Reincarnation – what explains it and what it explains

[Sunday feast lecture at ISKCON, Detroit, USA]

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
I am grateful to be here amongst all of you.
Today, I will speak on the topic of reincarnation, what explains it and what it explains. So, reincarnation, what explains it? In the first part, I will talk about, there are things which have been observed by people all over the world, which call for, demand for some explanation. I will start from some universal facts to certain specific facts.
At a basic level, we all want to be happy. And we all make choices. Maybe I do this, I will become happy.
If I do that, I will become unhappy. So, now the question comes, whenever we choose, who or what is it that is choosing? Because if we consider ourselves simply to be creatures of matter, then matter itself exhibits no free will. If I take this phone and I drop it, I won’t drop it.
But if I were to drop it, it has no free will about whether it should fall down or not, it will fall down. So, Einstein himself recognised, he said that gravity explains the falling of fruits, but it doesn’t explain people’s falling in love. So, there is something which it can’t explain.
Now, if we were simply creatures of matter, then there should be no free will at all. Because matter simply acts according to impersonal laws, mechanical laws. And yet, all of us intuitively know that we have free will.
When somebody acts in a way that we feel is wrong, we ask, why did you do that? If that person simply said, no, actually, my neuronal programme told me to do that. If I come and slap someone, why did you do that? No, my brain programme told me to slap you. They will slap me back.
My brain programme told me to slap you. It doesn’t work. Einstein himself, he was one of the greatest scientists of the last century.
But he recognised this problem. If we take a scientific worldview beyond its limits, actually, and extend it to all of human behaviour, then we just become programmed machines. And that implies that the Nazis, who killed millions of people, they were just programmed by their brain to do that.
And they’re not responsible for that. So, the materialistic worldview cannot explain the very presence of free will, which is something which we all acknowledge in our day to day functioning. So, there is something more.
That is, all of us have a innate longing to love. Now, where does this longing come from? Not only do we have a longing to love, we have a longing to love forever. That is, most of the movies, most of the novels, they are about romance.
And most romance is about happily ever after. H-E-A. Now, if you consider the Bhagavad Gita, it tells us the exact opposite.
So, we are happily ever after, but the Bhagavad Gita says this world is temporary. And we observe it is temporary. So, if everything around us is temporary, which it is, even the biggest mountains, they are temporary.
If everything around us is temporary, where does our desire for the eternal come from? If we went to a house where everything was shabby, everything was cheap, and suddenly we found a gold bracelet over there. You would ask, where did this gold bracelet come from? It’s out of place over there. So, like that, if everything around us is temporary, and we are simply products of our circumstances, then where would a desire to live forever come from? There’s nothing eternal, there’s nothing in our experience that lasts forever.
Why would we get a desire to last forever, to love forever? It doesn’t come from our external material circumstances. It comes from our inner core. And that core is the soul.
So, what it explains, if we postulate reincarnation, which I’ll come to later. We can’t explain with a materialistic vision the existence of free will. We can’t explain with it our longing to love and to live forever.
And moving to specific cases, there are many cases of past life memories, where children from all over the world have talked about, suddenly one day they tell, mummy, mummy, I want to go to my other mummy. And the parents get psyched out, what is going on? The normal attitude of people towards, especially in the western world, towards past life memories is of scepticism. And reasonably so, because many times such cases get sensationalised.
So, there are some people who may want fame and that’s why they claim, there are almost like 100 people who have claimed that they were Marilyn Monroe reincarnated. So, people want to gain some traction by that. But serious researchers have put aside such cases of celebrity reincarnation claims.
And they have focused on cases where there is strong evidence. Now, the evidence for past life memories falls in four distinct categories. First is recollections.
So, children suddenly remember. And researchers have zeroed in on children because the possibility of children to do frauds is much lesser. We’ll come to the possibility of fraud a little later.
But first is recollection. So, the typical statement of a child would be, I was big then, I am small now. The inverse of the normal, I was big then, what do you mean? And they will tell specific names, oh, I lived here, I was a child of these parents, I was this, like this, like that.
So, for example, in Turkey, there was a young man named Nesip, Nesip Uludazkiran, he was born in Adana. And from the age of five, he started saying that he, a five-year-old boy, he would tell his mother and sister that I am married. And my wife is more beautiful than all of you.
