Living Bhagavad Gita 20: The Other Side of Death

A series of short articles on the Bhagavad Gita for people living and working in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times filled with stress and fear. This scripture born in a battlefield teaches us how to face our challenges, live our life fully, achieve excellence in whatever we do and find happiness, peace and contentment.

[Continued from the previous post]

I have heard, Krishna, that those who destroy their family ways dwell in hell for boundless years.  BG 1.44

A samurai once came to Zen Master Hakuin and asked him, “I want to know about heaven and hell. Do they really exist?”

Hakuin looked at the soldier and asked, “Who are you?” “I am a samurai,” announced the proud warrior.

“Ha!” exclaimed Hakuin. “What makes you think you can understand such insightful things? You are just a brute soldier! Go away! Don’t waste my time with stupid questions,” Hakuin said waving the samurai away with his hand.

The enraged samurai couldn’t take Hakuin’s insult. He drew his sword, ready to kill the master and Hakuin responded calmly, “This is hell.”

The soldier was taken aback. His face softened. Humbled by the wisdom of Hakuin, he put away his sword and bowed before the Zen Master. “And this is heaven,” Hakuin stated, just as calmly.

Exactly as this story tells us, the heaven and hell we are told we will go to after death are states of mind, not geographical places.

Let’s take a good look at what is meant by heaven and hell.

O0O

Greek mythology talks about the Furies, also called the Erinyes, who punish those who commit grave sins or crimes. According to some traditions they were born from the drops of blood that fell on Gaia, Earth, when the Titan Cronus castrated his father Uranus and threw his genitalia into the sea and it is this horrifying nature of their birth that gives them their vengeful nature. Their descriptions and functions vary in different stories told about them but they are generally described as ferocious foul-smelling winged females with burning breath, snakes for hair, blood dripping from their eyes, bat wings and black skin, who could also appear as storm clouds or swarms of insects.  They are vengeful and pitiless in their pursuit of justice, particularly justice for the dead.

In the Greek playwright Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, for instance, King Agamemnon before sailing to Troy for the Trojan War sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to Goddess Artemis for getting good weather. While the king is away his wife Clytemnestra takes Aegisthus as her lover. Later when Agamemnon returns after the war, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus together murder him and Aegisthus seizes the throne. Agamemnon’s daughter Electra fearing for the life of her young brother Orestes takes him away and gives him to her father’s friend King Strophius who raises him as his son.

As a grown up man, Orestes goes to the oracle of Delphi and asks him what he should do to avenge his father’s murder and is advised by the oracle that he should murder his mother and her lover. He now goes to his country Mycenae and there kills his mother and her lover in spite of the mother’s pleas that a son should not kill his own mother, after which the Furies pursue him relentlessly for his matricide.

Greek mythology also speaks of Oedipus being pursued by the Furies for killing his father and marrying his mother, though both actions were done unknowingly.

Greek mythology tells us numerous tales of the Furies pursuing those who commit heinous crimes or sins. India does not have the concept of Furies but India says the same thing in a different way: what India says is that our evil karmas pursue us relentlessly. Avashyam  anubhoktavyam kritam karma shubhaashubham: We must all experience the results of our karmas, both good and bad. There is no escaping them.

From a psychological point of view, the Furies could be seen as our sense of guilt. And guilt will be there whether the action was done consciously or unconsciously and in that sense the Furies pursue you even for wrong actions done unknowingly, which explains why Furies pursued Oedipus though his patricide and matricide were both actions done unknowingly. That is true about karmas too.   

But what exactly are karmas then? Let us try to understand this with the help of Transactional Analysis, since to many of us today the rational language of western psychology is easier to understand than the language of ancient wisdom.   

O0O

Transactional Analysis [TA] is a branch of psychology/psychiatry born in the 1960s and shot instantly to fame, particularly because of what it told us about our interpersonal behaviour and the intrapersonal processes that go on in our hidden depths on which our outer behaviour is based. Among other things, TA speaks of what are called scripts, speaking of which transactional analysts say that “in the life of every individual the dramatic life events, the roles that are learned, rehearsed, and acted out, are originally determined by a script.”

According to psychologists Muriel James and Drorothy Jongward, these psychological scripts are very much like theatre or film scripts. As they say in their best-selling book Born to Win, “Each has a prescribed cast of characters, dialogue, acts and scenes, themes and plots, which move toward a climax and end with a final curtain. A psychological script is a person’s ongoing program for a life drama, which dictates where the person is going with his or her life and the path that will lead there. It is a drama an individual compulsively acts out, though one’s awareness of it may be vague.”

Transactional Analysis tells us that these scripts begin to be written, or programmed, in early childhood, based on the transactions between parent figures and children. Depending on the nature of these scripts, children become “heroes, heroines, villains, victims and rescuers and – unknowingly – seek others to play complementary roles.”

Eric Berne, one of the founders of the Transactional Analysis movement says: “Nearly all human activity is programmed by an ongoing script dating from early childhood, so that the feeling of autonomy is nearly always an illusion – an illusion which is the greatest affliction of the human race because it makes awareness, honesty, creativity, and intimacy possible for only a few fortunate individuals. For the rest of humanity, other people are seen, mainly as objects to be manipulated. They must be invited, persuaded, seduced, bribed, or forced into playing the proper roles to reinforce the protagonist’s position and fulfill his script, and his preoccupation with these efforts keeps him from torquing in with the real world and his own possibilities in it.”

Transactional Analysts explain how these scripts are originally formed. Pointing out that children are amazingly sensitive and pick up messages about their self-worth right from the beginning, they explain that the first experiences of the infant are extremely important in this. From whether they are touched and hugged or ignored, from whether they are given warmth or left coldly alone, and later from other forms of behaviour of the significant people around him, like whether they are crooned to or spoken to without affection, from the messages in the eyes of these people, from their smiles and frowns and other facial expressions and so on, the child makes conclusions about himself and his self worth. These initial conclusions he forms become powerful scripts in his unconscious and they influence his future behaviour powerfully. In later stages, when they are grown enough to understand, children write scripts based on the verbal messages they get from their parents and other significant people. For instance, a mother’s comment watching her child explaining something to her doll that she would make an excellent teacher one day can become an unconscious script in her that eventually leads her to choose teaching as her profession. Or it could be a visiting relative’s unthinking comment that that the little boy is going to be a terror when he grows up that takes the shape of a script.

