What happens to the koshas after death?
From Praveen
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Question from Praveen Prabhu.
What happens after the death to all the koshas? Where do they go? Like pranamaya and other koshas. Answer, koshas are objective levels of Krishna’s energy as well as subjective perceptions of human consciousness. To understand this objective and subjective aspect, we have to look at the concept of, say, nationhood.
Now there is an objective reality called a nation and a person belonging to that nation. At the same time, it is also a subjective perception. A dog living in India doesn’t think of itself as Indian.
Whereas a human being does. So, now we may ask what happens to the concept of nationhood after the person dies? What happens to nationhood? Well, both the concept as well as the objective aspect continue to exist. But they no longer remain relevant to that particular person.
Because that person may die and go to some other country or some other species. Similarly, we shouldn’t think of the koshas as physical units that physical layers that cover a particular soul. No.
They are levels of consciousness through which the soul passes during its spiritual evolution. So what happens to those levels of consciousness? They remain. And when a person dies, if that person has as Krishna tells in the Bhagavad Gita, depending on how that person has led life, that person will either evolve towards a higher level of consciousness or stay on wherever it is or go downwards.
So, it is subjective in the sense that the reality is perceived in that particular person’s consciousness. We may not specifically be aware that I am in Annamayikosh or I am in Pranamayikosh. But a particular kind of mentality is created just as this question is asking like what happens to the three modes after a person dies.
Now, the influence of the three modes on the subtle body and that continues to that subtle body and the influence continues to exist in the next species also. But the three modes are basically, they are pervasive everywhere. If a person leaves the mode of passion and goes into the mode of goodness, then that simply means the person has left one level of which continues to exist and goes into another mode which has also existed earlier.
But now that person has transferred from one mode to another. Similarly, with respect to the koshas, the koshas continue to exist and that person’s connection with that particular kosha will depend on the kind of consciousness that the person has cultivated during the lifetime. Thank you.