only by the kind of upbringing or the socialising that we do. It’s also determined by the kind of soul we have. And that is determined by where we have been in our previous life.
So two souls may have identical dresses. Just like two people may go to a big cloth store and buy exactly similar dresses. The dresses may be similar, but they are different people.
So in the case of twins, their dresses are similar, but the persons are different. So when we go from, we are dressed by our desires, the kind of desires we had previously, accordingly we get the dress. And for our desires means that based on the desires that we have, we are given the particular facilities to get a particular body.
In fact, the soul, the Bhagavad Gita explains, is present in every body. Sorry, in every living being. It’s not just humans.
Even in animals, even in plants, even in germs, souls are present. Wherever there is consciousness, a soul is over there. Can we move on? So now the Bhagavad Gita explains that the journey from one body to another body, that is determined by something which can be called as the law of last thought.
santakāle ca mām eva smaran muktvā kalevaram ya prayāti samadbhāvam yāti nāstyatra saṁśayaḥ This is Sanskrit in the Bhagavad Gita 8th chapter. What it essentially says is that what we think of at the time of death, that is what we will get in our next life. And what will we think of at the time of death? What will be our disposition at the time of death? That will be determined by what we have been thinking of throughout our life.
What we have been thinking of throughout our life. If somebody loves their dog very much and the dog loves their master, then it could be that the end of their life, the dog and the master may find themselves at the opposite ends of the leash. The master may become the dog and the dog may become the master.
If the master is very attached to the dog, if the owner is very attached to the dog, the owner thinks of the dog at the time of death, the owner may become a dog in the next life. The dog is very attached to the master, the dog thinks of the master at the time of death, the dog may become a human being in the next life. So this is how this journey takes place from one life to another.
Can you go ahead? So now, when a person dies, in the broad Indian tradition, the body is cremated, the body is burnt, it is not buried. And one reason for this is that the soul is given closure. If we have lived, if we have worn a dress for a long time, then even if that dress is worn out and we can’t wear it now, we may still want to preserve it.
This was a dress that I wore in my childhood. So like that, even when the body becomes unworkable, the soul has to leave the body and go to the next body. The soul can be very attached to that body.
And because of that, the soul may not leave the body. So when the body is burnt, it’s put on a funeral pyre and burnt, by that, the soul, which is maybe hovering above with the mind, the soul is wondering, is there some way I can enter into this body and I can live on? But when the soul sees that the body is irrevocably destroyed, burnt to ashes, then that gives the soul closure. This life is over now.
Now, let me move on. So cremation is done so that the soul can move forwards. And cremation is often done in a sacred place, maybe on the banks of a river, where there are sacred mantras being chanted and there are people in a prayerful, contemplative mood.
Life is temporary. And when we see the body burning to death, that creates a certain level of sobriety. This is what I am going to become in future also.
This is going to the end of my body also. And that sobriety can inspire people to explore life’s spiritual dimension more. So cremation serves a constructive purpose for both the person who is departing, the soul who has left the body, as well as for others.
It gives closure to the soul who has departed and serves as a graphic reminder of the inevitability of bodily destruction for those who are living. Now, as I said, is this just some dogma? Are there any ways in which we can substantiate this? So there are many children across the world who have had past life memories. There are children who know things that they just can’t know.
And these memories just spontaneously come up. A child, maybe two or three, and child suddenly says, Mom, I want to go to my other mom. What? Or one day the child may say to his dad, Dad, I’m small now, but I was bigger than you earlier.
What? Children speak like this, bold out of the blue. And when they speak like this, it creates perplexity among the parents. But there are some scientists who have investigated such memories quite seriously.
Can you go ahead? So this is Dr. Ian Stevenson. He was a pioneer in the research into past life memories. And he spent 60 years travelling across six continents.
And he documented thousands of cases of children who could remember their past lives. And he found actually that the evidences were of four levels. There were recollections.
Children could remember, oh, I was so-and-so boy over here. Maybe I could tell a story over here to explain this. So there was this boy in Turkey.
His name was Nesip. And when he was growing up, he said that, My name is Nesip. His name was Nesip Undutaskiran.
And he says, My name is Nesip. Your parents say, Yes, your name is Nesip. No, I’m Nesip Budak.
He says, No, you’re not Nesip Budak. You’re Nesip Undutaskiran. As he grew up, he was living in a place called Adan.