These scripts are then based on our unconscious reactions to our life events. 

In whatever way they are formed, these imprints on our psyches are non-verbal and are hidden deep in our unconscious. That is, they are in the form of images, feelings and so on, and not in words, and are hidden from the light of our consciousness. And they exert powerful influences on us and shape us and our lives. These scripts decide what we become, what our strengths and weaknesses will be, how we act and react, whether we will be winners or losers, whether we will derive success and happiness or defeat and unhappiness from life, whether we will be persecutors, victims or rescuers, whether we will be heroes and heroines or villains, whether we will be healthy, balanced and effective or suffer from anger-proneness, assertiveness problems, communication problems, relationship problems, sexual problems, violence, manias, phobias, neurotic behaviour and so on.

O0O

Ancient India refers to what transactional analysts call scripts, the unconscious imprints on the psyche, by several names. One of them is Chitra-Gupta, the accountant of Yama, the god of death. According to Indian mythology, Chitra-Gupta keeps an account, much as Gabriel does in Semitic mythology, of every deed we do on this earth and of every thought we think. And when we die and go to the other world, Chitra-Gupta opens the pages containing our account in his book and depending on whether we have done good or bad, depending on whether we have acquired punya [merit resulting from virtuous thoughts and deeds] or papa [sin], or it is a more or less equal balance of the two, he sends us on our onward journey, to heaven to enjoy or to hell to suffer or to the earth to be reborn.

Chitra-Gupta literally means pictures [chitra] that are hidden [gupta] – what Transactional Analysis calls our life scripts hidden deep in our unconscious. It is these that make us what we are at all times, do what we do. Chitra Gupta decides our future not merely after our death, but does so at all times. It is Chitra Gupta that has decided what we are now. For, our present is a result of these hidden pictures generated in our dark depths by our past thoughts, actions and reactions. And what we will become in the future is being written now – in the same dark depths of our psyche, by our present thoughts, actions and reactions, in form of images.

Indian philosophy uses other words to describe what TA calls scripts. Karmas, vasanas [psychological dispositions] and samskaras [inner culture] are nothing but TA’s scripts. Karmas are the deep imprints that we write on our psyches through our thoughts, actions and reactions. It is these karmas that give shape to our vasanas and samskaras.

Both Transactional Analysis and India believe that while scripts are powerful, they are alterable. Millennia ago India developed ways of altering our karmas, one of which was meditation, and TA talks about re-scripting, which is essentially a method of altering our life scripts. One of the aspects that I covered in Management Development Programmes for corporate officers included sessions in which I helped the participants to deep relax consciously and in that deep relaxed state to replace old scripts with new ones using such western methods as the swish technique and so on.

However, there is a major difference between the approach of TA, essentially a product of western thinking, and Indian philosophy. While transactional analysts say that scripts are decisive in shaping our self perceptions, behaviour patterns and life events, they say that the earliest scripts are formed in our early infancy, or, according to some, in our pre-natal state. Indian philosophy, however, tells us that we carry these scripts [karmas/vasanas/samskaras] with us from life to life.

Just as our life when we are alive and our rebirth after our death are decided by our karmas or life scripts, the life we live in our post death state too is decided by these life scripts or karmas that we carry with us when we leave the body behind and travel into what the yogis of Tibet call the bardo state – except that in that state the experiences are entirely mental since we do not have a physical body.

In our death and the journey into the bardo, we leave behind just the physical body, everything else travels with us. That is why it is said that death is no more than a change of clothes.

Since the experiences of the bardo are bodiless, mental, they are very much like our dreams. Just as in our dreams our experiences become intense, frequently far more intense than in waking life, and absolutely real so long as they last, so are the experiences of the bardo. In dreams beautiful things are far more beautiful than in real life, ugly and repulsive things are far more ugly and repulsive, and so are our pleasures and pains far more intense than they are in real life. And just as our dreams are illogical, so are our post death experiences. And bardo time is exactly like dream time – a dream that lasts just a few minutes of waking time can appear to last years in the dream, sometimes beginning with us as children and ending when we are old. That is why some cultures speak of hell and heaven, both of which no than what we dream in the bodiless state, as eternal.

Indian culture speaks of hells as endless in number – for instance, the Garuda Purana speaks of andhatamisram, rauravam, maharauravam, kumbhipakam, kalasutram, sukaramukham, andhakupam, taptamurti, and so on and on. This is because exactly as the life experiences of each of us are unique, exactly as our dreams are unique, so are our bardo experiences. Each one of us experiences our own unique pains and pleasures in what we call hell and heaven, but they are experiences generated by our mind based on our thoughts, emotions, feelings, memories, the life scripts we call karmas and so on, and all experienced within our mind. Apart from this, we do not go to any heaven or hell in any geographical place or separate dimension.          

Arjuna’s fear that those who destroy family traditions will have to spend endless time in hell when he tells Krishna “I have heard, Krishna, that those whose family traditions have been destroyed will have to live in hell for an indefinite period” is unfounded. In his desperate search for justifying his decision to abandon war and run away from his duties, he is giving this as yet another reason. Even if we go by the traditions of the day, the belief in the Mahabharata world was that the kshatriyas who die courageously in war go to the heaven of the heroes – the veeraswarga. Going by the story of the epic, we find men like Duryodhana in heaven after their death because he fought the war fearlessly as a true warrior should, even though he is an atatayi, a felon who committed terrible crimes throughout his life and was more responsible than anyone else for the millions of deaths in the Kurukshetra war.

O0O

Since our post death experiences depend on our present life and thoughts, what religions and ancient spiritual traditions tell us is that just as lust, anger, greed, pride, and other asuri sampada make us suffer while we are alive, these will continue to torture us after our death too. So unless we want to suffer in the bardo, we must live a life of love, kindness, compassion, forgiveness and so on.

Desire for vengeance is one of the most powerful negative feelings we can experience and so is guilt. These two can haunt us not only throughout our life, but also across lifetimes, as the story of the Roman brothers in Tales of Reincarnation tell us. Because the elder brother felt the need for vengeance at the moment of his death and the younger one felt intense guilt about causing his elder brother’s death though accidentally, the two of them are born again and again innumerable times for two thousand years, in each life living out their vengeance and guilt.

