The Reality and Unreality of Rebirth | Prof. Jeffery Long

[SPEAKER_02]: good morning and Namaste.
[SPEAKER_02]: We are so happy to welcome back as our speaker today, a dear and respected friend of our society, Dr. Jeffrey D. Lau, he is a call W. Ziegler professor of religion, philosophy, and Asian studies at Elizabeth Town College in Pennsylvania, where he has talked since
[SPEAKER_02]: He has written many books and articles, including Hinduism in America, a convergence of worlds which won the Rajendra and Jyoti Gandhi Award for Theology, Philosophy and Critical Engagement in 2022.
[SPEAKER_02]: His latest book is
[SPEAKER_02]: discovering Indian philosophy and introduction to Hindu, Jain and Buddhist thought.
[SPEAKER_02]: This year, he has published through Oxford University Press, a volume of Hindu primary sources with his colleague Dr. Ravi Gupta.
[SPEAKER_02]: He has spoken at a wide variety of venues, both national and international, including three presentations at the United Nations.
[SPEAKER_02]: He has also been interviewed for PBS documentary on the life and teachings of Swami Vivekananda.
[SPEAKER_02]: And for the history channel series, holy marvels.
[SPEAKER_02]: Dr. Long took initiation into Vedant tradition in the year 2005.
[SPEAKER_02]: and is a popular and frequent speaker at Vedanta societies across the United States.
[SPEAKER_02]: The subject of his talk today is the reality and unreality of rebirth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for your very kind welcome.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always a great joy to be speaking here at the Vedanta Society of New York.
[SPEAKER_00]: The original Vedanta Society, the first started by Swami Vivekananda in 1894, not in this building, but there's the institutional continuity.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's always a great honor to speak here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I always feel that I'm with family when I'm here with all of you.
[SPEAKER_00]: So thank you very, very much for inviting me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let us begin with a short prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sardavadeva Devi Svarupaya Sri Ramakrishna Anamaha.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sardavadharma Svarupanyai Sri Ramakrishna Anamaha.
[SPEAKER_00]: I review Sri Ramakrishna who embodies the essence of all dayities.
[SPEAKER_00]: I review Sri Ramakrishna who embodies the essence of all religions.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm speaking today on the reality and on the reality of rebirth.
[SPEAKER_00]: This topic of rebirth is something that's fascinated me for most of my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And something I've given a good deal of thought to.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I was asked to speak here again, and I'm always grateful to be asked.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd like to revisit this topic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's a great joy for me to share my thoughts with you today.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, when we're here on a kind of very wintery morning, you know, to talk about death, seems a bit on the nose, but we're also talking about rebirth, every talking about life, and, you know, it's interesting in the Confucian tradition.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a belief, and this is connected with the concepts of Yen and Yung, that at the height of summer and when you have everything, all the trees are green, everything is blooming.
[SPEAKER_00]: That it's appropriate then actually to remember that all this will pass away and to think of death.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that it's also appropriate in the middle of winter when everything is cold and, you know, the plants, they're not dead, but there is sleep.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's appropriate then to encourage ourselves in the thinking of life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because these two go together, life and death, rebirth, renewal, and then the passing away, these go together.
[SPEAKER_00]: But death is a very hard experience for us to cope with, and for us to have to go through, but we all have to go through it at some point.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I made that on the terrace with the founder of the Artius Samaj once said the following about loss.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said in life, loss is inevitable.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone knows this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet in the core of most people, it remains deeply denied.
[SPEAKER_00]: This should not happen to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is for this reason that loss is the most difficult challenge one has to face as a human being.
[SPEAKER_00]: Laws, especially the loss of our loved ones to the death of the physical body, as well as our own inevitable departure from this life, is indeed one of the definitive features of our existence on the material plane, and it's certainly the most difficult to accept and to process psychologically and emotionally.
[SPEAKER_00]: Indeed, I suspect that death is the single most important factor that first prompted human beings to develop religious beliefs and practices.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our views about death help us understand and cope with this universal phenomenon.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the wise hero, you just are, observes in the Mahabharata.
[SPEAKER_00]: Precisely because death is so hard to face, we human beings typically prefer to pretend it will never occur.
[SPEAKER_00]: One asks by the Yaksha, what is the greatest wonder in the world you disjured or replies?
[SPEAKER_00]: Day after day, countless beings go to the abode of death.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet those who remain believe themselves to be immortal.
[SPEAKER_00]: What can be a greater wonder than this?
[SPEAKER_00]: Rare indeed is the person who can face death with the good humor of the famously argumentative founder of the Bramo Samaj Ramohan Roy, who once wrote, just consider how terrible the day of your death will be.
[SPEAKER_00]: Others will go on speaking and you will not be able to argue back.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a very apt observation in our era of social media.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Buddha says in the first chapter of the Dhamma-pada, that verses on Dhamma, for one who is mindful of death, there is no enmity.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are wise words indeed, but what is the connection between death and enmity?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why should remaining mindful of death keep us from feeling emotions like hatred and animosity?
[SPEAKER_00]: When reflecting on these words,
[SPEAKER_00]: I cannot help but recall my last interaction with my father during his all-to-brief lifetime.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a summer evening and I was getting ready to go and play at a friend's house.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was 12 years old at the time and I was going to be writing my bicycle.
[SPEAKER_00]: My father who'd been injured in a devastating accident a year and a half before was concerned for my safety.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said to me, be careful writing your bike.
[SPEAKER_00]: Feeling the sentiment behind his words and being moved by it, I said, as I left the house, I love you dead, he replied, I love you too, son.
[SPEAKER_00]: Later that evening, as the sun set and I got back home from my friend's house, I found out that he was gone, he had passed away.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've always been grateful that my last interaction with my father was a shared expression of love.
[SPEAKER_00]: What if we'd been having an argument when I left the house?
[SPEAKER_00]: What if our last words to one another were angry words?