And he said, I live in Mersin. And he said, My name is Nesip Budak. And he was a six-year-old boy.
And he said, I have a wife and I have children. I want to go and see them. His parents, they didn’t believe in reincarnation.
They didn’t take it seriously. But as he started this from the age of three, four, five, six, as he grew older, he started saying, If you don’t take me there, I will go alone over there. And finally, they took him there.
His father, his grandfather, his mother’s father had got remarried to a woman who was from Mersin. And when his mother took him to meet his father after marriage, and he started speaking like, Oh, you’re from Mersin. Do you know Nesip Budak? He said, Yes.
He had died in a quarrel, in a knife fight. He says, I am Nesip Budak. He says, What? And he started telling many details about this person.
And she was intrigued. Now, all this was published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which is a respected scientific journal. So then eventually, his grandfather took him to Mersin.
And he had never been to Mersin. But as soon as he came over there, he said, Let’s go left. Let’s go right.
Let’s go right. And he took him straight to that particular place. And there was a widow who was living there.
A woman who had been a widow. And her husband’s name had been Nesip Budak. And then he started telling many details.
You know, we did this and we did that and we did that. And so I said, first of all, recollections were there. But then there were recognitions.
He recognised people over there. He had children from his previous life. And he recognised the names of the children also.
And not only that, he also had information of something quite confidential. This Nesip had been a very short-tempered person in his previous life. And one day, in a drunken rage, he had attacked his wife with a knife.
And she had dodged the blow. But the knife had hit her thigh, inner thigh. And it had created a scar over there.
So, he told this that she has a scar on her inner thigh. So, Dr. Stevenson had a female assistant. He took her and he took this Nesip’s wife or widow and they examined her.
And she had a scar on her inner thigh. And she said, yes, my husband had attacked me at that time. So, now, for a child living in an entirely different city, how would he know of a mark on a private part of a body of a woman whom he has never met before? Not only that, he was so possessive.
When he saw his children, now the children were older than him. But he was brushing their hair, kissing them, treating them with parental love. All these children were older than him.
And this Nesip Budak’s wife, widow, she had remarried. So, when he saw his wife’s photo with her husband, her husband was not there at that time, he got so angry, he took the photo and was about to hurl it on the ground. He said, you are my wife, no one else’s wife.
So, there were also behaviours. And most significantly, there were birthmarks. So, Nesip Budak in his previous life, he had drunk and he had quarrelled with somebody else.
And that person had also been drunk and as the fight got ugly, the other person had taken out a knife and had at multiple places stabbed Nesip Budak. And that’s how he had died. Now, Nesip, Unluthas Kiran, this boy, whenever he would talk about his previous life, he was born with multiple birthmarks on his body.
That he had six birthmarks on his body. And he would point to those birthmarks and say, this is where I was stabbed. And because Nesip Budak’s death had been investigated by the police, so there was a post-mortem report.
And Dr. Stevenson investigated that and he decided to check how precise. Okay, Nesip had six wounds on his body and Nesip had six birthmarks on this young boy’s body. So, he divided the human body into x, y, 160 coordinates.
And then he investigated how precise is the location of the wound from the previous life and the birthmark from this life. And he found precise correlation. So, even one birthmark is very significant.
But here there were six birthmarks. The probability of that would be 1 by 160 raised to the power of 6. It’s an extremely low probability. So, these kind of cases… Can you go ahead? So, Dr. Stevenson has written many books.
There are two of his books. One of his first books was 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. His last book was Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.
That is where he wrote extensively about the birthmarks and birth defects. Can you go ahead? So, now the birthmarks, they are quite dramatic, quite graphic. So, this is the birthmark that a child had right from his birth.
Now, this is not simply a mole or a scar or anything like that. So, what had happened? This boy remembered that in a previous life, he had been knocked down by a truck and the truck had run over his body. The truck had run over his thigh.
So, where the truck had run over his thigh, that’s where his thigh had become deformed. So, these are quite striking kind of birthmarks. So, these point to the idea that the same person, the soul has gone to another body.
Can you go ahead, please? So, now I’ll talk about the last part, immigration. For the soul, as I said, is evolving and it goes from one body to another. The idea is the soul is to go upwards.