Forgiveness is the way out of vengeance and acceptance of the past, of what happened, is the way out of guilt. That and never repeating our mistakes, never causing harm to anyone consciously.

Atonement is another way, as thousands of cases tell us. One such case is discussed by the English novel Atonement [and the movie of the same name based on it]. Atonement tells the story of a thirteen year girl who lives in pre-World War II England. She witnesses a scene of intimacy between her elder sister and her lover, misunderstands it and commits a terrible crime against the two. Her guilt when she realizes the truth of what she witnessed and what she did eats away at her for years and she seeks atonement for her sin by dedicating her life for reducing the pain of those who suffer.

Knowledge of the self, knowledge of what we are, not theoretical but experiential knowledge, is the ultimate way to come out sins, says the Gita. It is the mind that commits sins and we are not the mind. We are not touched by the sins of the mind just as the waking man is not tainted by the sins he commits in his dreams. We are something far beyond the reaches of the mind, something that cannot be touched by sin or virtue, something that weapons cannot cleave, water cannot wet, fire cannot burn, something that has neither birth nor death, something that is forever beyond what is in the technical language of Vedanta called doership and enjoyership, kartritva and bhoktritva.  Sins are there only so long as the ego is there, only so long as the mind is there. That is why Krishna says in the Gita that even if you are the worst sinner of all sinners, you shall cross the sea of your sins by the raft of knowledge: api ched asi paapebhyah sarvebhyah paapakrit-tamah; sarvam jnaana-plavenaiva vrijinam santarishyasi. [BG 4.36]  

To Hinduism, sin too is an illusion like everything else; there is no everlasting sin and there is no eternal punishment, there is no eternal heaven and there is no eternal hell. Once you go beyond the mind, you are freed from all illusions, including the illusions of sin and virtue. There are no bad karmas then, just as there are no good karmas. Continuing his earlier statement about crossing the sea of sin with the raft of knowledge, Krishna says yathaidhaamsi samiddho'gnir bhasmasaat kurute'rjuna; jnaanaagnih sarvakarmaani bhasmasaat kurute tathaa [BG 4.37]. Just as the blazing fire reduces everything it consumes to ashes, Arjuna, the fire of knowledge reduces all karmas to ashes.

Vivekachudamani, the masterly poem of Shanakara Bhagavadapada has this to say about the nature of the entire world:

na hyastyavidyaa manaso’tiriktaa

mano hyavidyaa bhava-bandha-hetuah

tasmin vinashte sakalam vinashtam

vijrimbhite’smin sakalam vijrimbhate

There is no Primal Ignorance other than the mind. The mind itself is Primal Ignorance that causes the bondage to the world of constant becoming. When that is destroyed, everything is destroyed. And when that manifests everything becomes manifested.

All joys and sorrows are part of the illusory world born of Primal Ignorance and for that reason, when Primal Ignorance is destroyed, everything that causes the sufferings of the world as well as its joys is destroyed. What remains then is our true nature: ananda, boundless bliss.    

O0O

As has been very wisely said, we are not punished for our sins but by our sins. Our sins are their own punishments. Anger is its own punishment, lust is its own punishment, jealousy is its own punishment, hostility is its own punishment, desire for vengeance is its own punishment, and so are all the negative qualities Krishna calls asuri sampada in the Gita – qualities such as pride, haughtiness, arrogance, crookedness and cruelty. Asuri qualities are like the dementors of the Harry Potter series of books.  They drain peace, hope, happiness, joy and serenity from the very air around them, they drain people of all that makes life beautiful. They destroy what Tibet calls drala, the beauty of ordinary things. They make it impossible for you to relax – and without relaxation there is no joy in life, there is no beauty, no peace. You don’t climb mountains anymore, you don’t sing and dance, you don’t laugh from your heart, you don’t let go and enjoy yourself.

This is as true of the other side of death as it is of this side of death.  

O0O

Living Bhagavad Gita 19: The Religion of the Upanishads

A series of short articles on the Bhagavad Gita for people living and working in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times filled with stress and fear. This scripture born in a battlefield teaches us how to face our challenges, live our life fully, achieve excellence in whatever we do and find happiness, peace and contentment.

[Continued from the previous post.]

When families are destroyed, timeless family traditions are destroyed. And when that happens, families plunge into lawlessness. And with families plunging into lawlessness, women become corrupt. And when women become corrupt, Krishna, varna sankara results. Varna sankara [the intermixture of varnas] leads to hell both those who destroy the families and the families themselves. Deprived of the offerings of water and food, the spirits of the ancestors fall. By these evil deeds of those who destroy families, causing confusion of varnas, the eternal dharmas of families and castes are destroyed. BG 1.40-43  

The religion of the Upanishadsis very different from religion as we commonly know it. It is a religion that takes us straight to the very heartof spiritual seeking. They tell us what the only way worth living is. They show us the only way to end all bondage and achieve ultimate freedom. They show us the path to reach the goal all humanity is pursuing, consciously or unconsciously. And they do not beat about the bush when they do this.  

The Upanishads do not give much importance to rituals. The term Upanishads use for rituals is ishta. Ishta comes from the same root word from which ishti comes and as is well known, ishti means Vedic rituals like putrakameshti. The word ishtika, another word of common origin, means bricks and it is because all vedic sacrifices are performed in vedis or kundas [sacrificial pits] made of bricks that they are all called ishtis or ishtas.

They speak of rituals as the lowest form of religion. Some of them openly reject rituals altogether so that people climb to the true heights of spirituality without getting trapped in the lower world of the religion of the rituals.For instance, the Maitreyi Upanishad says “The real temple is the body wherein resides the living soul, jeeva, the one and only Shiva” The Upanishad arranges sadhanas in a hierarchical order and says the best spiritual practice is meditation on the truth [uttamaa tattvachintaiva], then comes the analysis of the scriptures as the mediocre way [madhyamam shaastra-chintanam] and the lowest is the preoccupation with mantras [adhamaa mantrachintaa cha – repetition of the mantras, mantrajapa]. But there is one thing that is worse than the lowest – endlessly roaming from one pilgrimage site to another [teertha-bhraanti adhamaa-adhamaa].