And then he would say that I have children. And his parents were thinking he was just hallucinating, because in this unusual case, he said my name is Nesip. So, then when he kept speaking this, he told that my name is Nesip Uludazkiran.
So, in this life and previous life, his first name was the same, that’s why his parents couldn’t figure it out. And because in many religions all over the world today, reincarnation is not accepted as a mainstream belief. In Buddhism and Hinduism it is.
In Christianity, Judaism, Islam, there are references to it. It is overall compatible. But in the mainstream world, it is not accepted.
So, parents usually neglect such statements. So, he said, I lived in a place called Mersin, which is about six hours away. And he said, I want to go there.
Now, for five to six years, his parents kept neglecting. Every day he would say, I want to go there, I want to go there. But his parents kept neglecting it.
And finally, his mother took him to his father’s place, which was a small village near Mersin. And there his grandfather had got remarried. And his new wife was from Mersin.
They had never met. So, Nesip had never met his new grandmother. But as soon as he met her, he recognised her.
He says, you are so and so. And he started describing. And she also remembers, there was a person named Nesip Budak.
And he said that he had lived there and he had died. So, the details which Nesip gave, they match that. So, the first was recollections.
And many times these recollections turn out to be accurate. And the second is recognitions. So, when the child is taken to the previous place, often when the child is taken to the previous city, the child has never been at that place.
But the child just himself or herself leads the parents, you know, take this, take this tonga, take this vehicle, go left, go right, straight and go to the place where they live. And not only they recognise places, they recognise people, they recognise marks, they tell what is there in this cupboard, what is there in this house, what is there in this place. So, when Nesip was taken to Mersin, his grandfather took him there.
And there when he went, he straight went to the house of Nesip Budak. And his widow was staying there. So, there was indeed a woman who had a wife, who had been the wife of a man named Nesip Budak.
And he not only recognised her, he actually ran and embraced Nesip’s children. Actually, those children were older than him. But he was fondling them and playing with their hair as if he were like a father figure for them.
So, there were recognitions. He recognised not only the widow, he recognised several other relatives, he recognised several other friends. And this is the second level.
Recognitions take this case beyond just at the hazy level of memory to tangible observations. And there are many cases in which the past life researchers, they intervene before. That means, before this person and the previous life’s person, family, they meet.
And then they have either tape recorded or video recorded the meeting. So, again it becomes much more objective. Thirdly, there are behaviours.
Behaviours which replicate the behaviours from the previous life. Like I said, Nesip, he was very affectionate towards his children. Although they were older than him in this life.
And then his widow, she had remarried. And Nesip saw his previous wife’s photo with her new husband. He was so angry, he took her photo and tried to rip it apart.
She said, what are you doing? He grabbed it from his hand. And he exhibited extreme jealousy towards her husband. Now, Nesip had been a very short-tempered person.
And he used to drink a lot. So, once in a drunken state, he had quarrel with his wife. And he had, he used to have a knife with him.
He had slashed the knife at her with malevolent intent. She had moved away, but he had scarred her on the thigh. So, then Dr. Jan Stevenson, who did this research, he had a female assistant with her.
Female assistant went to another room. And then, at the exact spot on her thigh, where Nesip had claimed, he found that his widow had a mark over there, a mark of blood, mark of a knife wound, a scar. And not only that, so this is recollections and then there are behaviours.
I will come to this point of behaviours a bit more later. But more importantly, taking this whole from the realm of some event that happened to tangible, observable facts is the last thing, that is birthmarks and birth defects. So, many times, say, if a person dies in a fatal, because of some fatal injury, then the point at which, say, if a person dies, so there was a boy named Titu, who had two birthmarks on his two sides of his head, one smaller, one bigger.
And he claimed that he was a man named Suresh Verma, who had been shot dead point blank. And when the postmortem had been done, they found that the exact location of the fatal wounds from the previous life were correlated with the location of the birthmarks from this life, birthmarks or birth defects. Now, Stevenson decided to find out, Ian Stevenson is a pioneer in past life memory research.
He decided to find out what, how precise were these correlations. So, he divided the human body into 128 XY coordinates. And then he correlated, what is the location of the previous life’s fatal wound and this life’s birthmark or birth defect.
And he found that there is a precise correlation. And Nassif’s case is outstanding, because Nassif had not one, not two, not three, but six correlating birthmarks. So, he had been born with six birthmarks and then he would tell about his past life memory.