Just like if we have one kind of dress, then we work wearing that dress and we want to buy a more expensive dress, a dress which we like more. So, that’s the elevation. Ultimately, the purpose of all this, what are we longing for? This is the world of matter where everything is temporary.
Beyond this is the world of spirit where everything is eternal. And the purpose of life according to the Bhagavad Gita is that we emigrate. Emigrate from this world of matter to the world of spirit.
Can you go ahead? So, now what is there in that world of spirit that is characterised by eternal love? You remember I started the class with how there are so many novels and movies which talk about romance, which talk about the happily ever after. So, when we talk about happily ever after, there are two things. We live forever and our beloved lives forever.
And then both of us can have a happily ever after. So, till now I talked about how this longing points to our eternality. But along with that, there is not just eternal life, but there is eternal love.
Eternal love means there has to be an object for our love. And that object is described as the infinite, the divine. The Bhagavad Gita explains that the divine can have many different names.
And the Gita refers to that divine by the name Krishna. The word Krishna refers not just to a sectarian God, but literally it means this, that sarva-akarshati iti Krishna. That one who attracts everyone, that person, that reality, that truth is known as Krishna.
So, what the Gita explains is that we are attracted to different people, different things. Somebody looks very attractive, then everybody gets attracted to them. Somebody looks very good, people are attracted to them.
Somebody is very wealthy, people are attracted to them. Somebody is very intelligent, just remember and explain things brilliantly, people are attracted to them. Somebody is very famous, we are attracted to them.
Somebody is very powerfully built, very strong, physically, socially, whatever, we are attracted to them. So, there are different attractive features, beauty, strength, wealth, intelligence, fame. So, all these attractive features that attract us to others, there is one source in whom all these attractive features are present in full and that source is the ultimate object of love.
So, whatever we find attractive in anyone, we have two kinds of relationships, horizontal relationships and there is a vertical relationship. The horizontal relationship is with people around us and the vertical relationship is with the divine and the horizontal relationships, they are important but they are temporary. They cannot last forever but the vertical relationship can last forever and the purpose of life ultimately is to evolve, to become elevated so that we can develop this vertical relationship.
We can learn to love the divine and when we learn to love the divine, that is when we attain the divine. So this process of loving the divine is called as Bhakti Yoga. How many of you have heard the word Yoga? So now the word Yoga, as most of you probably know, it is associated with some physical exercises that can make our body fitter and more shapely, to improve our health and our looks, people do Yoga.
However, the word Yoga originally had a very different connotation. We consider in India, today most people practise Yoga to, as I said, improve their health and their looks but in the past, in the Eastern world, Yoga was practised primarily by people who renounced the world so that they could connect with the divine. So Yogis would leave their homes, go to the forests and sit in Yogic postures and meditate and the idea was to perceive some higher reality.
So Yoga is essentially, the word comes from, if you consider, it’s cognate of the English word Yoke. When we put a yoke, then what do we do? We connect an animal like a bullock with a structure by which the farm can be ploughed. So yoke means to connect.
So Yoga and yoke are cognate. They come from the same roots. So the word Yoga literally means to connect.
It is meant to help us establish a connection, the connection between the soul and the divine, the finite and the infinite. And Bhakti Yoga is the process by which this connection can be developed through love. Bhakti literally means love, love for the divine or divine love.
So Bhakti Yoga is the process by which the connection with the divine is developed by the power of emotion. Our loving propensity, we direct towards the divine and Bhakti Yoga is the most widespread among the various paths that are there in the broad Hindu tradition and in Bhakti Yoga, the idea is that when we love the divine more than the world, the divine takes us out of the world to the eternal abode. So we all have different loves in the world.
You may love, some people, some of us may love sports, some of us may love food, some of us may love video games, some of us, we all have different loves but the purpose of evolution and elevation is that we learn to love the divine and when we love the divine, that is when we attain the divine. So I’ll conclude with, since we are talking about life after life and the search for meaning, I’ll conclude with what is considered in our tradition to be the ideal death, the ideal departure from the world. One of the most prominent teachers or proponents of Bhakti Yoga in the modern times was Swami Prabhupada.