Let me talk of one more mantra from the precious Upanishad to make the spirit of the Upanishads clear before we move on.

paashaana-loha-mani-mrinmaya-vigraheshu

poojaapunar-janana-bhogakareemumukshoh

tasmaadyatihswahridaya-archanamevakuryaad

baahyaarchanampariharedaounar-bhavaaya

Worshipping idols of stone, metal, jewels, crystals and clay will lead the seeker only to repeated births in the world of bondage. For that reason, if he wants liberation, freedom from the cycle of births and deaths, the committed seeker should offer worship in his own heart and abandon external worship.     

What the Gita teaches is the religion of the Upanishads. The Bhagavad Gita is the essence of the Upanishads retold by Krishna for the modern man – of his day and of today. One of the dhyana shlokas of the Bhagavad Gita traditionally chanted before any study of the scripture begins says:

Sarvopanishado gaavah dogdhaa gopaala-nandanah

Paartho vatsah sudheer bhoktaa dugdham geetaamritam mahat

The Upanishads are all cows and Krishna is the milkman. Arjuna is the calf and intelligent men are those who get to drink the milk [of these cows]. And the milk itself is the supreme nectar called Gita.

So the Bhagavad Gita is the milk of the Upanishads.

A great modern teacher once said that religions begin with the profound spiritual experiences of great masters, but in the hands of their disciples, they are reduced to philosophy and over generations of these disciples they end up as mere rituals, by which time there is very little that is true religion or spirituality left in them.

But in spite of that, to the common man rituals mean much. In fact, for the vast majority of people, religion is nothing but rituals – the daily rituals you perform at home, the rituals performed in places of worship, the ones performed on special occasions like birth, marriage and death, rituals performed as part of religious festivals and so on. When Arjuna says the ancestral spirits [pitarah] shall fall from their worlds when varna sankara takes place because they then will not get the offerings of water and food offered to them through rituals [lubdha-pindodaka-kriyaah], he is referring to rituals like shraaddhas and so on. Let’s now take a look at this argument he forwards as a reason for abandoning his duty as a kshatriya and running away from the battle for dharma leaving power over people in the hands of those who believe in power for the sake of power and not for the good of people.

O0O

Nga Nyo and Ba Saing were two poor twenty years old friends who lived in a Burmese village called Chaungo who made a living by selling betel leaves. One day Ba Saing borrowed some rice from Nga Nyo but was bitten by a snake and died before he could return the rice. This happened sometime between 1270 and 1280 of the Burmese Era, corresponding to the beginning of 20^th century CE.

Sang was now reborn in Nyo’s house, perhaps because his dying thoughts were of the rice he had borrowed from his friend and not returned. He was born not as a human being though, but as a cockerel and Nyo trained it in cock fighting. The cock won its first three fights, but lost the fourth fight and in anger Nyo brutally dashed its head on the ground holding it by its legs. Carrying the dying cock home, he threw it down near a water pot, where his cow came and touched it gently by its lips.

The affection of the cow apparently touched the dying cock deeply. After his death as a cock, Saing was reborn as a calf to this cow. His tragedy doesn’t end here either. When the calf was a year or so old, Nyo sold it to four of his friends who butchered it and cut up the meat in preparation for a feast, which Nyo himself was to join. A clerk from the nearby town and his wife happened to pass by them at that time and the woman, looking at the calf being cut up, said she wouldn’t have slaughtered it so cruelly had it been their calf. “Even if it had died a natural death,” she added, “I wouldn't have the heart to eat its meat. I would just bury it."

The calf is now reborn as the child of this couple. He remains without speaking until the age of seven, perhaps because of the pain of his previous life experiences which he still remembers. One day his father tells him that it was his payday and he will bring some fresh clothes for him, but he must speak. That evening the father comes home from office with pretty clothes for his son. And for the first time in his life the child speaks. His first words were, “Pay back Nga Nyo’s measure of rice.”

When the father agrees he would do anything for him, pay back not just a measure of rice but a whole bag if necessary, the boy tells him in that case they should go to Nyo and settle the debt immediately.

Guided by their seven-year-old son at each step, the father reaches Nga Nyo’shome, carrying with him a bag of rice in a cart. Instantly recognizing Nga Nyo and delighted at seeing his old friend who is by now an elderly man, the boy asks him, "Hey Nga Nyo, don’t you remember me?" The elderly man is offended when he is thus addressed by his name by a mere childbut is pacified when the clerk explained that the child believes he is old friend of Nyo.

The boy then tells Nyo that he is actually his old friend Ba Saing. He recalls several of their experiences together when they betel sellers and explains how he had died by snake bite and had been reborn as a cockerel in his house. He recalls the cockfights and Nyo’s killing the cockerel in anger and his subsequent birth as a calf because of the kindness a cow had shown him. Saing then recalls to a by now silently weeping Nyo how he was butchered as a one year old heifer to be eaten in a feast by him and his friends. He recalls the compassionate words of his present mother to the dying heifer as a result of which he was born as their child, adding that he has come to repay the rice he had borrowed from him as Ba Saing.

As the Bhagavad Gita says, death is the individual leaving one body to move on to another – in the words of the Gita, like discarding old clothes and using fresh ones. It is something that happens to all of us – jaatasya hi dhruvo mrityuh. And just as death is certain to the living,it is equally certain that everyone who dies is reborn – dhruvam janma mritasya cha.

This cycle of birth, life and death, and again birth, life and death goes on and on endlessly. Because of what happens between death and rebirth, because of the trauma of the life in the womb [which the west does not accept as painful but considers the most blissful state] and the trauma of the process of the birth itself [which the west accepts], most of us do not remember our past lifetimes. It is only rare individuals who escape this vismarana, the erasing of the memory oftheir past existences, though people who remember their past existences in their childhood are not as rare as we would like to believe. For instance, lots of children in their moments of great fear, like during a nightmare, scream for their father or mother but fail to recognise them when they come running and continue screaming and looking for their mother or father as was portrayed frighteningly in the movie The Reincarnation of Audrey Rose. Even in the case of people who retain these memories, practically all of them lose those memories over time.  Nga Nyo seems to be a rare individual who retains these memories.