He would say that I had been stabbed and he would point to the marks on his body, where he had been stabbed. So, what had happened was Nassif Budak had got into a, had taunted and teased an acquaintance. And he was drunk at that time.
His acquaintance was also, that acquaintance was also drunk. And he started fighting and his friend had stabbed him, that acquaintance had stabbed him. And he had been rushed to a hospital, but next morning he had died.
So, the six wounds that he had got because of the multiple stabs, the location of those six wounds correlated exactly with the birthmarks on Nassif, Nassif in this life, Nassif Budak’s body, Nassif Ulludh’s body. So, now, if we consider the mathematical probability perspective, the probability of six birthmarks correlating is 1 divided by 128 raised to the power of 6. It is an astronomically low probability. And more importantly, there are no normal explanations for these birthmarks.
Because scientists have found that birthmarks or birth defects, they come primarily because of three causes. One is genetic. So, many members in a family have some birthmark or birth defect.
The second is if during pregnancy, the mother, she has some problem because of which a scar comes in the body of the infant. Or if she has health issues, or if she takes some substances, say alcohol or smoke, she smokes or drink or something like that. Now, in these cases, none of these factors apply.
So, there is no normal explanation for these birthmarks and birth defects. So, it is 1, 2, 3, 4 recollections, recognitions, behaviours, and birthmarks and birth defects. It is an increasingly higher and higher level of evidence.
And now the, so what could be the explanation for this, normal explanation? Could say maybe the children just guessed it and got it right. Or maybe the children had heard about it somewhere and they spoke it. But how do children exhibit the appropriate emotions? And most of these cases are often found in rural areas where children have very limited access to knowledge.
And further, when it is well documented, there is no contact, no possible means of contact between this child and that child. Even if we say somehow there is a contact. And even if somehow the children were such expert actors that they could act out the emotions also.
Now, how could anybody create birthmarks and birth defects? They cannot be artificially created. They are there from birth. And the birth certificate, the birth documents mark them.
So sometimes people say, no, no, somehow the parents must have orchestrated a fraud. Or maybe the investigators orchestrated a fraud. So now the problem with this hypothesis is that actually many of the parents are not interested in orchestrating a fraud.
Because the parents are from Christian or Muslim backgrounds. They don’t believe in reincarnation. So they actually would, they would rather expose a fraud than orchestrate a fraud.
Even among Hindus, the parents are not interested in proving reincarnation. Because for them, in their community, everybody believes it. So there is no need to prove it.
But rather there is a disincentive because, especially in rural India, there is a belief that if a child is remembering a past life, then that indicates that the soul has not integrated well into this body. And that indicates, this is the belief, that the soul is going to leave this body very soon. So now there is no statistical correlation for this idea that children who remember their past lives die young.
But still this is a widespread belief. And that’s why many parents actually discourage their children from talking about past lives. It’s only when the children repeatedly insist that the parents start taking it seriously.
Children sometimes say, if you don’t take me there, I’ll go alone over there. Then the parents become a little alarmed. And there was a case of one boy who, when he became two, he told his parents.
They were from a lower caste family. And he told his parents, I’m a Brahmin. And I will not eat the food cooked by you.
Actually, for the next five years, his father had to arrange for a Brahmin to cook food, all three meals every day and get the food to his house. So now what parents would ever wanted to orchestrate a fraud in which the son doesn’t eat food cooked in their own house? And he said, I will starve but I will not eat the food cooked by you. So literally his parents were forced to do that.
So there are many cases in which the children exhibit behaviour which is actually embarrassing for the parents. And why would parents ever do a fraud in which the children, in which they themselves would be embarrassed? So this kind of evidence, the only reasonable explanation is, if you consider the person who lived and died earlier as one circle, the person whose child is living now as another circle, there is no intersection point materially. The only logical intersection point is that there is a soul.
The soul lived in that body and the soul has moved on to this body. And that indicates reincarnation. The soul comes back in a new body.
So this is the first part, reincarnation and what it explains. It explains the existence of free will, it explains the existence of our longing for love. So because the soul is eternal, the soul longs for eternal love.
And further it explains the past life memories. These are the things which are explained by reincarnation. But further we can take the other part.
So, you know, the reincarnation centred worldview can explain something which has puzzled philosophers and theologians throughout history. That is called as the problem of evil. The problem of evil is why do bad things happen to good people? Taking the specific aspect of it.