At the age of 69, Swami Prabhupada came to America alone on a cargo ship with just 40 rupees and he didn’t even know English very well, he didn’t know anyone in America. When he landed in New York, he landed in America, he didn’t know whether he should turn left or right and he came as a messenger of divine love. He came in 1965 and that was the time of the counterculture and he started sharing this message of love with people and 1, 2, 5, 10, 100, thousands and millions of people within a decade started practising Bhakti across the world and in 1977, he passed away but in those 12 years, he wrote over 70 books, he circumnavigated the globe 14 times on world tours where he spoke about the message of divine love.
He inspired over a million people, millions of people to take up the spirituality. He built 108 temples across the world and then he returned to a holy place in India which is called Vrindavan, it’s in North India and there he was diagnosed with a serious disease which was more or less seen as incurable and then in the last days of his life in Vrindavan, he was surrounded by people who were devoted to the same God, Krishna to whom he was devoted and they would sing the names of Krishna, he would speak about Krishna even till his last moment. He was writing books by dictating the dictaphone and those were published as his books later.
So, he would hear about Krishna, speak about Krishna and people would come to meet him. One of his scientist disciples came to meet him and he was shocked, Swamiji had earlier been very healthy and vibrant but he had become extremely emaciated and he had become so weak, he had not been able to eat for days, he had multiple complications including a severe urinary tract infection. So he had become so emaciated, like a shadow of his self.
So this Dr. Singh, who was his disciple, he came to meet him, he was shocked and Swami was so detached, so spiritually aware, he saw his disciple being shocked and he laughed. He said, for so many years, I have been telling you, I have been telling all of you, we are not the body, we are the soul, he said. Now I am demonstrating that, my body is gone, my body is just a shell but still I am here.
And then, finally, November 14, 1977, at an auspicious time, he was surrounded by his disciples and they were all singing the names of God, we in our tradition especially sing the mantra, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Ram, Hare Ram, Ram Ram, Hare Hare. So they were all singing the mantra around him. He himself is extremely weak, he was listening to the mantra and then he spoke the names of Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, he spoke this twice and then he closed his eyes forever.
A few hours before that, a short while before that, he had been asked by his admirers and followers, do you have any last desires? And he replied, kuch ichcha nahi, means I have no desire left. He had come to serve the divine by sharing the message of love, he had done it, he is contented and he departed from the world. Death is inevitable for everyone but there is an art to dying.
The Bhakti Yoga tradition explains that if you can die in remembrance of the divine, then we attain the divine. The body will suffer, it will get deteriorated. One of his followers, he also died in a similar way, in a very sacred situation.
So all this, how does it apply to us, he says that, his followers saying that, in life pain is unavoidable but suffering is optional. What does it mean, pain is unavoidable but suffering is optional? If we become spiritually aware, then we don’t stay obsessed so much with the body. We may have to live with pain but we don’t have to live in pain.
If we understand that our physical reality is like a dress, if we have bought a new dress and suddenly it gets torn, we’ll be annoyed, we’ll be embarrassed, we may become angry also. But the tearing of a dress is not the same as the ripping out of an arm. So when we understand that we are spiritual beings, we don’t get so affected by life’s ups and downs.
We can bring a steadiness, a calmness, a maturity to our life by which, not just at the time of death but even during the journey of life, we can face life with greater inner security, greater inner confidence. This is that life can be meaningful if we attain the divine at the end of our life but life can be meaningful if we connect with the divine even in this life. And that is the essential message of the Bhakti tradition.
So I’ll quickly summarise and if any of you have any questions, we can discuss. So I spoke today about life after life and the search for meaning and I spoke this in broadly three parts, three E’s. Does anyone remember the three E’s? Sorry, evolution, elevation, emigration.
Thank you. So evolution is, we are souls indestructible on a journey of multilife spiritual evolution. Our longing for eternal life and eternal love points to something eternal within us.
Just as a child who has never heard of a pizza in a remote village desiring a pizza or finding gold in a place where there is no gold. So this longing comes not from our externals but from our internals. I talk about the Gita’s model of the self, the three levels, body, mind and soul.
They are like the hardware, software and the user. At death, the soul and the mind leave the body and go to another body. There I started talking about elevation.
The body is like a dress and we buy a new dress based on the price and the preference. So the price is the karma and the preference is the kama, our desires and how much we can, what kind of work we have done. So we talk of the soul gets a new body that is like a new chapter beginning in the journey of the soul.