Speaking to Arjuna in the Gita, Krishna tells his friend that both of them have had numerous lives in the past and he remembers them all though Arjuna does not:

bahooni me vyateetaani janmaani tava cha arjuna

taany aham veda sarvaani na twam vettha parantapa BG 4.5

O0O

As we saw in the Burmese story above, after Ba Saing is killed by snakebite he is immediately reborn as Nga Nyo’s cockerel – there does not seem to have been much time gap.  And after the cockerel is killed by Ba Saing, it is soon reborn again as a calf – again without much time gap. And then after the calf is slaughtered, it is reborn as the son of the clerk while Ba Saing is still alive, though by now he has grown old. All the four life times of Ba Saing happen within a single life time of Nnga Nyo.

In the Mahabharata we have the story of Princess Amba of Kashi who kills herself in a ritual fire she ignited with the desire to be reborn as Bhishma’s killer. She is subsequently reborn as Drupada’s daughter Shikhandini while Bhishma is still alive.

The Padma Purana tells us that the washer man who criticises Rama for keeping in his house Sita who has lived in ‘Ravana’s house’ was in his previous life one of a pair of birds whom Sita in her childhood had separated from its mate. The bird kills itself after cursing that it would soon be reborn and will cause Sita’s separation from her husband in that life.    

The understanding of India’s epics and Puranas, as well that of other scriptures, is that rebirths happen is fairly quick succession and the bodiless state, the state between death and rebirth, is usually not long.

One of the books that talks most authentically about death and explains what happens in the moments of death and immediately afterwards is the very unusual book called The Tibetan Book of the Dead or Bardo Thodol, authored by Tibet’s great Yogi Padmasambhava about a thousand years ago and first translated into English in 1924 by W.Y. Evans Wentz and published with an introduction by Dr Carl Jung. It is a book based on the experiences of great yogis who die consciously, live in the post-death state consciously and then take birth consciously. The book discusses what happens to us immediately before death, during the moments of death and following death. It describes in great detail the experiences the bodiless individual undergoes during the first forty-eight days after death. Bardo Thodol stops with the forty-eighth day because practically all dead individuals find a new body to be reborn into by then. The book describes how the dead individual searches for an appropriate body and chooses one among the available ones according to his karmas – his driving psychological needs – and enters it to be reborn again.

O0O

Let’s now look at a case of reincarnation from the western world discussed by Rosemary Ellen Guiley in her Tales of Reincarnation – that of Gail Bartley, an attractive young woman who worked as an advertising professional in New York. Let me reproduce here part of an article of mine called Reincarnation, Transactional Analysis and Karma [available online] in which I discuss her case as narrated by Guiley.

“Soon after her marriage ended in divorce, she fell in love with Roger. As an advertising executive she had ample opportunities for meeting other attractive young men, she did not really like Roger, her mother took an instant dislike for him and a voice in Gail’s head kept screaming all the time, ‘Get away. He hates you. He is trying to destroy you!’ In spite of all these Gail felt irresistibly drawn toward Roger. And he abused her constantly, hurt her emotionally and did not hesitate to beat her up occasionally; once he even tried to choke her to death during one of the fairly frequent violent outbursts between them. The relationship had wrecked her personal life, drained her emotionally, destroyed her self-esteem. However, in spite of all this, Gail found herself unable to get away from the man – and she completely failed to understand her love-hate relationship with this man, as did the other people around her. 

“It was this riddle of her relationship with Roger that eventually sent her to a past life regressionist. Upon regression, reaching her first past life experience, Gail found herself standing in a bedroom with high ceilings. She was now a twenty-three year old woman called Joyce in the 1920s. The experience, completely new to Joyce, was strange and eerie: she was at once the woman Joyce and Gail, who was watching her. Gail experienced that Joyce was shaking with fear, fear caused by a man who was with her in the room, lying on their bed – and that man was none other than Joyce’ s husband and the man Gail knew as Roger.

“And then Gail experienced the man getting up from their bed and walking towards her. Joyce was now shaking in terror and Gail’s breathing changed as she watched it. She began to hyperventilate and the regressionist asked Gail what was happening and she told her the man was strangling her. Joyce fell on her knees at the violence of the attack and then collapsed on the ground as the man continued to throttle her. However, Joyce did not die. Before that could happen, the man released her throat and walked away, leaving her on the ground, struggling to breathe.

“In a later part of the regression, Gail once again felt Joyce’s terror. Joyce was in their room again, that same night, and she hears him approaching her, climbing the stairs leading to their room. As he comes near, she sees he has something in his hand, which he is hiding behind him. His eyes are cold and she breathes in the hatred that emanates from him.

‘He rips open her gown with the knife he was hiding behind him, and brutally stabs her with it. Gail feels choked, her breath escapes her and she realizes she is experiencing the last moments of her life as Joyce. Coming out her body and hovering in a corner of the room, Joyce watches what is happening. One of the things she witnesses is her husband’s utter shock at what he has done, his complete disbelief and intense remorse.

“Further regressions reveal a sad tale of revenge and guilt spanning across life times, centuries and continents. It all started in ancient Rome where Roger and Gail in a long ago lifetime lived as brothers. The two of them loved each other deeply and thoroughly enjoyed their life as Roman citizens. In her regression, Gail sees herself as the younger brother, a blond young man filled with raw energy and impatience to win a chariot race that is about to begin. The race begins and his chariot takes off like a storm, another chariot keeping abreast with him. And then the tragedy takes place. His chariot swerves violently, hits the other chariot, the man driving that chariot thrown off his balance and falls, his head hitting his own chariot wheel, causing an instant death. In the middle of his shock he realizes the saddest truth: the man killed by his mistake is none other than his beloved brother.

“This life follows a series of lifetimes revealed by the regression, in each the elder brother is violent and vengeful, and the younger brother, Gail of this lifetime, is his victim. In one of these, Gail is a boy of seventeen, George, who lived in the Old West of America with his ill tempered, hateful, domineering father and his mother who was terrified of him. On one occasion his father catches George with his girlfriend, a girl who had grown up with him as his playmate. The two were together in the barn and they were kissing and feeling each other. The father orders George back into the house and then rapes George’s girlfriend. One night the boy is asleep in his tent while camping out with his father in the wilderness. He wakes up hearing repeated dull thuds and realizes his father is digging something in the night. His father has been furious with him that evening about some small thing, maybe he hadn’t tied up the horses properly. Sudden realization comes: his father is digging a grave for him! And then the father hits him on the head with a shovel and he is dead and out of his body. He sees his father dragging his body to the pit he had dug and burying him in it.”