Now, why do different people have different starting points in their life? Suppose we went to watch a cricket match or maybe in America baseball match, whichever it is. So now say we start, we go and watch and we find that the one team has a score of 0 and another team has a starting score of 200. Hey, what is going on? Why is one team having such a big lead in advance? There are two possibilities.
One is that the scoreboard has conked off. And it’s just operating by chance. The other is, I’ll come to the other one.
So similarly, you know, we see in life different people have different starting points. Some people are born wealthy. Some people are born poor.
Some people are born with great looks. Some people are born with mediocre looks. Some people are born with phenomenal memories.
Some people are born with phenomenally poor memories. So now why this difference? One explanation could be it’s all by chance. Life is like a cosmic lottery.
And some people are winners. Some people are unlucky. If you are unlucky, bad luck.
What can you do? If we see, this idea of everything happening by chance is a counterintuitive and disempowering ideology. Counterintuitive because we see everything in life, we assume a cause-effect correlation. Say, tomorrow your child comes back with poor grades from school.
Ask, why? You know, why I’ve got poor grades? Child says, by chance. What do you mean by chance? We always… See, chance is never a cause. Chance is simply an admission of absence of knowledge of the cause.
So basically, chance is also disempowering. That means, you know, anytime anything can go wrong. And it’s just irrational.
It’s actually, the chance explanation is unscientific. Science functions on the presumption of cause and effect. Last year I was invited to Cambridge University to give a talk on science and spirituality.
So while returning, I passed by that tree where Newton is said to have seen the fruit falling. Now when Newton saw the fruit falling, if a monkey had been sitting there instead of Newton, the monkey would just have eaten the fruit and gone on its way. Newton asked, what made this fruit fall? And the reason for it is, he came up with the idea of gravity.
But the very question, what made this fruit fall, has an assumption in it, that things don’t happen by chance. Things have causes. So the idea is, science itself functions based on the assumption of cause and effect.
The chance explanation is very unsatisfactory. The other explanation, say if one team is starting with a score of 200, the other team is starting with 0, the other explanation could be that the scorekeeper is biassed. The scorekeeper has decided to give more score to the team so that the team can win.
So like that, the other explanation could be that God favours some people. God has made some people wealthy, God has made some people poor. God has made some people good looking, God has made some people not so good looking.
Now, this actually is even more disturbing. Because if we are to devote ourselves to God, and that God is partial, and that God is just arbitrarily partial, then how can we devote ourselves to a God like that? We say, no, no, no, actually God’s justice is different from ours. Yes, God’s justice is different, but it should be different in the sense of being better than ours.
Not more irrational than ours. Say, no, actually the problems of life are tests coming from God. Yes, it’s fine.
Their tests, it’s fine. But the problem is not why there are tests. The problem is why there are different tests for different people.
If a teacher conducted a course, after that she had an exam for the students. And each student had a different question paper. Some people had easy papers and some people had difficult papers.
The question would be not why there is an exam, why there are different exams for different students. So, like that we all are tested differently. Why? So, if we have only these two alternatives, that everything happens, that we get different starting points by chance, or we get different starting points by God’s fiat, by God’s arbitrary will, actually neither are satisfactory, but many people would choose the first over the second.
Why? Because to devote oneself to a capricious God is extremely difficult. And that is one of the reasons why atheism is becoming more and more widespread. Because atheism itself does not offer satisfactory explanations.
However, there is a third alternative. Why is one team having a score of 0 and the other team having a score of 200? Because we have come in the middle of the match, not at the start of the match. Both the teams have gone through an innings before.
And during their previous innings, one team has got a lead. So, if we consider that we all have gone through many lifetimes in the past, and we have done some karma, we have done some actions by which all of us have got a karmic score. So, some people, by their karmic score, their score is more positive.
Some people’s karmic score is less positive. And therefore, the starting point that we have, they are determined by the karmic scores we have got from our own previous lives. This is the reincarnation-centred world.
It holds that we are on a multi-life progression. And this life is simply one innings in a multi-life match. And this match is ultimately not against anyone.
This match is against our own lower self. We are all on a multi-life journey of spiritual evolution. And to the extent we evolve, to the extent we score more and more, and we move towards winning, and our winning does not require anyone else being defeated.
Life is not a zero-sum game. Because what does it mean to win in this? This reincarnation-centred worldview, it transforms the view of the world, the view of the universe, from a jungle to a university. The materialistic worldview simply assumes that this world is like a jungle.