[SPEAKER_00]: You always think of that stereotypical, you know, the kid says, I hate you and slams the door and walks when I go, what if I had done that?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think I could have forgiven myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: For this reason, I've become a big believer in the words of St. Paul when he writes, do not let the sun go down on your anger.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's from his letter to the Ephesians.
[SPEAKER_00]: I always do my best to ensure that my last interaction with a person.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if I'm having a dip-disegreement with them, it's pleasant and kind.
[SPEAKER_00]: For we never know when the last thing that we say to a person might really be the last thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: We, of course, don't have any control over what the other person says or does.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to pretend that my last interactions with everyone have all been pleasant, but I try to ensure that that's not on me, that's the choice of the other person.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can choose how we will speak and act and do our best to ensure that we have no regrets where that person is concerned.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we lose someone that we love, there's a void left in our lives that cannot be filled.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not to say that we cannot learn to cope and accept what has happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's indeed essential that we do so for our own sanity, but also because if we're committed to the path of truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore, to deny the enormity of death would be a lie.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this lie, like all lies, is costly in the long run.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we repress or refuse our grief and live, as Udhisthira says, as though we think ourselves immortal, we're harming ourselves by not allowing ourselves to feel what has happened in its fullness, and to learn and grow from the experience, and go beyond it, painful though this process is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, our loved ones would want us to accept the reality of what has happened to them, and carry on with our lives, fulfilling the purpose for which we were born.
[SPEAKER_00]: Having lost many loved ones in my life thus far, I've come to believe that it is never easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pain does not go away, but one learns to live with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This reflection reminds me of the beautiful Sanskrit film, some of you might have seen, Ashankara Charya.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's actually movie in Sanskrit, which is a wonderful thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: In this film, the character of Ashankara, the founder of Advaita Vedanta, and of the Dasyanami monastic order to which our Ramakrishna order is closely connected, is accompanied throughout his life by two figures, which represent death and wisdom.
[SPEAKER_00]: Muitathyo and Yana, respectively.
[SPEAKER_00]: As long as we are in this life,
[SPEAKER_00]: All those whom we know and love will eventually succumb to it as we someday will ourselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we learn to understand and accept this reality, we will grow in wisdom, wisdom will also be our constant companion, and will move ever closer to comprehending the meaning of Shankarajaya's teaching.
[SPEAKER_00]: Brahma-sathyam-jaghan-mithya, the infinite ground of being is the ultimate truth, in comparison with which the world is a dreamlike illusion.
[SPEAKER_00]: All things must pass.
[SPEAKER_00]: The infinite alone is real.
[SPEAKER_00]: As painful as it is to realize that we shall all pass away, it need not lead us to live despondent and gloomy lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the contrary, it can be a liberating realization, leading us to the conviction that we should not waste a single moment, that we should cherish the presence of those we love while we have them with us, and that we should avoid as much as we can, letting the sun go down on our anger.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the questions that the experience of loss prompts in our minds is, of course, what happens after we die?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is one of the biggest of the universal, big philosophical questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is also, like other such questions, a topic of ongoing debate, a debate that I think I'm highly unlikely to resolve today.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I want to suggest that there are good reasons for accepting the classical Indian teaching of rebirth, Poonajanma, refer to frequently in the Western world as reincarnation, and less frequently as trans-migration or by its Greek name, Metamacecosis.
[SPEAKER_00]: The following argument is not intended to disrespect those who hold other views.
[SPEAKER_00]: But to establish why many of us do find rebirth to be the best answer to this question.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the very least, I want to establish that it is as reasonable of you as any other.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe more.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vedanta teaches that our true body, our true nature, rather, is not the body, but the Atma, the deathless self.
[SPEAKER_00]: It teaches us further that the deathless self is identical to Brahman, the infinite ground of all being.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope to show that this perspective can incorporate the salient insights expressed by other points of view on the topic of death.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, what I will say here is highly unlikely to persuade those who are committed to other perspectives.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of us finally need to come up with our own answers to this question.
[SPEAKER_00]: That will help us each to reconcile ourselves with death.
[SPEAKER_00]: My goal is not to persuade, but to show the inner logic of the Vedantic perspective and explain why I take it to be true.
[SPEAKER_00]: The answers given to the question, what happens after we die, very as much as do the people who ask and seek to answer this question.
[SPEAKER_00]: We each have our own worldview of which our views on the afterlife form a part, often a quite an important and integral part.
[SPEAKER_00]: What Mahan McGonney once said about religions is equally true on views of the afterlife.
[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, in reality, there are as many religions as there are individuals.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's true of views of the afterlife.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like religions, though, views on the afterlife can be clustered into groups based on certain core affinities that they share.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're tend to be four basic types of answer to the question of what happens after we die.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each of these answers has its particular strengths, as well as raising certain critical questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to look at both the strengths and the critical questions raised by each of these four approaches to the afterlife.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first of these answers, which we can call agnosticism, involves saying that we don't know what happens after we die.
[SPEAKER_00]: The afterlife is a mystery, no definitive answer to this question has been given, if by definitive we mean an answer on which all right thinking people agree, that has not happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, many wise people have diverse views on this topic.
[SPEAKER_00]: Given that no answer commands universal as sent, perhaps the safest thing to say about the afterlife is that we don't know if it exists or not.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if it does, we do not know of what it consists.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are what I would call soft or open versions of agnosticism, as well as hard or closed versions.
[SPEAKER_00]: A soft agnosticism affirms that we do not yet know what happens after we die, but is open to the possibility that this might not always be the case.
[SPEAKER_00]: We do not know the answer to this question at present, but we might know it someday, and we will presumably all know it after we die, if knowing is the kind of thing that survives the death of the body,
[SPEAKER_00]: A hard agnosticism affirms not only that we do not know the answer to this question, but that we will never know it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That the nature of the afterlife or even whether such a thing exists is just not the kind of thing that's available to the human mind to know.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second type of answer to this question is a physicalist or materialist answer, which in essence denies the reality of an afterlife.
[SPEAKER_00]: At least of the kind that's conceived in religious traditions.