More regressions reveal more such lifetimes in each of which the elder brother who was killed in the accident is the violent aggressor and the younger brother his victim. They are born again and again, repeating their life pattern that is now more than two thousand years old. 

As this real life past life regression story too tells us, the dead does not live forever in some mysteriousdimension, but are born again and again, directed by their life scripts that India calls karmas. 

Dr Brian Weiss is today the most widely known authority on rebirth and past life regression in the western world who uses his knowledge and expertise for healing people from diseases which cannot be explained by causes in their current life. In his best seller books like Many LivesMany Masters and Through Time into Healing, he talks about people being born again and again and when regressed reliving their past lives. In his work too what we come across is every one of us being reborn after our death, as the Gita speaks of when it says jatasya hi dhruvo mrityuh dhruvam janma mritasya cha: Those who are born are certain to die and those who die are certain to be born again.

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Even though the Upanishads reject ritualism and the path the Bhagavad Gita teaches is not of rituals but of the yogas of bhakti, karma, jnana and so on, rituals do have their own beauty if you practice them with the right vision. For instance, bali and tarpana are offered to the dead ancestors  in the rituals of shraaddha. Shraaddhas are offerings made out of shraddhra for ones ancestors – love and reverence for them. They are also expressions of our gratitude and indebtedness to them – we wouldn’t have been born but for them. In that sense they are beautiful. But what Arjuna means when he says that when varna sankara happens these ancestors will fall from their worlds is that these ancestors are not reborn on earth but live permanently in another world where they are sustained by the tarpana we offer to them and would fall from there if tarpana is not offered by their children.

As the Gita says, to quote again verse 2.27 quoted earlier, jatasya hi dhruvo mrityuh dhruvam janma mritasya cha: those who are born are bound to die and those who die are bound to be reborn. If the ancestors are already born on earth and living their lives here as new individuals, with new identities, in new families, with new parents, then sending offerings for them into some other world does not make sense, apart from the question how something physical offered here can reach them in their world.

Shraadha rituals are exactly what the name says – expressions of our love, reverence and indebtedness to the dead. As far as sustenance in post-death existences is considered, what sustains us there is our own karmas and not what others do.

So Arjuna’s argument that the war will cause varna sankara and that will ultimately make our ancestors fall from their worlds does not hold water. That is yet another argument he gives for running away from the unhappy challenge he has to face in the battlefield.   

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Bhagavad Gita and Asuri Sampada: “Who on Earth is my Equal?”

The Bhagavad Gita classifies people into two groups – those born with daivi sampada and those born with asuri sampada. Daivi sampada are positive virtues like fearlessness, purity of mind, and so on, twenty-nine of which the Gita lists. And then it moves on to the asuri sampada – negative qualities like pride, haughtiness, anger and so on, the list of which is small but which is discussed in greater details.

Krishna states here that people are born either with daivi sampada or with asuri sampada. Though Krishna does not expressly state this, since none of us is entirely positive or negative and all of us are grey, we must assume that he is speaking of our basic dispositions – some of us are basically disposed towards negativity and others towards positive virtues, just as in terms of modern psychology some of us are basically optimists and others are basically pessimists. Even the darkest people like Duryodhana in the Mahabharata, for instance, shows some good qualities and even the most positive ones, like Yudhishthira shows some negative qualities.

Krishna knows, as the whole east knows, that life does not begin at birth or conception – we all have had innumerable past lives and every time we take a new birth, we are born with our past gunas, karmas, vasanas and samskaras. We are all born with memories of our past lives lying buried just beneath the surface of our consciousness, becoming visible sometimes on their own and at other times when we peep beneath the surface, as during past life regression or deep meditation. It is these memories, gunas, karmas, vasanas and samskaras that make us daivi or asuri.

Describing people with asuri sampada, negative qualities, Krishna says each one of them thinks:

“I am the lord of all. I am a great bhogi who enjoys the best things in life. I am a siddha, a man of great power and achievements; balavan, a man of immense strength; sukhee, living a life of contentment and bliss. Of noble birth am I, master of heaps of wealth, famous everywhere. I conduct grand sacrificial rituals where wealth flows endlessly, I give in charity boundlessly, I revel in pleasures, I make merry, feast and celebrate.  Tell me, who on earth is my equal? Self-centered, willful, filled with all the insolence of wealth and bloated with the adulation they receive, arrogant, haughty, full of rage and lust, these people cling to their mighty egos, and lord it over everyone.”  BG Ch. 16

When I think of such people, a person who used to stay close to my house some years ago comes to my mind. Every word he spoke, every step he took, every breath of his, the way he sat and stood, the way he treated all except those who were his superiors, spoke of his boundless arrogance. The poor and the powerless were no better than worms that crawled in the gutter for him and he crushed them under his foot every chance he had. He owned a fairly big house in an affluent locality and walked as though he was the master of everything under the sun.

In his case it was money that made them so arrogant. Power can give us the same arrogance, fame can give us the same arrogance, victories can give us the same arrogance.

Most people get bloated up with pride even when their achievements are puny. The wisdom of ancient India understood that arrogance is unhealthy for us even when our achievements are big because they feed the ego and starve the soul. Healthy living requires that you feed your ego and starve the soul. That is wisdom in the truest sense of the term. 

Hell is the destiny of people with asuri sampada – hell not only for themselves, but for everyone around them too. One Hitler created hell for the six million Jews he killed in the concentration camps and the millions of soldiers and civilians killed in WW II. It is for this reason that their asuri sampada has to be destroyed and if that proves impossible, then they themselves have to destroyed, so that they could be saved from themselves and others could be saved from them.   

The Brahmavaivarta Purana tells us an amazing story of how a god of great achievements was taught humility and the asuri sampada in him was destroyed.

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The story begins with Indra slaying the mighty serpent dragon Vritra lying crouched on the high mountains in the shapeless shape of a massive cloud. Indra frees the waters Vritra had blocked making the world parch for want of water. With the monster’s death, the freed waters burst forth from the mountains joyously, nourishing the earth and quenching the thirst of all living creatures making them sing in delight and praise Indra as the mightiest hero ever. Much of the Rig Veda is the rapturous praises thus sung by the inspired poets of the ancient world. Here is one Vedic poet singing of Indra: 

I will declare the manly deeds of Indra,

the first that he achieved, the Thunder-wielder.
He slew the Dragon, then disclosed the waters,

and cleft the channels of the mountain torrents.
He slew the Dragon lying on the mountain:

his heavenly bolt of thunder Tvaṣṭar-fashioned.
Like lowing kine in rapid flow descending

the waters glided downward to the ocean

[From Rig Veda Mandala 1, Hymn XXXII. Griffith trans.] 