Then I talked about past life memories which are indicators that all of us have a past. And these past life memories, there are multiple kinds of evidences. There is recollections, recognitions, behaviours and birthmarks and birth defects.
Stevenson’s research I talked about and the story of Nesip-Undo-Tuskiran and the six correlating birthmarks. And then as we are evolving and we are trying to elevate ourselves, the purpose ultimately is immigration. Immigration means the world of matter is temporary, the world of spirit is eternal.
The purpose of life is to immigrate to that eternal world and in that eternal world, there is an eternal object of love, that is the divine, known in our tradition as Krishna. So whatever is attractive in anyone, that is present in fullness in that divine. So the process of connecting with the divine is through the process of bhakti yoga, where we chant the holy names and surround ourselves with impressions of the divine.
And by that, as we become absorbed, attached to the divine, when we love the divine more than the world, the divine takes us out of this world to the eternal abode. Normally when a person dies, there is a cremation so that the soul has a closure and the soul can move to the next body. But when there are spiritually evolved souls, when they die, they stay absorbed in the divine.
I talked about Swami Prabhupada’s departure, where he had no desire left and he just gracefully hearing the names of Krishna, chanting the names of Krishna, he departed from the world. And when we understand that we are spiritual, that can not only create an auspicious destination in the afterlife, but even in this life, we can rise above our situations and our emotions. We may have to live with pain, but we won’t have to live in pain, because we will see physical problems like tears on our dress.
But we are bigger than that. And we can stay secure in our spirituality and march confidently through our life. Thank you very much.
Any comments also are welcome. Yeah, please. You asked about the last thought.
Yeah. You are asking me? Yeah. Okay.
Because you talked about, there might be another person. Yeah, that’s true. So what would… What would my attachment be personally? Well, I am trying to develop my attachment to Krishna.
As I said, I have been practising this and sharing this process of Bhakti Yoga for the last 20 years. So, generally, we can find out what our attachment is by where our thoughts go to when we have nothing to do. When we have something to do, naturally, okay, we are doing our studies, we are driving a vehicle, we are talking with our friends.
When we are sitting and relaxing, where do our thoughts go to? So, that is like the home of our thoughts. Just like we have a home for our body, where we will go to naturally and we don’t have anything else to do. Similarly, our thoughts have a home.
So, wherever our thoughts go to, when we have nothing consciously to think about, that is what our present home is. And that is what we will think about at the time of death. So, presently, I can’t say that I have great attachment to Krishna, but the Bhagavad Gita is a book which I have studied extensively.
I have written for almost 20 years. So, whenever I have some free time, I try to think of the Gita, recite verses from the Gita and contemplate the Gita. I have been writing on the Gita also every day for the last 7-8 years.
I have a blog called Gita Daily. That is my blog where we have almost about more than half a million followers from the Facebook page. So, where I write every day on the Gita.
So, I am thinking of that, trying to understand the Gita and make the Gita understandable. So, that is what I will probably think of when my last moment comes. But as I evolve further, the attachment to the Divine increases by the practise of Bhakti.
So, I can see that what my attachments were 20 years ago and what they are now, they are evolving. So, I am confident that as I keep moving forwards, I will become more attached to the Divine also. Thank you.
Yeah. So, do we believe in the caste system? The word caste system itself has a very negative connotation. The Bhagavad Gita talks about division of society and the word for it is Varanashram.
Varanah is not caste, but you could say more class. And it says it’s by quality and activity. That means by disposition.
So, the original system was that if people can be engaged according to their natural talents, then there can be individual satisfaction and social contribution. Nowadays, it happens that say, if engineering is glamorised, everybody wants to become an engineer. Even if they are not fit for engineering.
So, the original system was such that, well, I am also in that. I became an engineer although I had no interest in it. So, the point is that the original system was so that people’s talents could be identified and they could be engaged according to that.
So, the system of division of labour was according to quality and activity. That’s very clear in the Gita. Guna and Karma.
But unfortunately, over the centuries, this became stratified and people became labelled by their birth. And that is a serious deviation from the traditional teaching. And that is something which has led to terrible discrimination.
And Indian society is, especially in the urban areas, it’s outgrown significantly. And we are by no means supporting the caste system by birth. In fact, Swami Prabhupada opened the doors of bhakti not just to people in the lower caste but to everybody in every part of the world.