[SPEAKER_00]: According to this perspective, consciousness is an effective neurochemistry.
[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore, when the brain ceases to function, we, what we generally think of as ourselves, the mind-body complex, simply ceases to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: The third type of answer is that our embodied lifetime is followed by an afterlife that will continue forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: In many ancient cultures that consist of a shadowy existence in an after world, like the Irabus or Hades of the Greco-Roman religions, or the Shaeo of the Hebrew Bible, or the realm of the ancestors in countless indigenous traditions.
[SPEAKER_00]: In contemporary religions like Christianity and Islam, it consists of an eternity of either paradise or damnation, depending on the moral quality of one soul at death.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the breach between oneself and God been healed by our acceptance of the divine grace, or by obeying the divine commandments, or his one died in a state of rebellion against the Supreme Being.
[SPEAKER_00]: The answers to these questions will determine whether one spends a blissfully
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, the fourth type of answer is the one that affirms the concept of rebirth.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the idea that we are not simply identical with our physical bodies, that we are instead spiritual beings who reside only temporarily in such forms, identifying with them over the course of a lifetime, and then moving on to another physical vehicle, when our current one sees his defunction.
[SPEAKER_00]: In most forms of this model of the afterlife, certainly those which developed in India, the ultimate aim of life is to attain a state of freedom from rebirth, from a material existence in which the pain of separation and loss is inevitable in our moments of happiness are temporary.
[SPEAKER_00]: As was beautifully expressed in the song that was I'm before we started the program.
[SPEAKER_00]: So one of the strengths and weaknesses of these various models of the afterlife.
[SPEAKER_00]: Turning first to agnosticism, we can say that it's clear as strength is its refreshing honesty.
[SPEAKER_00]: For its true that none of the models of the afterlife that have been proposed can be said to command anything close to universal ascent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Humility is an essential component to the philosophical quest.
[SPEAKER_00]: What we do not know about most topics is vastly more than what we know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our knowledge has a horizon, a limit beyond which we can only speculate, and we need to be honest about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: But his death, identical with the horizon of our knowledge, is it impossible to know what might be beyond it?
[SPEAKER_00]: I've personally found that many people who insist that one cannot know what happens after we die.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not the ones who say, well, we don't know now, but we might know eventually.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ones who insist, no, this is not noble, are often not aware of the vast literature on this topic, some of which I'll be mentioning.
[SPEAKER_00]: While we must admit what we do not know and be careful to differentiate between what we know with certainty and what we merely lean strongly toward based on available evidence and argument, we can also recognize that the claim that we cannot know something might arise from a desire not to know it.
[SPEAKER_00]: A desire that arises ultimately from a fear of what the answers might be, and how these answers might affect how we live our lives here and now.
[SPEAKER_00]: One might say that the heart or close diagnostic, in effect, chooses to leave the conversation about what happens after we die before it has ever begun.
[SPEAKER_00]: If this sounds harsh, I'll just say that I saw this happen once.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was in a group of friends, and we started talking about the afterlife, and the very topic upset someone so much that they just...
[SPEAKER_00]: left, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not to criticize the harder-closed agnostic, where it's highly likely that such a refusal to engage with the question of the afterlife comes from a profound pain of loss, as well as the profound fear that it's certainly a rational response to the thought of our own death.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we shall see, the answers to this question do have implications for our present existence, some of which are quite radical, and in fact, I think, especially the Vedantic answer, probably has the most radical implications for our existence here and now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Turning next to the physicalist or materialist responses, the chief strength of the view that there is no afterlife is that it draws our attention to just how precious our current lifetime is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone who denies the reality of an afterlife can be just as committed to the idea of not letting the sun go down on one's anger or as someone who believes in an afterlife.
[SPEAKER_00]: Indeed, the idea of there being no afterlife can arguably underscore the importance of parting with our loved ones on good terms.
[SPEAKER_00]: For if our most recent interaction with them turns out to be the last, it really is the last, if there is no afterlife.
[SPEAKER_00]: No opportunity to meet with them in heaven or in a future rebirth.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've lost our chance to make things right with them, to let them know how we really feel, and to receive their love and return.
[SPEAKER_00]: If all the remains of us is a memory, we want that memory to be a good one, that can sustain our loved ones until their own inevitable demise.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the saying goes, we should live each moment as though it were our last, because it just might be
[SPEAKER_00]: On the other hand, one of my teachers in graduate school, the renowned ethicist, Frank Ronigamel, is fond of saying, quote, if nothing matters ultimately, nothing ultimately matters.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the important roles that a philosophical worldview plays is to provide a conceptual grounding for our ethical intuitions.
[SPEAKER_00]: If conventional forms of materialism are true, then it becomes difficult to see how our beliefs about right and wrong, good and bad justice and injustice can have any ultimate grounding beyond human preference or social convention.
[SPEAKER_00]: are our moral intuitions simply a matter of taste.
[SPEAKER_00]: This seems a thin basis on which to build a society.
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine being in court and saying, Well, it doesn't really matter whether I'm guilty or innocent, because this is all just your opinion.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not going to get you very far with the judge most of the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, we want something firmer to ground our sense that some things are truly right, some things are truly wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, a materialist can respond that our moral intuitions have evolutionary value, that we've succeeded as much as we have as a species, because we've developed attributes such as compassion and empathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this response would only seem to push the question to a different level.
[SPEAKER_00]: For why does our species ultimately matter?
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to underscore that my argument that materialism leaves us without a strong basis for ethics is not an argument about the moral qualities of those who hold this view.
[SPEAKER_00]: Certainly one can be deeply compassionate and make profound contributions to the causes of peace and justice while being a materialist.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I can think of countless examples including very dear friends of mine.
[SPEAKER_00]: My point is not the materialist lack of morality, they don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I think many materialists are highly evolved souls, and a lot of them have rejected beliefs about the afterlife, as well as religion generally, because of the abuses that these things have enabled in many cases in history.
