Acharya Prashant: Suppose, you are a teacher and you have taught hundreds and thousands of students and you are a good teacher, just for the story’s sake. Good teachers are rare. Now the students have really imbibed what they received from you, really imbibed or you could say the rubbish in the students’ mind has been cleared off by your teachings, either way. You die, and one of your students gives birth, you die and one of your students becomes a father or a mother. The kid that is born would be raised by your student and because your student has been a good student and he has really imbibed your teachings, so those teachings would go to the kid. The kid would have the same pure quality of mind as you had. In a poetic sense, now you can say that you have been reborn as that kid. In a poetic sense, as a metaphor, now you can say that the teacher who died has been reborn as the student, as the son or daughter of the student.
But the rebirth has not taken place because something arose from your dead body and entered the womb of the student. The rebirth has taken place because of the stuff that you did during your active lifetime, not after your death. Whatever one person does, impacts the consciousness of entire mankind and that’s how rebirth takes place. And therefore, rebirth is taking place every moment because I might do something just now which may cause you to transform. Now haven’t you been reborn? That’s rebirth and you have been reborn not because my soul entered you, you have been reborn because the Truth was transmitted to you via me.
The opposite is also possible. You might be otherwise an innocent person, but you acquire bad company and the bad company overshadows all your innocence, now you have been reborn because the innocent one has died. The innocent one has been died and someone else been reborn. That’s how it happens, through your actions.
You see subtle truths cannot be conveyed very subtly to everybody and therefore there were figuratively communicated. So that people, somehow, at least partially, get a grasp on them.
Therefore, you must not be too concerned with the literal meaning. Go deep into the myths of transmigration and rebirth and such things and figure out what they really would mean. You know what, it is also possible that the kid that is born to the student, has something in his eyes that resemble the dead teacher. That doesn’t mean that the dead teacher has physically fathered the kid. It’s just that all eyes that are peaceful have something in common. All eyes that are peaceful have something in common. So, when you would look at the eyes of the newly born kid, you would be reminded of the dead teacher and you would be then justified in saying that the dead teacher has taken rebirth as this kid.
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