Survival of the fittest. Of course, Prabhupada had a one-sentence counter of this idea. He says survival of the fittest.
But actually, even the fittest don’t survive. Ultimately, nobody survives in this world. At the material level.
However, the important point is that survival of the fittest is the law of the jungle. Might is right. And that worldview puts everyone in competition with everyone else.
But the spiritual worldview holds that this world is like a university. And we all have to learn the lesson of love. We all are meant to grow in love.
We are going to learn to love more and more selflessly and learn to direct our love from temporary objects in this world to the eternal object. The source of this world. It is God.
This God is known by different names and different traditions. Ultimately, there is one supreme being. And to the extent we learn to love that absolute truth, to love that source of all existence, to that extent we evolve.
And this is a journey which we are going over many lifetimes. And those who are better off than us, they are not our competitors. If we see the world as a university where everyone is meant to learn the lesson of love, then it implies that those who are better situated than us, it’s just like they are in a university at a more higher standard than us.
Somebody is in kindergarten. Somebody is in high school. Somebody is doing post-doc.
So those who are doing post-doc, they have also gone to the kindergarten stage. And those who are in the kindergarten stage, they will also come to the level of post-doc. So the post-doc student doesn’t have to push down the kindergarten student in order to complete one’s degree.
The whole mood is a reincarnation-centred world. Do you understand? We are all evolving. We are all in the same journey.
The mood can change from grabbing to sharing. Because we all have to learn the same lessons. And our success, we may achieve a lot in this world.
But in the process of achieving a lot in this world, if our love is consumed by the objects of this world, then we come back again. We don’t evolve, we devolve. We stay caught in the temporary and ultimately we suffer.
Why? Because whatever we love in this temporary, it brings frustration. So now, when we learn to love the eternal, it brings an entirely different dimension to our life. Whatever happens in our lives, we may all go through different difficulties at different times.
And sometimes some difficulties are so crippling that we just completely feel overwhelmed. Why is this happening? What can I do? I’m just so helpless. This feeling comes when we have a materialistic definition of success.
Sometimes materially, by factors beyond our control. Our wealth may go away, our health may go away, our relations may fall apart, our social position may crumble. These things are not in our control.
They can come, they can go. And if we have a materialistic worldview, then we identify with those things and we get devastated by such losses. But when we have a spiritual worldview, we understand that all these things, they’re important.
But their importance ultimately is in serving as means for helping me to love the eternal. So sometimes we have resources in the world and those resources we use for serving the Lord. That God is known by different names in different traditions.
In the Vedic tradition, the Bhagavad Gita, He is known by the name Krishna. Krishna means the one who is all-attractive. So whatever is attractive in this world, it all is present in its fullest in Krishna.
So when we have the things of this world, we use them to serve and to learn to love God. When we don’t have those things, still we can continue to love God. Because for loving Him, what we need ultimately is just the intention to love.
It can be expressed through a lot, it can be expressed through little. So that way, the spiritual worldview frees us from dependence on material things for our sense of self-worth. All of us need some sense of self-worth.
Who am I? In this big world, do I count? How do I count? How does my existence matter? We often desire to count. That makes us seek things in this world. Maybe if I have more wealth, maybe I have more power, more position, then I will count.
But even if we have more wealth, more power, more position, people are attracted to us. But they are not attracted to us actually. They are attracted to those things which we have.
And we lose them, people will no longer be attracted. So the things in this world, they don’t really satisfy our longing to be of some value. That happens when we understand that God, Krishna, He always loves us.
When nothing is left, Krishna is still left. He is there in our heart, always with us. The reincarnation-centred worldview, it is not just a metaphysically entertaining idea or a scientifically entertaining concept.
It is actually profoundly life-transforming. Because ultimately, it speaks the language of the heart. The language of love.
This whole journey which goes on many, many lifetimes, ultimately is meant to culminate in directing our love towards the eternal, all-attractive object of love. So we are going through various lifetimes, choosing various objects for loving. And through it all, we are seeking happiness.
Last year, I was in Melbourne. After a class, one person asked, if God wants us to do the right things, then why are there so many wrong options and so few right options? So I explained, that is the way it always is in any multiple-choice exam. If there are five multiple choices, four are wrong, one is right.
Now, if passing in that multiple-choice exam was simply a matter of chance, then all students would fail. Because the chance of getting a right answer is only 20%. And probably we need 40% at least to pass.