Indra killed the monster who had misappropriated what belonged to all and freed living water to benefit the plants and trees, the birds, beasts and humans, making mother earth throb with life once again. Earth turned green once again, birds soared up into the skies, animals roamed the jungles that sprang up everywhere and man was happy.  Clouds started raining from the skies again.

Indra destroyed the ninety-nine cities that belonged to Vritra, cities of repression and oppression. Saviour, savior, everyone called him. Truly, he had made life and light possible by destroying darkness and bondage. Now he wanted to rebuild the cities of the gods, cities of freedom and light, of joyfulness and celebration and a palace for himself.   

Indra instructed Vishwakarma to build the magnificent palace for himself. The palatial gardens should have streams running through it, Indra told him, and lakes teeming with waterfowl, divine trees everywhere, and everything else he could imagine. Vishwakarma was making great progress and as the first year neared its end and work was nearing completion, Indra started making frequent visits to see the work in progress. Which was fine with Vishwakarma, but every time he made a visit, he would ask the celestial architect to modify something or the other, micromanaging things and interfering the Vishwakarma’s work, making progress slow, putting him in unendurable stress, making sleep impossible to him, driving him nuts.

Indra had ceased to be the mighty hero and liberating leader he was earlier. Instead, with his own importance gone to his head, he had become an intolerable boss, always grumpy, always complaining, always looking for faults, insisting that his way alone was right, constantly insulting the intelligence and imagination of Vishwakarma in his attempt to show he was superior. It was possible that he was jealous of the miraculous powers of Vishwakarma as an architect. Frequently when a boss becomes jealous of his subordinate, he tries to ‘show him his place’ by trying to show he has better ideas about everything, even in subjects about which he has no knowledge. He refuses to see people as people, and instead sees them as his subordinates whom he can order about. And as an architect there was no equal to Vishwakarma who turned everything he touched into pure wonder, whose creations were beauty solidified. But Indra wanted him to do things Indra’s way. Life became hell for the celestial architect.

Vishwakarma just did not know what to do. He was the most creative architect, but, as it often happens, he did not know how to play games to outsmart his boss. That was not his area of expertise – he was a simple creative genius and not a politician. He decided to seek help and secretly went to Brahma, the Creator. Brahma listened to him patiently, assured him his troubles would soon come to an end and sent him back a relaxed man, or rather a relaxed god. 

Brahma informed Vishnu of the whole affair who instantly made a plan to solve the problem. Such things should not happen in the celestial world, Vishnu knew. Time had come for the lord of the gods to be shown his place.

India has always loved telling human stories in the name of the gods. Or let’s say, stories of gods as though they were human beings, subject to the same anger that men are subject to, the same jealousy and greed, the same intolerance and hostility, the same ignorance and narrow-mindedness, the same lust and illusions and delusions. These are teaching stories, stories told to teach men and women wisdom, to teach us that whoever we are, however powerful we are, we are all subject to the games the mind plays with us.

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It is a Purana that tells us this story – the Brahmavaivarta Purana. Indra in Vedic literature is different from Indra in the Puranas. In Vedic literature, Indra is the symbol of the enlightened mind, mind that has become still and empty, the yogic mind, the meditator’s mind, the free mind, the ‘mindless mind’, what Zen calls the no-mind, mushin, mind that is one with pure consciousness, mind that soars in the limitless skies of consciousness like Garutman, the eagle of the Vedas on whom Vishnu, the all-pervading being, travels. Whereas in the Puranas, he is the symbol of the ordinary human mind, the mind about which Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita complaints to Krishna: chanchalam hi manah krishna, pramaathi balavad drdham tasyaaham nigraham manye vayor iva sudushkaram – “The mind, Krishna, is restless, turbulent, strong and stubborn. I consider that it is as difficult to control as the wind itself.”

In the modern spiritual classic The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche speaks of the two completely different minds, or aspects of the mind: sem and rigpa. Sem, says Rinpoche, “is the mind that thinks, plots, desires, manipulates, that flares up in anger, that creates and indulges in waves of negative emotions and thoughts, that has to go on and on asserting, validating, and confirming its "existence" by fragmenting, conceptualizing, and solidifying experience. The ordinary mind is the ceaselessly shifting and shiftless prey of external influences, habitual tendencies, and conditioning. The masters liken sem to a candle flame in an open doorway, vulnerable to all the winds of circumstance.”

The higher mind, or the enlightened mind, the awakened mind, is the “primordial, pure, pristine awareness that is at once intelligent, cognizant, radiant, and always awake. It could be said to be the knowledge of knowledge itself.” The Vedic Indra stands for this mind, for rigpa.

The Indra of the Puranas, books written after the glorious age of the Vedas had come to an end and the worship and understanding of the Vedic gods had declined giving rise to the Pauranic gods in their place, is the symbol of sem, the ordinary mind. 

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Early next morning a radiant young brahmana traveler with brilliant eyes that spoke of his serene intelligence appeared at the gate of Indra. He was immediately received in great honour and given the traditional offerings of water, honey, milk and fruits made to brahmanas on arrival. Politely enquired of the purpose of his visit, the boy said he had heard of the great palace Indra was building and had come to see it. When the young boy spoke, his voice was rich, deep and soft. Indra’s hairs stood on their ends as he listened to the traveler.

“It is great that you are building this splendorous palace,” said the boy. “How long will it take for the work to be completed?” The boy paused and a gentle smile appeared on his lips as he added, “No other Indra of the past has completed a more magnificent palace.”

Indra too smiled at the comment. How conceited of the little boy to assume he has known the Indras before him and the palaces they had built! Was the boy mocking at him, ridiculing him? Or was he just being presumptuous? With the indulgent smile of an elder towards a child the lord of the gods asked him, making sure his voice remained polite, “Have you then known other Indras? Seen the palaces they built?” 

