REINCARNATION

From ancient mystic scriptures to the smutty tabloid pages in the drugstore check-out line, you hear the word a lot these days – “ reincarnation.” What is it anyway?

Simple: after you die, you get born again in a different body.

This can sound strange if you weren't raised to believe in past lives. But if you give it an unbiased look, you’ll see the logic of it.

You used to have a tiny infant’s body, now you have a mature body, and someday you’ll have an old body. Somehow, your body has been imperceptibly changing with time. So from here it’s not such a gigantic leap to understanding reincarnation and how it works. Just as we change bodies throughout life, we also change bodies at the time of death.

Of course, changing your body after death is a bit more drastic, but it’s the same basic principle.

How it Works

You’d be surprised how many people believe in this kind of thing. But few have a clue to the details of how reincarnation works. The ancient knowledge of the Vedas however, explains the subject exhaustively. Here, I’ll give you a summary of the essentials.

First of all, we’re not simply a self (soul) in a one body. We’re a self in two bodies: a physical body and a mental body.

The physical - that familiar thing made out of flesh and blood - is formed of three subtle elements known as manah (mind), buddhi (intelligence), and ahankara (false ego, or false identity).

At death the mental body and the self leave the dead physical body. The mentality carries the self from one physical body to the next to pursue the unfulfilled hopes and desires of the mind, intelligence, and false ego.

You migh ask: If I really had past lives, shouldn't I remember them?

I have serious trouble remembering everything that happened in my life a few months back (do you remember what you have for dinner six weeks ago on Tuesday night). Five years back things become a dim haze. Memories of my early childhood are practically nil. Infancy is totally forgotten. And my birth is entirely unknown. Is it really such a surprise that I don’t remember previous lives?

Purpose of Reincarnation

All right, you say. It could be possible. But what’s the purpose of the whole thing? You get born, you die, you get born again, you die again. What’s the point?

It does sound stupid to get born and die over and over again. But sometimes desires and dreams overthrow our better judgment, and we do dumb things. That’s basically how we got involved in this whole cycle of birth and death to begin with.

In other words, we are in this world because we chose to be here. The Buddha taught that as long as you want things of this world, you come back again to this world.

Desires and dreams impel us to build our hopeful sand castles of material happiness, which are smashed flat again and again by deathly waves in the ocean of time.

The whole idea of self-realization is to stop reincarnation, to stop taking off and putting on new bodies, to halt the endless parade of masks marching before the forgotten face of the soul.

In other words, we, the soul, don't belong here. There is something better for us beyond this world (that's why every spiritual tradition talks of heaven, nirvana, liberation, paradise, a spiritual world, etc.)

The frustration of being born and dying again and again is to give us the hint that the fulfillment we seek can only be found by waking up our long-dormant perpetual identity, the true self, who lives outside the avenues of time, beyond the borders of birth and death.

Karma

Two children are born at the same time on the same day. One is born into a prosperous loving family, and the other is born to a poverty stricken women abandoned by her mate.

We naturally wonder why this happens. If God exists, why is He seemingly so unkind to allow this to happen? Or is the universe awarding and punishing us for past actions?

Sacred texts of India tells us this happens because of the law of karma, a natural law of action and reaction. As Newton pointed out, "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." And as we commonly say, "What goes around, comes around."

God is not directly rewarding or punishing us; we reward and punish ourselves by what we do. Although we may be good in this life, we may have bad karmic debts from the past (or visa versa). This explains why good or bad things sometimes happen to people who don't seem to deserve them.

We are all responsible for our own karma. When we say "He had it coming to him," when a person gets a reaction for doing the wrong thing, we are acknowledging the law of karma.

If something is meant to happen karmically, there is often little you can do to prevent it. And if something is not meant to happen karmically, there is often little you can do to make it happen. It doesn't mean we don't act, but it means we understand that our karma is a significant factor in achieving goals. If it wasn't, everyone trying to be fabulously rich, famous and powerful would achieve these goals simply by doing the same things the rich and famous did to become successful.

Animals don't create new karma; they only live out the karma they created as human beings. Only human beings create karma because we are the only species that has sufficient free will to make right or wrong choices. (Animal's freedom of choice is so minute that nature doesn't hold them accountable for their actions).

You ask: OK, I suffer or enjoy because of what I did in the past. And that’s supposed to teach me lessons that will hopefully move me towards self-realization. But what good is it for me to be punished or rewarded for something in a past life that I don’t even remember doing? How is that supposed to teach me a lesson?

If something bad happens, we are meant to understand it's because we did something to deserve it. Just as when you get a stomach ache, you consider what caused it, when you suffer you are meant to consider what you did wrong. This is how you grow. Your karma is meant to help you grow.

God did not create our suffering, we did. If you burn your hand in fire, it's your fault, not God's fault. He is helping us come closer to Him and ourselves by showing us that when we act improperly, we'll never be happy.

We all learn through hardships. Overcoming obstacles is what makes us stronger. We need these challenges to grow. As long as we need more lessons, we will be challenged by life to come to a higher platform.

So when life is difficult, rather than ask, “Why me,” ask “what am I supposed to learn?” Karma is God's language. Through your karma God is teaching you.

Lessons learned in previous lives become the wisdom with which we live our present lives. Sometimes we see a person much wiser than his years and we say, "She's an old soul." Actually, all souls are eternal, but she is just learning faster."

This Vedas compare this world to a jail. Ultimately, we’re all on death row, and in the meantime there’s plenty both good and bad stuff that happens to us. If we’re smart enough to ask “Why isn't everything here perfect?” and look for the answer in the right place - the ancient books of wisdom -we’ll understand that it’s because we messed up in our last life. Instead of working towards self-realization, following the rules so we could stop reincarnation, we did whatever we wanted, impelled by the desires of t body and mind. And so we wound up with another material body in this prison house of the material world.

The ultimate goal of spiritual teachings like the Vedas is to help us become free and attain a permanent spiritual position beyond this world of birth and death. Our karma is meant to aid us in this journey.