And he would say that God is not the property of any particular caste. God is the guide of every single living being. So, in that sense, the Bhagavad Gita itself teaches what we call as spiritual democracy.
It opens the path of spirituality to everyone. Yes, please. Ok, good question.
So, is somebody thinking of their dog at the time of death, is it a lower level? It’s not a matter of so much as lower or higher in a judgemental or a moral sense. It’s more in the sense of opportunity for growing. See, all living beings exist.
But it is only human beings who can question the purpose of existence. Why do I live? The Vedic texts explain, the broad Yoga texts explain that all living beings are driven by four bodily drives. To eat, to sleep, to mate and to defend.
So, animals do this, humans do it. But we humans can do something more. We also need to eat, sleep, mate and defend.
But we can think of something more. Why am I living? What is the purpose of life? So, this capacity to question is there in the human beings because, as I said, the soul, mind and body are together as one unit. But in the animal bodies, the soul’s consciousness is tied very much to the body.
It’s tied so much to the body that the soul can’t think of anything beyond the bodily drives. But in the human body, the soul is still connected to the body. But the soul’s consciousness is somewhat detached from the body.
Soul can think of higher things. So, the human body is more conducive for spiritual evolution than an animal’s body. That’s why human body is considered a better opportunity.
Now, we all need love. And our attachment to other people or even to dogs, that simply is an expression of our longing for love. I was travelling in Texas in America and I saw a bumper sticker on a person’s car.
I said, the more I get to know people, the more I love my dog. So, the love for dogs is simply an expression of our need for love. So, if we understand our spirituality, ourselves spiritually, then we can also direct that longing for love towards the divine.
And the dog can be one way in which our longing for love can be fulfilled. But if the dog becomes the primary attachment or the soul attachment, then it can be a problem. The broad spiritual culture which is derived from the Bhakti Yoga tradition, it respects all life forms.
And even animals are seen spiritually. So, we don’t neglect or minimise animals. But if our primary attachment gets concentrated on any object, that is where we’ll go.
So, attachment to dogs is not the problem. But obsessive attachment, that can lead to obstacle in the spiritual evolution. But if we see the attachment to a dog as an indicator of our longing for love, and then we can direct our love spiritually, then that can also help us in our spiritual evolution.
So, what if our attachment is to an object? See, generally, even people who are attached to an object, if we go deep into psychology, we’ll find that their attachment to that object is because of the hope that that attachment will give them some connection with someone. Why do people want money? We want money, we want looks, we want so many things, so that we feel we’ll become more lovable in the eyes of others. So, if our attachment is to things, then it’s quite likely that that attachment to thing is because we think that thing will give me the love of someone.
So, exactly the exact attachment to what we have, we are conscious beings, so obviously we cannot become unconscious beings. Money is unconscious. So, when it is said whatever we remember we will attain, that simply means what is our deepest attachment.
So, the attachment to money is probably a reflection or a distorted expression of our attachment to something or someone that we hope we might have got with the money. So, whatever is our deepest attachment we’ll go to, if we are very attached to money, then we might be born in another life where we have excessive craving for money. So, we all need money.
For all of us money is a functional need in life. But for some people money is the purpose of life. And for some people money is the sole purpose of life.
So, why this difference? That’s based on the kind of attachment they have. Okay. Yes, here please.
So, if somebody has done wrong all the time, does the soul go into the lowest punishment? Okay. Yeah, so if the soul has done something wrong, does it go into a body which is lower as a punishment? The purpose is, of this whole system of evolution, it is not so much punishment as reformation. It’s not retribution.
You did this, so you have to get this. That’s not the point. The point is to elevate.
So, if you understand that point, that if we make a wrong choice, it’s not that we have to be condemned for the wrong choice, but we are given a pathway by which we can make a right choice again. So, just like if say we are using GPS to drive to a destination, and then GPS tells us turn right, and if we turn left, then GPS doesn’t say get lost. The GPS immediately reroutes, tells us now you take this route from here.
So, if we do something wrong, now why do we do something wrong? It’s because the desire is very strong. We have the desire or the belief underlying the desire that by doing this I will get pleasure. And therefore we do it.
So, then we all have certain conceptions of what will give us pleasure. And those activities may give us a little pleasure, but that pleasure doesn’t last for long. So, if somebody has done something wrong, see here wrong is not so much in the sense of morally right or wrong, wrong is that which is unfavourable for our spiritual evolution.
