The soul lives a thousand lives

EDITS | Saturday, November 22, 2008 | Email | Print |  The Pioneer The soul lives a thousand lives Mandakini Sankhdher Punarapi jananam punarapi maranam punarapi janani jathare shayanam... Here the Shankaracharya has stated the pathetic process of incarnation and reincarnation of the universe. To take birth is very painful, to live in the womb of mother in dirt and darkness, and to leave this samsara, to leave all near and dear ones is too sorrowful. That is why he says “Bhaj govindam … bhaj govindam mudhamate…”  How is a man reborn? It was first published in the 1970 July and August volumes of Prabuddha Bharata. The author, Swami Satprkashananda, was a senior monk of the Ramkrishna Order and the founder-head of the Vedanta Society of St Louis, USA. Reincarnation is not just a belief system but a definite science explaining our past and future lives. It even occurs regularly within our bodies during our own lifetime. Every seven years one’s body is rejuvenated completely. Right from the cells to the shape and size. Do we not grow from infancy to youth to middle age and then to old age? Yet the person I, the self within the body, remains the same. It never really grows old.  The Gita provides a beautiful and complete explanation of reincarnation. Not only Hinduism but all major religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam believe in the theory of reincarnation, expressing their ideas from time to time through their teachings. The idea of continued rebirth had first been taught in the west by Pythagoras who learned it from the ancient sages of India.  The world’s greatest thinkers have studied and expressed their convictions about this topic in very interesting ways. “I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, and that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence”, said Socrates. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The soul comes from within the human body, a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew… it passes into other habitations for the soul is immortal and the body is perishable.” Well known philosopher Leo Tolstoy thought that one’s present life was made up of thousands of dreams and that such a life was one of many such thousands of lives which one entered from the other more real life and then returned after death. And so life goes on endlessly, until one merges into the the last real life — the life of god.  source