[SPEAKER_00]: My point is that the satisfactory worldview, at least from my perspective, is one that can support all of our intuitions, moral, aesthetic, metaphysical, and so on, and not render them arbitrary conventions.
[SPEAKER_00]: If in the end, the answer to a question is well because I said so, we really haven't answered the question, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Setting aside our quest for such a worldview would seem to be a dead end for philosophical inquiry.
[SPEAKER_00]: Emmanuel Kant famously argues for the afterlife as what he calls a postulate of practical reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: What he means is that if we believe in morality, if we believe in justice and in right and wrong, then in the face of the demonstrably unjust world in which we live, it is reasonable to conclude that there is a time or place in which the scales of justice are balanced, where good is rewarded, and where evil is shown the error of its ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: Conted in mind, the Christian model of heaven and hell, but his argument can be applied to any concept of the afterlife.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, and I'm agreement with the great German sociologist Max Weber on this point, it works exceptionally well with the concept of rebirth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Phosphor of religion, John Hicks, states that materialism is called bad news for the many.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's referring to the fact that the vast majority of human beings have led lives full of suffering and injustice.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lives that have been in the words of the political phosphor Thomas Hobbs, Nasty Brutation Short.
[SPEAKER_00]: If there is no justice in the afterlife, if there's nothing vastly better for suffering beings to look forward to beyond death, then the world is a truly cruel and heartless place.
[SPEAKER_00]: A materialist could of course respond that yes, it is, this is the case, the universe is indifferent to our hopes for justice, and this is simply a hard truth that we must accept.
[SPEAKER_00]: Such a view might motivate us to bring as much joy and relieve as much suffering as we can during our brief time on earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, this is what I typically see in among people who hold this view.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as the evidence for materialism so overwhelming as to compel us to accept this bleak conclusion, I'd like to suggest that it is not.
[SPEAKER_00]: First, there's what philosopher David Chambers calls the hard problem of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why are we conscious?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why does consciousness exist at all?
[SPEAKER_00]: Michael Paul and hopefully describes a conscious being as one about whom we can meaningfully ask what it's like to be that being.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's in fact quoting from another philosopher Thomas Nagel when he brings this up.
[SPEAKER_00]: a being who is possessed of the capacity for experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can say that consciousness at its most basic is what it's like to experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: But how did this quality come to be?
[SPEAKER_00]: Conventional materialism is committed to the idea that non-experiencing matter is primary, that the fundamental basis of everything that exists is unconscious matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are, of course, other types of materialism that see consciousness as intrinsic to matter, which brings us very close to Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, Swami Vivekananda once said, well, the materialists call it matter, I call it Brahmin, but we're talking about the same thing, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you define matter in a certain way, then, yeah, we're material.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, material is interesting, the Latin root of it goes back to Mata to Mother, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything is Mata, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We would embrace that idea quite happily.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we're not saying that Ma is not experiencing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm speaking of the widespread philosophical perspective that's taken by many today to be the scientific perspective.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this is actually problematic assumption.
[SPEAKER_00]: Science can do just fine without this assumption.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, maybe a little better as I go to outline here.
[SPEAKER_00]: If not experiencing or purely physical unconscious matter is fundamental, this raises the question of how conscious experience beings have emerged.
[SPEAKER_00]: The standard materialist view on this topic is that consciousness is an effective processes occurring in the brain and effective neurochemistry.
[SPEAKER_00]: To be sure, there have been massive advances in neuroscience over the last few decades.
[SPEAKER_00]: The brain has been very thoroughly mapped.
[SPEAKER_00]: We now know that damaging a certain part of your brain will make you lose your capacity for language, and that stimulating another part of your brain will make you smell popcorn.
[SPEAKER_00]: What has not been discovered, though, is the precise process by which consciousness asks such a curse.
[SPEAKER_00]: We cannot yet pinpoint what exactly happens when an entity goes from being a piece of dead matter to being an entity who experiences, an entity about which we can ask what it's like to be that entity.
[SPEAKER_00]: We do not know then when exactly this transition occurs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Neuroscience shows us that the brain is very intimately connected with the shape of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is not yet shown is that the brain produces consciousness rather than expressing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: materialist thinkers argue that it's only a matter of time before this question is solved, that like other things we've learned about the brain with sufficient research will eventually learn how it generates consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: According to this perspective, there is no hard problem of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're just degrees of easy problems of consciousness, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Relatively easy, easy meaning intensive neuroscience of a research, but it then it's a research question.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a philosophical question.
[SPEAKER_00]: Charmers, though disagrees, claiming that explaining how consciousness occurs at all is a question of a different order from explaining how shifts occur within a consciousness that already exists.
[SPEAKER_00]: Explaining consciousness as such is quite different from explaining why I am conscious or not conscious of X at a given point of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we look to physics, we find that a new paradigm is emerging, that raises profound questions about conventional materialism.
[SPEAKER_00]: Developments in quantum theory suggest a picture of reality in which the role of measurement is fundamental.
[SPEAKER_00]: Measurement is something we do.
[SPEAKER_00]: The famous double-slit experiment, for example, points to a picture of the physical world in which the active observation is inseparable from the phenomena that are observed.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are some philosophers and physicists, certainly not all, but a few, right, a significant few, who have taken this to suggest that consciousness may be intrinsic to the nature of existence, rather than a late and accidental product of unconscious matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: This view is, of course, logically consistent with the teaching of Vedanta, which anticipated such a view long before the rise of modern science, that the infinite ground of all being, that from which we all have emerged, is consciousness, as succinctly stated in the Mahavaka,
[SPEAKER_00]: The hard problem of consciousness from a Vedantic point of view is simply an effective asking the wrong question.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we assume that non-conscious matter is fundamental, the existence of consciousness becomes a problem to be solved, well then how did we get consciousness?