So, we all have certain beliefs of what is enjoyable. But the bhakti tradition explains that learning to love the divine is what is supremely enjoyable. So, if we have certain other ideas of what is enjoyable, and we do certain actions related with that, then we will be put into situations where that desire can be played out abundantly.
And then one understands, I thought this was enjoyable, this is not all that enjoyable. So, for example, if somebody is madly in love with swimming, swimming is good as an exercise, swimming is good as a recreation, but if somebody is mad after that, then the human body is not very suited for swimming. We can’t swim constantly with it.
Then the soul may be given the body of an aquatic, where the soul can be constantly in water. Now, for us, swimming might seem to be very enjoyable, but for an aquatic, swimming is just what we naturally do, but there is danger in that, there are bigger predator aquatics which may eat it. So, basically if you have a very strong desire, then we are given an opportunity to play out that desire, by which we can realise that this desire is nothing all that great.
And then we do course correction, and then we again come back. Can we have multiple attachments, or what happens if you have a strong attachment to a person? See, the point here is not to not have attachments. It is to see our relationships in the context of the bigger purpose.
As I said, there are horizontal relationships and vertical relationships. To have horizontal relationships is natural, but the ideal situation is where the horizontal relationship strengthens our vertical relationships. That means we are attached to someone who is also spiritually minded, who is also devotionally minded.
Then both can together evolve spiritually. And then the attachment to the other person, so if the other person is also spiritual, being attached to that person can help us, they will remind us to spiritualise our consciousness, to become, to gain a better perspective in our life. So, the whole idea is not to become detached in the sense of becoming hard-hearted or uncaring.
The idea is to evolve. So, if we have multiple attachments, it’s natural. All of us have relationships.
There is a beautiful prayer which says that What it means is, O Lord, You are my father, You are my mother, You are my brother, You are my friend, You are my wealth, You are my knowledge, You, O Lord, are my everything. What that means is, that we get affection from different sources, from our parents, from our siblings, from our friends, from our resources, wealth and knowledge. But whatever we are getting from it, it’s ultimately the divine giving it to us.
One of the closest acts of love is when a mother has a newborn child and the mother feeds the child her own breast milk. She is nursing a product of her body with a part of her body. It’s very intimate.
And yet, if you think deeply about it, the mother did not do anything special to produce milk in her breast at that time. The same divine who sent a child into the world through her womb has also sent milk in her womb to feed that child. So the idea is, these horizontal relationships and the vertical relationships needn’t be in competition.
It’s not that we have to give these up to take this up. But rather we see that these horizontal relationships can also be gifts of the divine. And if we don’t get stuck over there, yes, this person loves me so much and I love them.
That’s true. And this love is a glimpse of the love that awaits me if I connect with the divine. There is a story in one of the Bhakti texts where a child is neglected by his father and insulted by his stepmother.
And he goes to his mother and his mother is powerless to help him. And she tells him that if you go to the divine, if you go to Krishna, he can offer you more love than what millions of mothers like me can offer. The idea is, her love for his child is real.
But she recognises that with all my love, I cannot help at this point. So she does not limit the child to her love alone. She uses her love for her child to direct the child towards Krishna, towards the divine.
So we can have multiple attachments, but if we see, we can have multiple relationships with different people and naturally there will be affection within those relationships. But if we see these relationships as we are getting a glimpse of the love which can come from the divine through these relationships, then the experience of fulfilment in those relationships can also inspire us to devote ourselves to the vertical relationship. What is the concept of afterlife in Advaita Vedanta? In the broad Indian tradition, you could call the Hindu tradition, the nature of reality is seen to be as oneness.
That we are all one. Now, the idea of oneness is universal. The details of how we are one, that is different.
So, in Advaita Vedanta, which is one school of thought, there it is said that Oneness means, like right now I am observing you. So, in this act, there are three things. There is the subject of consciousness, I am looking at you.
There is the object of consciousness. And there is the stream of consciousness. So, the subject, object and stream.
So, now oneness, in the Bhakti Yoga tradition, means that we, the other person and the stream of consciousness, all these are parts of the divine. So, we are all parts of the divine. That is the understanding which the Bhagavad Gita gives us.
