What is rebirth? What takes rebirth? || Acharya Prashant (2017)
Questioner (Q): What is re-birth? What is the transmigration of soul? What travels after death? What carries forward?
Acharya Prashant (AP): A few things must be clearly understood. ‘You’ do not carry anything.
You as a ‘person’, are not a very important carrier. That which carries is the total stream of mankind’s consciousness.
(Referring to the people sitting in the audience) Her mind, her mind, his mind, your mind, his mind, her mind, the mind of the kid, the mind of the old man – we all are carrying remnants, carryforwards from our collective past. That is what is carried forward.
See, it is like this.
There are waves in the ocean. One particular wave is carrying a little sugar, a lump of sugar. Now the wave rises and falls. What happens to the lump of sugar? It gets distributed throughout the ocean. Now it belongs to everyone. That is how things are carried forward.
What you do in your lifetime, has gone to many, many, many. Through every single action of yours, you are impacting the entire mankind. In other ways, you are responsible for forming the mind of entire mankind. In turn, your own mind is being formed by the entire mankind, because you are an active recipient as well.
The subtle becomes the gross. The more the mind is impacted at some point, many many years later, that also changes your body. Have you seen that when you are angry, your face changes? When you are in love, your eyes change. So, the subtle has a way of changing the gross.
If you are impacting the mind of mankind, always you are also impacting even the form of mankind. That’s how it happens.
Otherwise, all that is ‘personal’ about you, gets burnt down in a funeral pyre. There is no way, something can get carried forward from there. All is reduced to smoke and ashes; nothing remains. But what you have done in your lifetime, that remains. And that is going to affect all future generations.
Take it this way.
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. You can say, that the rubbish in the minds of the students 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, you can say that you are being re-born as that kid. In a poetic sense, as a metaphor, now you can say that the teacher who had died, has been reborn as the son or the daughter of the student.
But the re-birth has not taken place because something arose from the dead body, and entered the womb of the student. The re-birth has taken place because of the stuff that has taken place during your active lifetime; not after your death.
Whatever one person does, impacts the consciousness of entire mankind. And that is how re-birth takes place.
And, therefore, re-birth is taking place every moment, because I might do something just now, which may cause you to transform. Now, haven’t you been re-born? That’s re-birth.
And you have been reborn not because my soul entered you, you have been reborn because the Truth transmitted to you, via me.
The opposite is also possible.
You might be otherwise an innocent person, but you acquire a 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 dead, and someone else has been reborn.
That’s how it happens – through your actions.
You see, subtle truths cannot be conveyed very subtly to everybody. And therefore they 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 such things, and figure out what they really would mean.
You know what, it is also possible that the kid which is born to the student, has something in his eyes that resembles 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 into 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 re-birth, as this kid.
Q: Then why do we have such rituals after death like Tehravin , on the 13th day after the death?
AP: No Upanishad says that. No Scripture worth its name says that. The Puranic literature, that talks of such stuff, is stories and fancies. It is not serious metaphysics. It deals with a lot of imagery, a lot of fables, a lot of things that are there just to involve you, engage you, even entertain you.
One has to understand the difference between the Upanishads and the Puranas . They are not in the same dimension. You cannot take Isavasya Upanishad and Garuda Purana , and compare them.
The stuff that you are talking of, would be found in Garuda Purana .
Q: Yes.
AP: It’s alright. Read that. But understand that in the light of the Upanishads .
If you want to read the Puranic literature, read it in the light of Upanishads . Then you will not be misled.
