Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Namaste.
So, judging from some of the comments we’ve gotten, and from a conversation I had yesterday with a friend, this thing called transmigration, or the movement of the soul from one body to another body, is not well understood.
I mean, anybody who’s involved in spiritual life, one of the first things they learn is that this is not the only life. There is another life. Even the Buddha says this. He says, there is a next life, so why is everybody acting as if there isn’t? (Mahāgovindasutta, DN 19 et al)
In other words, they’re focused on the pursuit of short-term goals that apply to this lifetime only. They want wealth, beauty, power, fame, knowledge, or renunciation, you know, these opulences. But they’re all perishable. That’s the problem. ‘You can’t take it with you’ is the common saying, and that’s true.
So, what is this transmigration? What is this process of rebirth? And, really, more fundamentally, who or what is it that is reborn?
I mean, we throw around the word soul very casually, as if it’s just assumed that we know what it is, but can anyone really define it?
If you read Bhagavad-gītā, there is some discussion on this soul. Kṛṣṇa says,
nājāyate mriyate vā kadācin nāyaṁ bhūtvā bhāvita vā nabhūyā ajau nitya-śāśvato yāṁ purāṇo nā hanyate hanyamāne śarīre
And that last line, of course, was stolen by Ezra Pound and made into part of his poem:
“If the red slayer thinks he slays, or the slain thinks he is slain, they know not the ways I keep and hold and pass again.”
Very mysterious, but it becomes quite clear in the Gītā.
“The soul is neither born, nor does it ever die, nor, having once been, does it ever cease to be. The soul is without birth, eternal, immortal and ageless. It is not destroyed when the body is destroyed.” — Bhagavad-gītā 2.20
But what is this soul? It’s not described or defined in the Gītā. Well, the Gītā is designed for a broad audience, mass audience. And although it is very profound, one has to know the background to really understand it. And the background is found in Vedānta. Vedānta and its commentaries, especially the commentary of Śaṅkara, describe the nature of what we call the soul.
What is it? Well, the soul is called ātmā in Sanskrit. Ātmā, jīva-ātmā, means the soul that is born. And parama-ātmā means the Supreme soul, the soul of the universe, or the soul of all creation, or whatever you want to call it. But even these don’t really describe the nature of the soul, which is consciousness. Consciousness plus upādhi.
This is Śaṅkara’s contribution, his analysis, that in what we call the parama-ātmā—for example, Viṣṇu, or Devī, or Śiva, or any of the demigods that are immortal—we have Brahman plus what we call upādhis, or limiting adjuncts that take this unlimited, pure awareness without any qualities and turn it into an individual.
So what’s the difference between jīva-ātmā and parama-ātmā? It’s only that in the case of parama-ātmā—like Viṣṇu, or Devī, or Śiva, or a few of the other demigods like Agni, Brahmā, and those—that they know, they are well aware, they are realized, and they know that their so-called individuality is only due to upādhis.
And they can definitely perceive those limitations, and if necessary, or whenever they like, actually, they can go beyond them, because they’re all Brahman-realized. See, any being who becomes Brahman-realized can do this.
So the aim of Self-Realization is to attain this realization of Brahman. Realization that “I am not limited, I am not an individual, I am not even, what to speak of the body, I’m not even the mind or even consciousness. I’m something beyond that.”
But in the case of the jīvatma, those who are born, those who have to die, that individuality is hemmed in so tightly by these upādhis, that for all practical purposes, it’s part of them. They are fully conditioned by the upādhis, the limitations that make them perceive themselves as an individual, identify with a body, and of course, everything connected with the body.
So this is the real nature of soul. The soul is nothing but the supreme, the Brahman, the pure awareness, the consciousness, the essence of Being. But it is hemmed in by these upādhis, by these limitations that make it appear to be something that it’s not.
Yet, this is the interesting part: the nature of Brahman can never be covered over by anything. Because really, there is nothing but Brahman.
So, the soul is Brahman, plus upādhis that condition it into this state of an individual, a jīva, one who is born. So, what happens when the soul, this soul, this conditioned living entity, which is really the supreme living entity, but simply highly conditioned, what happens when this body becomes finished?
According to all spiritual philosophy, there are six changes: gestation, birth, growth, production of byproducts—either work or offspring or both—dwindling, and death. Everything that exists, everything that has beingness, the existence, has these six changes.
And so this is what causes saṃsāra, this constant transmigration from one body to another. And besides that, the specific type of transmigration is controlled by karma.
What is karma? Well, karma is our mental and emotional efforts to either resist or chase after certain kārmik results.
Actually, everything that happens in our life is foreordained. It’s destiny. It’s there in the birth chart, if you know how to read it. Everything that happens is fate. Everything that happens is going to happen and you can’t stop it from happening.
Nor can you make something else happen instead, because all that was determined by your previous actions in past lives and born along with you in this life, which is why the birth chart is so indicative of what will happen.
So, okay, the externals of life are predetermined and we’re just along for the ride. We’re just the observer, the passenger in this vehicle of the body. So then how do we generate new karma for the next life?