So, now, the passing in the exam is not dependent on chance. It is dependent on educated choice. The teacher has taught the subject.
And to the extent the student has internalised the subject, to that extent, the student can naturally make the right choice. So the purpose of examination, in which there are multiple wrong choices, is not to free the student. Because success or failure is not a matter of probability.
It is a matter of educated choice. Similarly, in this world, there are many objects that may attract us. And some of them attract us to good things, many of them may attract us to not so good things.
But the point of this all is that we are all meant to make educated choices. So, the scriptural wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita and similar wisdom traditions of the world, they help, they provide us the necessary education. The world has two purposes, the very existence of the world.
One is experimentation and the other is three-direction. We are all experimenting in this world. Maybe this will make me happy.
Maybe that will make me happy. Maybe that will make me happy. And we keep trying.
Maybe try this, try that, try that. If you look at our own life history, our whole life history is largely our experiments in search of our happiness. I tried doing this, I tried doing that, I tried doing that.
And some experiments are more successful than others. Some such experiments are very disappointing. But overall, if we see, none of our attempts for happiness, they live up to the promise.
Material happiness is at best an anticlimax. We get to the top and just when we think, now I’m going to be happy, then we find it’s a short-lived, it’s over. It’s over.
Oscar Wilde, he said that fashion is a form of ugliness, so intolerable that we have to change it every six months. Why? Normally fashion is considered beautiful. But what happens, the same thing which is beautiful today, which is attractive today, which is cool today, after some time it becomes old-fashioned.
And for a person who prides themselves in their taste in fashion, there is no insult greater than old-fashioned. So it becomes ugly, intolerably ugly. I have to change it.
So what the Bhagavad Gita says is, that whatever is attractive in this world, those attractive things manifest a spark of God’s all-attractiveness. So everything attractive, whether it is fashion, whether it is wealth, whether it is power, whether it is an attractive partner, whether it is this or that, all these things manifest a spark of Krishna’s all-attractiveness. The spark gives some pleasure, gives some warmth, some light, but it is limited.
So the multiple options that life allures us with, they are like sparks. But there is Krishna who is the whole. Now all that attracts our heart that is present only in Krishna.
And by understanding the philosophies of the Bhagavad Gita, by understanding the worldview centred on the incarnation, we learn to choose the option of Krishna. Now choosing the option of Krishna doesn’t mean rejecting the things of this world. It simply means connecting the things of this world in a mood of service to Krishna.
So spiritual evolution also involves material contribution. It is God who has given us certain talents and we are meant to use those talents in a mood of service. What we are is God’s gift to us.
What we become is our gift to God. What we are is God’s gift to us. In a materialistic world we always think, oh they are better than me, they are better than me, they are better than me.
But in a spiritual worldview we understand that whatever I am, I am meant to love and serve God and for that purpose I am what I am meant to be. Now if God had wanted me to be someone else, he would have made someone else. God has made me me, God has made you you.
We are what we need to be for our ongoing spiritual evolution. So when we learn to put God first in a mood of service, in everything else we can harmonise accordingly. And thus by learning to love God, we get spiritual satisfaction internally and we make material contribution externally.
And thus we progress towards fulfilment, towards success, towards lasting love and lasting happiness. We end the cycle of reincarnation when we learn to love God and we attain his abode. So I’ll summarise.
I spoke about reincarnation, what explains it and what it explains. So I discussed first various phenomena which are unexplained in a materialistic, a non-materialistic worldview. The very existence of free will, the very existence of a longing to love and love forever.
These are not explained. Further, the specific cases of past life memories in which there are multiple levels of evidences. These are recollections, recognitions, behaviours and birthmarks and birth defects.
I discussed the case of Nessir Kundalini Kiran and I discussed the case of an elaborate six correlating birthmarks. And then also the fraud explanation doesn’t work because parents don’t want to have their children believe talking about past life memories either because they don’t believe in reincarnation or because they believe that the child who talks about past life will die soon. So there is no reason for a fraud in many cases.
There is strong scientific evidence and logical inference which points to an eternal core that is non-material. Now, further reincarnation and worldview explains the problem of evil, specifically the problem of why different people have different starting points. So a match, if one team has starting score of 0 and another of 200, one explanation could be, it is just the scoreboard is working by chance.