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we instead take consciousness to be fundamental, we can make the much less difficult move of seeing matter as a projection of consciousness, as a mode in which consciousness experiences itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: akin to what we experience in a dream, right, when we're having a dream, we're perceiving matter, right, we're seeing objects and hearing things.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are material sensory kinds of experiences, but we're not claiming that those are objects that are in sense its made of some unconscious substance, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: They're projections of our awareness.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if consciousness is intrinsic to the nature of reality,
[SPEAKER_00]: as psychologists Jim Tucker argues in his book Return to Life, then and after life becomes a very real possibility.
[SPEAKER_00]: Rather than producing consciousness, we can conceive of the brain as a receiver, as an instrument which links a center of consciousness, a jiva or soul to the physical world, enabling us to interact with the physical world.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the point where we plug in to the matrix, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the brain.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the brain dies, this does not mean the consciousness ceases.
[SPEAKER_00]: It simply unlinks the physical body and goes elsewhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: But where does it go?
[SPEAKER_00]: Does it go to a single afterlife or rebirth in another physical form?
[SPEAKER_00]: So this brings us to our next afterlife model.
[SPEAKER_00]: A very widely held view, especially in the Western world, is that our earthly life is followed by an eternity in either heaven or hell.
[SPEAKER_00]: This view has many strings that make it deeply reassuring for those who hold it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It offers forms of hope that materialism cannot easily provide.
[SPEAKER_00]: First, there's of course the reassurance that our loved ones have not ceased to exist after death, and Norshawi.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is even possible perhaps even likely that we will eventually reunite.
[SPEAKER_00]: Secondly, there's the question of justice.
[SPEAKER_00]: And after life offers the kind of justice of which Emmanuel Kant and John Hickab both spoken.
[SPEAKER_00]: A realm where wrongs are righted, where goodness is rewarded, and where evil is shown to be the error that it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: The view of a single afterlife, however, liked materialism, raises difficulties.
[SPEAKER_00]: In many respects, these difficulties are the mirror image of those raised by materialism, whereas materialism denies the survival of consciousness altogether.
[SPEAKER_00]: The one after-life model affirms survival but fixes the destiny of the soul forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I may anticipate where I'm headed with this argument, I'm going to suggest that rebirth offers a kind of middle path that's able to address both the sets of difficulties with these other two models.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what are the difficulties of the one-after-life model?
[SPEAKER_00]: One difficulty, which materialists often raise and objecting to any kind of afterlife, is that an eternal existence would be pointless.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's precisely the finitude of our lives, they argue, that lens urgency and meaning to our choices.
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine a book, a movie, or a song that never ended.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you might have read some books and seen some movies and heard some songs that you thought were never going to end, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: What would eventually happen?
[SPEAKER_00]: It would become boring.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would have no point simply moving from one section to the next.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, if it's a book, it might contain episodes, if it's a movie, it might contain scenes, if it's a song, it might contain movements, that one might enjoy and find deeply meaningful.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, it's precisely their finite self-contained nature that would make these segments what they are.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is reminded of a great episode of the series The Twilight Zone.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the best TV series ever made, episode titled a nice place to visit, and which a criminal dies and goes to a place that he thinks is heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: While he's there, he goes to parties, he gambles and he always wins, he pursues women romantically and they always fall for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything goes his way.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it's going to be this way forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: He turns to his guide in the afterlife and complains that there's no unpredictability, and that he would not even mind getting a glimpse at the other place, at hell, just to end the monotony of heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, of course, we're coming near the end of a twilight zone episode, so it's going to be a twist, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: At this moment, his guide delivers the final punchline.
[SPEAKER_00]: Heaven?
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever gave you idea that you're in heaven, this is the other place, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So hell is just the same thing over and over and over and over.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, even if it's a pleasant thing, the first few hundred times, but it gets old.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another difficulty with the one after-life model is the idea of hell specifically.
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea of eternal damnation would seem to rest on the assumption that one can be so evil as to be beyond the pale of divine grace.
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, it seems to be based on the idea that God gives up on us at some point.
[SPEAKER_00]: This would seem to be inconsistent with the idea that God is infinite love, as taught in the Christian tradition.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also consistent in consistent with the idea of God is infinitely just.
[SPEAKER_00]: For an eternity of damnation is vastly disproportional to a single human lifetime, even a lifetime devoted to the most vile depravities.
[SPEAKER_00]: One can conceive of hells that last a very long time, maybe even billions upon billions of years, and we see these in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions.
[SPEAKER_00]: For those who are responsible for maliciously and deliberately bringing massive suffering upon others, such as through genocide and warfare.
[SPEAKER_00]: But even billions or trillions of years are an infinitesimal blip compared with eternity.
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea of an eternal hell also operates with an understanding of punishment as retributive rather than rehabilitative.
[SPEAKER_00]: One would expect a just and loving God to desire our perfection, to want us to become our very best.
[SPEAKER_00]: One could then see the various difficulties we experience in life as challenging obstacles that we need to overcome for our character to improve.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what Swami Vivekananda refers to when he speaks of the world as a grand moral gymnasium, where we have all to take exercise so as to become stronger and stronger spiritually.
[SPEAKER_00]: And eternal hell, however, with no end, is not a punishment that can lead to our betterment.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's simply pain with no purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: Punishment without the possibility of transformation is difficult to reconcile with a God of infinite love.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we add to this the idea that God created us,
[SPEAKER_00]: while possessing the foreknowledge that we would choose evil rather than good, thus leading us to suffer forever, and then when I had and created us anyway, we're left with a disturbing picture of a deity whose goodness becomes very difficult to understand or even affirm.
[SPEAKER_00]: This picture of hell becomes even more troubling when we consider that some versions of this model identify being in a state of divine grace with adhering to a particular religious tradition.
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, whole swaths of humanity come to be damned eternally, not for committing any grave moral wrong, but for adhering to the religion to which their conscience has guided them, usually the religion of their ancestors.
