Reincarnation

[Abhishek Ramakrishnan]

Hello Sir, is reincarnation that common to be considered a true phenomenon or is it just that it does not happen to everybody and therefore, is very rare? The reason why I am asking this is because I watched a discussion on theology unleashed platform where they were discussing reincarnation and how can Science can be used to give a better explanation any incident that claims to prove reincarnation.

[Ashish Dalela]

You can read these two articles:

Reincarnations–The Most Essential Spiritual Truth

What is the Soul in Vedic Philosophy?

Here is a specific quote to answer your question from the first article:

Hence, if someone says, “Can you prove reincarnation?”, then we could just move our hand and say: “There”. The up-and-down movement of the hand is also reincarnation because both states are potentials and by the selection of one potential and the rejection of another the hand moves. The same soul has taken a different bodily form. Hence, it is reincarnation: The soul taking a new body.

The idea that reincarnation occurs only at the time of death is a materialistic idea. The demand for proof of reincarnation arises only for someone who hasn’t yet solved the mind-body problem. When we solve the mind-body problem in the above way, there is no need to prove reincarnation. We can extend this point to make a more general one: Many things that we consider problems are merely problems created by our way of thinking. Similarly, many things that we consider not to be problems are the results of other neglected problems.

From the first article, the successive states of this body are due to soul activity. From the second article, body unity is established by the soul. Since there is a body unity and since the body changes, therefore, soul is proved every moment in life. This is how the soul is described by Krishna. All questions about “proving” the soul’s existence are laden with assumptions of Christianity in which there is an object called a “body” in which the “soul” is carried like money in the pocket. When this dualism is created, the main problem is dualism. Nobody has solved that dualism yet.

Prabhupada always explained the eternity of the soul by talking about childhood, youth, old age, and disease. He was referencing Bhagavad-Gita. In one conversation (sitting on the roof of one of the buildings in Bombay), he says: “In the night when you dream, you go to another place. Then when you wake up, you come back to this body”. So we have to understand waking and dreaming. 

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