The other is the scorekeeper is biassed. Like that we can say that we all, whatever we get is by chance. But that is counterintuitive.
It is unscientific. Science is based on the principle of cause and effect and it is disempowering because we just become like victims of a cosmic lottery game. And to say that God has ordained all these differences that implies that God is arbitrarily biassed and becomes extremely difficult to devote oneself to such a God.
But there could be a third alternative that this is the second innings of a match. We have not come to the start, we are in the middle of a match. So we have acquired certain karmic scores from our past lives.
They have determined our starting point in this life. And this reconciles the goodness of God with the principle of cause and effect in this world. And the reincarnation centred worldview, it tells that the purpose of life is to learn the lesson of love.
To learn to love the eternal and find eternal fulfilment there. This redefines our vision of the world from a jungle where we are competing with others to get scarce material resources to a university where we all are trying to learn the same lessons. And different people who are in different positions, they are just like different students in different levels in a university.
And not only does this bring a cooperative spirit, among people as a group, but individually the reincarnation centred worldview is very empowering. Because material things can be taken away from us anytime. And when they are taken away, if our sense of self-worth is coming from material things, we will be shattered.
But if we understand that the purpose of everything is ultimately to love God and to find satisfaction, lasting satisfaction therein. When we have material things, we will use them for that service. When we don’t have them, still we will serve with whatever we have.
Just the intention of our heart is also enough for our spiritual growth. I discussed about how life has two purposes, experimentation and redirection. So it’s like a multiple choice exam.
There are many different options. They are all ways in which we are trying to find happiness by loving various things in this world. So the attractive things which attract us, they manifest a spark of God’s all attractiveness.
When we learn to not be attracted towards the spark, but towards the whole, we are making the right choice. And every such right choice helps us to grow in, grow in our love. And when we have to choose Krishna, that doesn’t mean we have to reject the world.
We use whatever we have in this world in His service. What we are is God’s gift to us. What we become is our gift to God.
When we have this mood of loving service, then through our connection with Krishna, through our loving intention, we get spiritual satisfaction. And through using our resources, we make a material contribution. And thus we get satisfaction even in this life.
And as we keep consistently choosing to love Krishna, by practising Bhakti Yoga, when we love God more than this world, then God takes us out of this world to His eternal abode for a life of everlasting happiness. Thank you very much. Do we have time for questions? Yes.
Okay. Okay. Okay, so question is, why do we remember things from our previous life? And where is the memory stored? Yeah.
Actually, the, our existence is three dimensional. Body, mind and soul. Gross body, subtle body and soul.
So when we go from one body to another body, it is we go from the gross body to the next gross body. The subtle body also goes. So it is not just the soul.
The soul along with the mind goes. Because the mind is filled with desires. And those desires the soul is identifying with.
Those desires the soul is to fulfil. And normally speaking, the transition from one body to another is so traumatic, is so disorienting that most of our memories are wiped off. However, just as in day-to-day observation, we see that different people have different capacities of memory.
So some people can remember what they did when they were five years old. Some people can’t remember what they did five minutes ago. So we all have different memory capacities.
Now why is that? That’s just because of past karma. So like that, there is variety in memory capacity based on past karma. So some people by a peculiar brain blend of karma can remember their past lives.
Now remembering a past life, for us from a third-person perspective, might seem exciting. Who was I in the past life? But actually for that person, it can be quite disorienting. Who am I? Am I this person? Am I that person? So it can be disorienting.
So by some peculiar karma, sometimes the soul remembers the past life. And one thing that happens is especially many memories of past life are when there is sudden death. When the death is sudden, at that time the soul is not able to process the event of death because it happens so abruptly.
And then because that event is not processed well, so in a sense the soul moves to the next body but its thoughts, its desires, its ideas still remain connected to the previous body. And that’s why the soul has memories of its past life. And that is also why because the soul has that, Oh I was shot! I was shot! And a bullet went from here and came out here.
That impression is there in the head. And it is that impression, not in the head, in the subtle body, in the mind, that is there, that impression causes the birthmark or the birth defect. So the soul becomes scarred, not physically but mentally.
And that mental scar comes out as a physical mark. So the memories, where are they stored? They are stored in the brain as well as in the mind. That means that the activities that we do, each activity that we do, certain neuronal connections are formed.
Activity that we do again and again, those brain cell connections become tighter, stronger. That’s how the brain memories are stored. But they are not the only place where the memories are stored.