[SPEAKER_00]: As John Hickus pointed out, such a view makes salvation apparent less like the result of moral or spiritual growth, and more like an accident of birth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, someone got lucky, they were born into the right religion, too bad for the
[SPEAKER_00]: Happily, there are models of hell in the Abrahamic religions that do manage to avoid these difficulties.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I raise the question of eternal damnation with Islamic scholars, they have emphasized that only God decides how long one is in hell.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the concept of a temporary punishment does exist.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've asked this question multiple times to friends who study Islam and often who practice Islam.
[SPEAKER_00]: I say, well, you believe in an eternal hell and they all say the same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's up to God.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's up to, so, God who is compassionate and merciful might say, okay, you've suffered enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: That possibility is there.
[SPEAKER_00]: That door is left open.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the Christian tradition, the great theologian Oregon argues that one must see an eternal hell as a logical possibility that a being with free will could conceivably refuse the divine grace add in finitum.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, if that's not true, then we don't truly have freedom.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he also holds out the possibility, and I love the way Oregon says this,
[SPEAKER_00]: and that even Satan himself might yet seek divine forgiveness.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we do have models of this that are not as harsh as the ones that tend to predominate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another difficulty with the one after life model arises with at least some versions of the concept of heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we've talked about hell, but what about heaven?
[SPEAKER_00]: This difficulty is a mirror image of the difficulty with hell.
[SPEAKER_00]: For if eternal damnation does not allow for spiritual transformation and eventual salvation, there are versions of heaven in which salvation follows from a single act of repentance.
[SPEAKER_00]: While such an understanding emphasizes divine mercy, it does not seem to take divine justice into account.
[SPEAKER_00]: Justice would seem to require not only forgiveness, but transformation.
[SPEAKER_00]: For forgiveness without transformation leaves the moral of the universe, what our Hindu tradition calls Dharma incomplete.
[SPEAKER_00]: One would like to see an afterlife in which those who have done harm to other living beings are able to atone for the harm they've done.
[SPEAKER_00]: Indeed one would expect that a being who's truly repentant of the evil they have done would want to make such atonement.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would want to repair the damage that they've done to the universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea of purgatory found in the Roman Catholic tradition goes some distance toward addressing this concern.
[SPEAKER_00]: Purgatory, once described to me by a Catholic priest as God's waiting room, is the immediate afterlife destination of souls who are in a state of grace, who are on their way ultimately to salvation, but who still have work to do in terms of spiritual transformation.
[SPEAKER_00]: In purgatory, this work is carried out.
[SPEAKER_00]: The soul is purified, that's what purgatory means.
[SPEAKER_00]: Related to our word purgation, it's purified after some period of atonement of doing the work it needs to do in order to be made perfect.
[SPEAKER_00]: And is then received into the fullness of the divine presence.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'm talking about the work that souls need to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not worth not worth either that work in the sense in which I'm using the term is an excellent translation for karma.
[SPEAKER_00]: For purgatory raises the question if we still have work to do after this life before sending to our next goal, what was the point of this life?
[SPEAKER_00]: What role does our earthly existence play in the journey of the soul?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why did we have to spend all this time on the earthly plane and not just, let's just start in purgatory and start working toward a purification?
[SPEAKER_00]: One possible answer to this question of course is that we are in purgatory.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes I've had students say what's the afterlife like I say look around you.
[SPEAKER_00]: This world is indeed the karma of whom he, the realm in which we do the work that we need to do in order to reach our ultimate goal of union with the infinite.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we simply continue being reborn in this realm until our work is complete.
[SPEAKER_00]: This brings us finally to the concept of rebirth or reincarnation.
[SPEAKER_00]: In this model of the afterlife when the body dies, the soul, the Jiva, and Vedantic terminology continues on and takes rebirth in the form suited to its current state of spiritual development.
[SPEAKER_00]: In this model, we are not bodies that have souls, we are souls that have bodies.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the words of Arvin Sharma, we are not human beings having a spiritual adventure, we are spiritual beings having a human adventure, and we have taken this human form temporarily.
[SPEAKER_00]: The rebirth model addresses many of the difficulties encountered in the other views we've examined.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, it does not give rise to the hard problem of consciousness, which confronts materialism.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it addresses the question of justice raised by Kant and Hick in ways that avoid the problems of the one after life model.
[SPEAKER_00]: A possible criticism of this model is that it does not avoid the problem of the meaningless boredom of eternity, but simply postpones it.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the final goal of most traditions that affirm the idea of rebirth is liberation from the rebirth process, resulting in a state of eternal bliss.
[SPEAKER_00]: But with this bliss not be as boring as the heavens posited in other traditions.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dante, it seems, can avoid this particular problem with its teaching that the state we will experience after liberation is not an unending infinite stretch of time, but a state utterly beyond the concepts of time, space, and causation.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a state, in other words, that is literally inconceivable to our finite intellects.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if what we're boring, it would hardly be the desirable state described by Vedantic
[SPEAKER_00]: Liberation is not endless time, it is freedom from time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I cannot help but be reminded of an exchange I once heard of between the swammy who was giving a talk and a member of his audience.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone in the audience said, what monk should be boring?
[SPEAKER_00]: The Swami promptly responded, you're boring, and moved on to the next question.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a silly question, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would be all be aiming at this if it's boring, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Another criticism of this model was that it has been used to justify various kinds of social injustice.
[SPEAKER_00]: The concept of karma in particular arguably involves a blame the victim mentality in which, because living beings, because we suffer because of our own past actions,
[SPEAKER_00]: It's sometimes assumed that we have no responsibility to help alleviate the suffering of others.
[SPEAKER_00]: Provedic of Rajaprana, who just spoke here last week, response to this beautifully in her little book, Vedanta, a simple introduction.
[SPEAKER_00]: She says, quote, if a person's karma is such that he or she is suffering, we have an opportunity to alleviate that suffering in whatever way we can.
[SPEAKER_00]: doing so would be good karma.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can always offer a helping hand or at least a kind word.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we choose not to do whatever is an unlimited power to alleviate the pain of those around us, we're chalking up bad karma for ourselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, we're really hurting ourselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that an idea can be misused to support unjust social systems, or to justify our own laziness in difference or malice toward others, does not mean that the idea itself is false.