“Yes,” the boy replied calmly with no change in his serene voice. “I have seen numerous Indras and Vishwakarms and the many palaces they built.” There was no mockery in that steady voice, no boasting. “Vatsa,” said the boy addressing Indra as though the lord of the gods was no more than a toddler, “I have known your father, Maharshi Kashyapa, and his father, Maharshi Marichi. And I also know Brahma, whose son Marichi is, and, Lord of the Gods, I know Vishnu too, from whose naval lotus Brahma was born.”

“I have known the dissolution of universes. I have seen it happening again and again, and again and again new worlds coming into being form the cosmic waters of consciousness without end. I have seen that state in which all was one. How many times have I seen this happening? No one can count that.  Universe after universe is born endlessly and every one of them dissolves into the nothingness from which they come.  And right at this moment, King of the Gods, who can count the number of universes that exist simultaneously, each with its own Indras and Vishwakarmas. Who can count the grains of sand on the beaches of world?”     

   

Indra had grown completely silent listening to what the boy was saying. There was no doubt the wandering brahmana child was speaking the truth. There was the power of authenticity to every word he spoke. The bemused smile on the face of Indra had disappeared long ago. Without blinking his eyes, he was watching the miraculous being that had appeared before him that morning in the guise of a young pilgrim and wondering who it was. All arrogance had left him and his head that he haughtily held high was now bent in humility before the speaker whose words he was listening to holding his breath. He was about to ask him who he was when he noticed a procession of ants that had appeared in the royal chamber where they were seated. Indra saw the procession was almost as wide as the large hall itself and the ants were slowly moving towards them.

The young boy’s eyes too were on the ants now, watching them with curiosity and deep interest. All on a sudden the child burst out laughing – sparkling spontaneous, mirth filled, wondrous laughter the like of which Indra had never heard before. As the laughter died out, Indra got up from his seat, stood humbly before his guest, bowed deeply to him and asked, “Bhagavan, who are you? I have never met anyone like you and I never knew someone like you existed. Your brilliance surpasses that of a thousand suns simultaneously rising up, you look like a child but seem to be more ancient than time itself. Who are you, please tell me. And also tell me why you laughed at the parade of ants. You terrify me, though you exude nothing but love.”

“Let me tell you why I laughed, Lord of the Gods,” said the boy. “When I saw the parade of the ants I couldn’t control my laughter. But why the sight of the procession of the ants made me laugh is a secret that cannot be revealed to anyone who is not ready for it. It is the great secret of secrets, which very few even among great saints know. The axe of this secret destroys at a single stroke the mighty tree with its roots above and branches below, the tree that has existed from times without beginning, the tree that the wise speak of as eternal.”

The boy had become silent after he spoke these words, so silent as though he had never spoken at all. Indra fell at his feet and begged him to reveal the secret to him and the little boy knew that the lord of the gods is ready for the highest knowledge, the highest secret.

And in a long discourse the little boy who was none other than Vishnu himself told him the secret of karma which controls us from lifetime to lifetime, the result of our karmas which cannot be escaped even in a million lifetimes, and also how to free ourselves from the bondage of karma and become liberated. The little boy told him how every time we perform an action with the sense of I, we create a karma and these karmas accumulated become life scripts for future births and bind us. He also told Indra in great detail how to act without the I-sense, how to be the non-doer even when doing all kinds of actions. He taught Indra the secret of become asanga, unattached, to not only the results of one’s actions but also to the actions themselves. He taught Indra how to perform actions for the good of the world, as he had done when he had slain the snake monster Vritra and dedicate the results to the Divine.

The boy explained to Indra that each ant in the parade was once an Indra like him, from which Indra got visible proof, pratyaksha, that there had been endless number of Indras before him.  As Indras, the boy told him, prompted by their ego and arrogance, each one of them had asked the same question: Who in the universe is equal to me? This asuri sampada had led them to lower births and in their lower births too they had continued with asuri sampada until each of them had ended up an ant after countless lifetimes.

A little later an old wandering ascetic appeared on the scene wearing a deerskin as his loincloth, his hair matted, and taught Indra the same wisdom in different words. When the teaching was over and the ascetic disappeared on the spot, it became clear that he was none other than Lord Shiva. Following Shiva, the little boy too disappeared, revealing to Indra that he was none other than Lord Vishnu.

Indra now moved to the other extreme, like a pendulum, losing all interest in life, denying himself all joys, saying no to his wife, to all pleasures, to his responsibilities, saying no to life itself. A horrified Indrani, his queen, rushed to Brihaspati, the guru of the gods, who came and taught Indra how to balance between the extremes, how to remain in the world doing all that is expected of him, including his commitment to his wife and son and others, and yet remain free from karmas that bind us.

And yes, of course, he let Vishwakarma complete the palace without more micromanaging and constant squabbling. One other thing came to an end: he no more asked kon’yosti sadrisho mayaa, “Who on earth is my equal?” Every time the thought came to him, he remembered the parade of ants.

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One question that arises here is if a man with asuri qualities can become Indra, a position that according to Pauranic Indian tradition goes to the one who has done the highest number of powerful religious rites and asceticism. Well, as I said earlier, please keep in mind we are not discussing here the Vedic Indra, symbol of the enlightened mind, but the Pauranic Indra, who stands for the ordinary mind, sem. The ordinary mind can feel haughtiness, arrogance and pride in its achievements – success can go to the head of a man with such a mind. He can be proud of the rites themselves, of his asceticism, as it happened with Jajali. Second, though the Gita says we are all born either predominantly asuri or predominantly daivi, our qualities are subject to change from moment from moment. A man who is wicked now can become good later and vice verse.  

The Saptashloki  Durga says: jnaaninaam api chetaamsi devee bhagavatee his saa balaad aakrshya mohaaya mahaamayaa prayacchati. Even the minds of enlightened men, she, the Goddess, the Mahamaya, draws by force and leads to delusion.  

It is like moss on the surface of water, says the wisdom tradition of India. You clear it with your hands to drink the water and a moment later, it is back again, covering the surface. So you have to be constantly on the alert. The famous story of the great yogi Matsyendranath tells us of how he became infatuated with the queen of Sri Lanka long after his enlightenment and his disciple Gorakhnath had to go to him and awaken him by saying those words that have since become legendary: Jaag macchandar gorakh aayaa – Wake up, Matsyendra, Gorakh has come. 

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