Well, it’s our attitude. It’s our attitude. If we resist or are greedy for the results of our actions, that is what creates the karma that becomes the next life. And how it works is through vāsanas.
You see, these thoughts of either resisting what is happening or wanting something else to happen are called desires, right? And desires are suffering. And any thought or perception accompanied by suffering becomes a vāsana, becomes a thought.
Some Scientologists call them engrams, right? Any kind of thought or perception accompanied by physical or mental pain or suffering becomes a vāsana and is stored in the mind in seed form.
We’ve talked about this before. And then when you encounter a situation that’s similar to a stored vāsana, it becomes active by process of association in the mind. And then you feel a mental pressure one way or the other, either to resist or to want something.
So these mental efforts and the vāsanas that are created by them and that often will spark them also, these create the kārmik seed. And at the end of life, when the whole life is sort of rewound and compressed and formed into a seed and leaves along with the subtle body, when the gross body is finished, that becomes the seed of the next life.
So it’s very simple. What do you remember at the time of death? You remember all the actions and attitudes of this life.
So this is the basis and rationale of sādhana.
You know, sādhana, the principles of sādhana are that you get up in the morning and immediately before you do anything else, you remember your mantra. And your mantra is an indication or an aspiration of where you want to go in the next life. The deity that you want to be associated with. And of course, that also implies a world where you want to appear.
Now, this is all discussed in great detail in Vedānta-sūtra and its commentaries. The problem is, nobody reads them. I started a series on Vedānta-sūtra a couple of years back. It got so few views that I just, you know, I just dropped it because it wasn’t worth the effort.
Now I’m starting to get some good comments from Zecho and others. So these are very stimulating to me to want to continue these series. But I don’t know if I’m ever going to do like a formal series on any scripture again, because they always lead to less views and fewer comments.
I don’t know what it is. People want to know the conclusions and the attitudes that lead towards liberation, but they don’t want to know the technical materials that show you how.
You know, this has always been like a head-scratcher for me. You know, everybody wants to hang out with somebody who’s enlightened. But when I start talking about how to get enlightened, they lose interest.
Anyway, sādhana is the process of reinforcing a certain type of vāsana, because sādhana always involves some kind of austerity. Okay, austerity means conscious or deliberate suffering. Like, “I’m going to chant so many rounds of my mantra before breakfast. I’m going to put off my breakfast to do my sādhana.”
So there’s a little bit of suffering; or one observes principles like truthfulness, non-stealing or non-violence, physical and emotional non-violence, verbal non-violence. These are all troublesome to some degree, because the body has a natural programming to want to defend itself.
So out of fear, we commit violence—you know, to other living entities like cows and other animals, for food; or we make remarks that are calculated to induce pain in others.
These things have to be given up to become a real sādhu. So how do we do that? Well, we have to make a mental effort, right? We have to counteract the vāsanas from past lives, or previous karma that push us in the direction of these violent acts. And we have to stop them before they become more than just a thought or more than just an impulse, before they become words or action.
So this is an austerity. This is painful. This is difficult. It’s an effort. An effort is ego. And ego is the sum total of all the vāsanas, who I am.
Okay, so when we make efforts to counteract the vāsanas, we create karma. And that karma draws us towards a future destination in our next life.
You see how this all works? It’s a machine. But it’s a machine that, if we know how it works, we can take control of, or at least we can influence it in the direction that we want.
We don’t want to be reborn on this earth planet, you know? What to speak of being reborn in an animal body or something like that. But what are the things that people think of all the time? Sex, food, winning—you know, beating the other guy—winning over your opponents and stuff like this. This is the kind of thoughts that people have.
So at the end of their life, when they’re about to leave the body, and the mind is rewound and compressed, it becomes a seed. And what is it full of? All those qualities of those thoughts they had their whole life. And this only leads to rebirth as a human being or lower.
But if for our whole life, or as much of our life as we have time, if we consciously create thoughts of higher quality, higher vibration, higher energy, see? then the cumulative effect of those thoughts at the end of life will take us higher.
And of course, the ultimate thing is to attain complete Self-realization and be beyond all this stuff completely. But this is very rare.
But even if one attains Self-realization, then as we’ve been over in earlier videos here, one does not have to simply disappear and merge with Brahman. There is a possibility to become an eternal individual in cooperation and identity, one with God, yet at the same time have one’s own separate form and identity and sphere of activities and so on.
And this is a very elaborate subject. We have gotten a little bit into it some time back. There was a series on rasa-tattva, which I’m going to put a link to here. And that’s a very deep, very elaborate subject. But it is how we determine our preference for the next life, what we would like to become.
And of course, we put a lot of energy, especially early in this channel, on the process of becoming: paṭicca-samuppāda. And that’s another series that you should watch on paṭicca-samuppāda, because it shows you how actually to become whatever you want to become.
If you want to become something better, greater, more intelligent and happier than you are now, then you have to follow this path of sādhana.
Āūṁ Tat Sat. Āūṁ Śakti Āūṁ.