[SPEAKER_00]: It underscores rather than need to understand and apply the idea correctly as it's understood within the worldview in which it exists logically.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Rajaprana nicely conveys the world view that gives meaning to the Vedantic of Karma, citing again her Vedanta simple introduction, quote, One-ness is the law of the universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that truth is the real root of all acts of love and compassion.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Atman, my true self, is the same spirit that dwells in all.
[SPEAKER_00]: There cannot be two Atmans.
[SPEAKER_00]: Consciousness cannot be divided, it's all pervasive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Myotman and yourotman cannot be different.
[SPEAKER_00]: For that reason, Vedanta says, and this is one of my favorite lines of Rajaprana, love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, a very common objection to the idea of rebirth is that people do not remember their past lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: If there's no evidence for an idea being the case, then however, logically, attractive it may be.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if it addresses the objections raised toward all its alternatives, it's not persuasive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone could hear what I've presented up to this point and say, OK, this idea makes more sense than the others, but
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it true?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do we have any reason other than that it looks nice to find this persuasive?
[SPEAKER_00]: Simply wanting something to be true does not make it so.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, and this is a very big however, there are people who at least appear to remember elements of past lives, having access to information that they did not obtain through conventional means, through mechanistic means, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Psychologist Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia collected thousands of cases of children over the course of his career who could narrate events which occurred before their birth.
[SPEAKER_00]: things which happened to people with whom they had no connection and about which they did not read or about which they were not told by anyone else.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this knowledge is something that they they just seem to have been born with.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stevenson researched these cases and discovered that in a substantial number of them, the events narrated by the children, did in fact occur as the children narrated them.
[SPEAKER_00]: they were narrated by them accurately.
[SPEAKER_00]: This work has been continued by Jim Tucker who's come to see them as suggestive of rebirth.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think probably one of the most powerful of these cases.
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw this this was featured on NBC Nightly News many years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's a short clip if you want to look at others that there was a little boy.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's grown up now and in Ryan Hammond's who had Not only incredibly detailed memory of The life of another person someone whose life was not well-known.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't narrated on the internet.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not something you know
[SPEAKER_00]: They had to do some research and find out who is this person he's describing and he had all kinds of details They got over 50 details that he had gotten in and when this person was finally discovered If someone who had been named Martin Martin Martin Martin Martin Martin Martin Martin Martin Martin Martin Martin Martin Martin yet another person that someone I know actually there's a there's a mighty Martin
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... he was a Hollywood agent and uh... that this little boy had all kinds of accurate memories of of his of this man and there was one which Jim Tucker noted which seemed to be incorrect because uh... the little boy talked about dying at the age of uh... i think it was sixty one or six some early sixties
[SPEAKER_00]: And according to Marty Martin's death certificate, he had been 59 when he died.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Tucker said, well, that's not accurate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything else is right, but this one thing's not right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So does that invalidate the case?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then Marty Martin's daughter is explained that no, that was actually a mistake and that he had died at the age that Ryan had indicated.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is incredible, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The knowledge that this little boy has,
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very consistent with the idea of rebirth, and it could be some kind of telepathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we could try to come up with alternate explanations for why it occurs, but Tucker has looked at enough of these cases that he's become a believer in this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Harder to verify, but nevertheless, I think worth mentioning, are events from past lives narrated by people under hypnosis.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we've all heard a past life regression.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, this is controversial because of the possibility of leading questions and so on.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think they're really famous book about this as Brian Weiss's many lives, many masters.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course there are many such cases described in the literatures of the Hindu Jain and Buddhist traditions.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we go back in time, there's an entire genre of Buddhist literature, the Jatika tales, which claimed to narrate stories from the past lives of the Buddha.
[SPEAKER_00]: in Tibetan Buddhism, the phenomenon of tukus that is reincarnating teachers or llamas, has become commonplace, or has been commonplace for many centuries.
[SPEAKER_00]: It even formed the basis for the Tibetan system of government for several centuries, during which the country was ruled by the Dalai Rama.
[SPEAKER_00]: I could say the Dalai Rama is in the plural, but according to the teaching it's been the same Dalai Rama all through being reborn.
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, in regard not to rebirth in particular, but to the idea of the survival of consciousness beyond the death of the body, there's the extensive and continuously growing literature on near-death experiences.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the work that has been done on this phenomenon has been carried out, and this is funny because it keeps popping up on the internet, and he and I get each other's emails.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Jeffrey Long, not me.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is an oncologist with a very similar name, but his name spells like, he's R-E-Y-I-M-E-R-Y.
[SPEAKER_00]: But some people think we're the same person because they're a similar interest, but we're different people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like Tucker, long as become persuaded of the veracity of his patient's experiences, neither Tucker nor long.
[SPEAKER_00]: Neither of these scientists to my knowledge isn't adherent to Vedanta or Buddhism or another tradition where these ideas are affirmed.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're just going where the evidence leads.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they say, well, something is surviving the death of the body.
[SPEAKER_00]: And these memories are coming from somewhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: According to the philosopher and psychologist, William James, who incidentally met with Swami Vivekananda, as well as studying the works on Sri Ramakrishna, if we have a belief that is at least not inconsistent with our best scientific knowledge, and if that belief is beneficial to our lives, helping us live more happily and meaningfully, then we're justified in accepting that belief.
[SPEAKER_00]: He called this the right to believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope I've shown or at least gestured in the direction of showing that the idea of rebirth is worthy of acceptance, that it's no less rational, and indeed has some advantages over alternative ways of thinking about the afterlife.
[SPEAKER_00]: This case, as I mentioned at the outset, will certainly not persuade everyone, but it hopefully will be edifying to those who already lean toward this point of view and who are on the path of Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_00]: Having spent so much time now making a case for the reality of rebirth, it might seem odd to conclude with a brief case for the unreality of rebirth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, what do I mean when I say this?
[SPEAKER_00]: If we bear in mind the non-dualistic Vedantic context of rebirth, several important points come to life.