Our memories are also stored somewhere else. That is the mind. Because now scientists have found that even the brain cells are regenerated.
That means not only the cells die, but cells are reborn also. So the brain cells also get replaced periodically. So if our memory was stored only in the brain, then say somebody gave me a chit, time is over, end the class now.
Somebody gives me a chit like that. And suppose we remove all the molecules from the chit, one by one by one. And we find all the molecules are replaced and still the message is there.
How is that possible? So all the brain cells are changed, but still our memories remain. That means our memories are not just stored in the brain, but they are stored in the mind. And from the mind they are represented in the brain and then from there they are memorised.
Did I answer your question? Thank you. Do you have any other questions? Yes, please. I do.
Is this possible for the soul to be regenerated as a part of the body? Like the soul can… Okay. Okay. Is it? Can the soul remember its eternal position? It’s not so much a remembrance, it’s more of a realisation.
So remembrance, when we talk about remembering something, is something which was there in the past and now we have forgotten it. Whereas when you talk about realisation, it is that which is the reality, I understand it to be reality. So as far as our eternal identity is concerned, that’s a realisation that will come by the practise of bhakti.
So the more we keep practising bhakti yoga, what we are doing is we are remembering Krishna. So our situation is like, say there is a person who is… a very wealthy billionaire’s child. But they met with an accident, fallen from a cliff or something, banged their head, lost their memory.
Then they are trying to remember, they can’t remember. Then what is one of the ways to cure amnesia is expose them to stimuli from their past. Do you remember this pen? Do you remember this watch? Do you remember this car? Do you remember this? Do you remember that? Just by exposing them, yeah, I remember something.
I remember something. So like that, by exposing to stimuli from one’s previous life, the memory gets awakened. The whole process of bhakti yoga is exposing ourselves to the stimuli centre of Krishna.
In our eternal position, Krishna is the closest of centres. So the deities, the holy name, Krishna’s message in the Bhagavad Gita, the Bhagavatam, pictures about Krishna, all these are stimuli that will gradually remove our spiritual amnesia. And as the spiritual amnesia goes off, then our awareness of who we are will naturally awaken.
So that process is gradual. But the realisation is subtle. It’s like every morning, if you go out for a morning walk or we do meditation early morning before the sun rises.
Now it’s dark. Now it’s dark. Now it is dark.
Hey! The sun has risen. It’s daytime. Actually the sunrise is happening every day.
So every moment the sun was rising, rising, rising. But our realisation is at one particular moment. It’s daytime.
So like that, every day that we practise bhakti yoga, every day that we chant the holy names, every day that we remember Krishna, the sun of spiritual awareness is rising in our heart. Rising, rising, rising. And one day we’ll realise, this is who I am.
That will come as a realisation as a gradual practise of bhakti yoga. Okay? Thank you. Any other questions? Yes.
What would you say is the oldest expected ideal of someone who feels they’re going to be prepared for incarnation, for instance, in this country that there’s a lot of young people who feel they’re in the wrong body shape, can’t stand it, and they have to be a male to female. Would that be in terms of past life, future life? Okay. Okay, yeah.
So sometimes some people feel as if they are in the wrong body. As if they try to change their body, they become transgender. 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. Shri Prabhupada in a lecture to hippies, in the first or second lecture he says, you know all of you hippies, you are not very much appreciated in America. Because they consider you a frustrated being.
He says, but I appreciate you. He says, human life is meant to be frustrated. He says, only when you are frustrated with life will you enquire about spiritual life.
Athato Brahma Jignasa. So this is Prabhupada’s brilliance. But nobody translated Athato Brahma Jignasa as 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 civilisation 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 will be better over here. I move here, I move here. And now sometimes some material change may make things better.
But ultimately no material change provides lasting happiness. If I have fallen in the ocean and I am in a stormy part of the ocean and you go, oh that part of the ocean looks so peaceful. I just want to go there.
I 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 are offered 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.
And 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 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 assert 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. 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’s best to raise our consciousness upwards spiritually. And by practising 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. 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 judgement is passed in moral terms.
But if we talk in terms of what is really progress. This progress is not going to power the lasting happiness. This vertical progress, raising one’s consciousness above one’s body level to one’s 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. So I believe many people do have many questions including myself.
If Prabhupada agrees we will have him set up a chair and table outside and then we can spend as much time as we can to go out.