Advaita Vedanta holds that the subject is not there, the object is not there, only the stream of consciousness is there. So, oneness is accepted by both. But the nature of oneness, that idea is different.
So, we could say there is an evolution in theism. Some people say there is no God. Some people say there are many Gods.
Some people say there is one God. And some people say there is only God. So, no God, many Gods, one God, only God.
So, only God, now what does it mean? The Bhakti Yoga tradition explains that we are all parts of the divine. So, within the divine, there is variety. So, whether within the oneness, there is variety or there is no variety.
That is the main difference. But everybody accepts there is oneness. If we consider our longing for love, which is so deep-rooted to us, if there is no subject and there is no object, then there is no possibility for love.
But if you understand the subject is eternal, the object is eternal. Then it opens the door for eternal love. Okay? Thank you.
You mentioned bacteria have souls. I was wondering when you die, how does our soul compare to the soul of our cells? And at what point does our soul re-enter a new body? Okay. So, at what point does the soul re-enter into a new body? It depends, as I said, on karma.
The soul… Can you change the slideshow? And the last two slides, I have hidden them. Can you show them? This can lead to a whole Pandora’s box of questions. But, see what happens is, just the last slide.
The second last. So, basically, this worldview also explains what are ghosts. So, when a soul leaves a body, the soul has to get a next body.
Now, the soul has to do some karma. It’s like when we… If we have an old dress which is torn and we want to buy a new dress. We have to get the money to buy a new dress.
Otherwise, we will have to live without a dress. So, like that, if the soul leaves one body and the soul is not yet entitled to get the next body, then the soul may live in a disembodied state. So, normally, what I said that that state is a state of transition.
It just lasts for a few moments or a few minutes or a few days till the soul goes to a new body. But, sometimes, the soul may stay in that body for a long time. And the soul may stay not in that body but in that state.
So, when the soul has a mind but no body, that is what is called as a ghost. A ghost is basically a disembodied being. There is no physical body.
And ghosts are… When we think about ghosts, either we don’t believe in them or we feel scared about them. But actually, the ghosts are themselves in a state of great distress. Why? Because, say, if there is a feast and everybody is enjoying food and suppose you have got a severe stomach upset and you can’t eat anything.
Seeing everybody else eating and not being able to eat is a state of misery. So, for the soul, in a ghost state, it’s like that. The soul may see people enjoying things.
The soul may see somebody eating a delicious dessert. But the soul has no physical tongue to eat the dessert. So, it’s a state of great distress.
So, especially, say, we are given a particular body to live in for a particular time. Say, suppose somebody is supposed to live for 60 years. And at the age of 20, they commit suicide.
Then, for the next 40 years, they are not meant to get a new body. Their next body would come after the age of 60. Thus, for 40 years, they may have to live as a ghost.
And in that state, they will be in a state of great distress. Having a lot of desires, but having no means to fulfil their desires. Go to the next slide.
So, sometimes, some such souls can enter into a body and possess a body. So, possession means what? In one body, at that time, there are two souls. So, one soul becomes dormant.
There are many well documented, scientifically documented cases also of people who suddenly behave differently. I know a person in Mumbai, in a city in India. And this lady, she was born in Maharashtra.
The local dialect there was Marathi. And once, she woke up one day and started speaking in a masculine voice. And started speaking Bengali, which is a language in another part of India, which she had never been to.
And there are many cases like this. So, what happens in such cases? The other person enters into the body. And that person temporarily takes over the body.
And that’s how, what we call as possession. Some people get possessed. And that possession may stay for some time.
And then, when the soul has gratified whatever desire it has, the soul will leave that body. So, normally, the transition from one body to another happens in a short time. It depends on which body the soul is going to go to.
If the soul is going to another human body, then the transition is relatively straightforward. If the soul is going to go to another non-human body, then the soul’s conception has to be changed. So that it can adapt to that body.
So, that takes some time. But if the soul is to stay in a disembodied state, then that may take some more time. So, that’s why, exactly, there is no predictable fixed time duration for the soul to go from one body to another body.
It varies from case to case. Can you hear what’s going on? They’re closing their books and stuff. Do this to me, too.
It’s our cue that we’re done. So, we are out of time. Do you have a few more minutes if students have one more question? Sure.
So, if you have some more questions, come on up. But otherwise, let’s show our appreciation. Where are you going? Did you even take a photo?