[SPEAKER_00]: First, in the spirit of both Vedanta and William James, an idea needs to have some practical import.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it makes no difference to the way we live our lives, it's simply for a big.
[SPEAKER_00]: As mentioned earlier, there are people who do not even wish to engage with this question, because of their fears about how it might affect their lives here and now.
[SPEAKER_00]: The import from the perspective of the Dante of the concept of rebirth is profound.
[SPEAKER_00]: If this life is not our only one, then we not only have opportunities to write the wrongs of the past, to do the work the karma that we need to do, but we also have become a tune to the countless ways in which we are interconnected with others.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Buddha once said that we should be kind to all the beings we meet.
[SPEAKER_00]: For given our countless past lives, everyone we meet could at one time have been our mother or our father.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every association is a potential re-association, and every interaction a chance to advance on the spiritual path.
[SPEAKER_00]: If rebirth is true, life indeed becomes a grand moral gymnasium wherein we all have to take our exercise so as to become stronger and stronger spiritually.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we take this idea seriously, it will shape our every thought, word, and action.
[SPEAKER_00]: But secondly, and this is the point on which I wish to conclude, as we progress on this path, lifetime after lifetime, we come to see the truth of Brahma-Satya Jagamitya.
[SPEAKER_00]: All things must pass.
[SPEAKER_00]: The divine ground of being alone is real.
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, rebirth itself is no more real than the rest of this world.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's part of the dream, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's part of the matrix, it's how it works.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the dream from which we seek to awaken.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the Buddhist philosopher in Nagarjuna stated, and as Swami Sabha Priyana did recently restate it, in a recent talk at the Vedanta Society of Southern California, Sansara and Nirvana, the realm of rebirth, and the realm of awakening are one and the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're the same reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we view reality through the mode of ignorance, then we experience it as the realm of rebirth.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when we view reality through the mode of awakening, we see, we don't see rebirth, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We see the infinite ground that is beyond and is the transcendental and imminent foundation of this world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is our goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sri Ravakrishna Apanamastu.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you very much.
[SPEAKER_00]: If there are questions, I'm happy to say.
[SPEAKER_00]: Last time I was here, there weren't any questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we just kind of went on for those.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, there's something in on the spiritual passivity that a belief in rebirth might lead to.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's like, oh, it's really hard to meditate every day now.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'll listen to a few lectures.
[SPEAKER_07]: Next, I'll get it right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, oh, that's excellent.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm glad you mentioned that.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is one of the great things about the question section.
[SPEAKER_00]: I get to talk about things I didn't include in the paper.
[SPEAKER_00]: This would be, I would consider this another misuse of the idea of rebirth, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: that, you know, if anything reflecting on the countless sufferings we must have gone through and countless lives should really motivate us to want to, you know, continue on.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in this moment, we're comfortable, you know, there's that famous metaphor, you know, the man who's hanging off of a branch, you know, and he just wants to get the little drop of honey, you know, he's not, he's not letting anyone rescue him, he's taking all that risk because he just wants that one more drop of honey.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, so he's okay, well, you know, I can have an easier life if I don't dedicate myself too much to all of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, there's a sense in which, of course, that's true, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I once heard a photo hit say, you know, God is not in a hurry, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, there's a sense in which there's a kind of urgency of the spiritual life that one could argue gets taken away.
[SPEAKER_00]: That can be both positive and negative.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the one hand, that kind of fear and anxiety that we sometimes see in the one after life model is not so much present if we believe in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like you don't think that if you don't do this right now you're going to go to hell.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not the idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: You think we'll just have to keep coming back and doing what I'm doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, first of all, there's a phrase in the Hindu tradition and translates as a human rebirth is rare, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So you don't know if in your next life you'll get to listen to Swami Sabha Piananda's lectures, you know, you might be a rabbit or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you know, you don't know what's going to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a friend who's a scholar of the Jane tradition, John Court, and I once heard him narrate a story from when he was doing his fieldwork in India.
[SPEAKER_00]: He lived in a community in Goodgerot for quite a number of years.
[SPEAKER_00]: People became very comfortable with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: They started asking questions about his own views and spiritual life and so on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm a lady who wants to ask him, is it true that you people in the West believe you have only one lifetime?
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, yeah, that's kind of the standard view, you know, and she said, no wonder you're also stressed out, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you have that idea that, oh, I have to do it all in one lifetime.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I also think that for those souls who might be inclined to take it easy because of this idea of rebirth, that I can put it off, this is like my personal, I wouldn't even call it a theory, but just kind of a hunch.
[SPEAKER_00]: That why the belief in one lifetime is so prevalent in so many different religions, that it kind of gives people maybe who need it that extra push.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it gives others a lot of anxiety and problems.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, hopefully there would be a middle path.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I would see that I would see putting off spiritual life as a misuse of the idea of rebirth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I'll do it in another life.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, well, you don't know what your next life's going to be like.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, it's a very good question.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah?
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you for elucidating the four different aspects of how we could look at this subject.
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the analogies that's given often in Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_03]: is sleep and dreaming as being created by us or by our, you know, by also a conscious as whatever and that everything we see you and me, this this chair is also created or created perhaps isn't the right word but within consciousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: If we're sleeping and we never wake
[SPEAKER_03]: we would not necessarily have created anything that we would be aware of.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, how do, is there not another argument that death is simply a sleeping knowing
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that essentially seems to be the materialist view.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, as suppose you could have a non-materialist version of that, where there's a geva that just kind of goes into, it would be like the state of Dremless Sleep, really.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, when we think in terms of the four states of awareness in Vedanta, it's of the waking state, the dream state, Dremless Sleep, and then we have Moksha.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the state of dreamless sleep, this argument is sometimes come up like, you know, are we ever unconscious?
[SPEAKER_00]: In according to Vedanta, we're always conscious, but you could be conscious of nothing, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The object of consciousness could be nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, what you've asked is, could death essentially be a passage into dreamless sleep?
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe an eternal passage into dreamless sleep?
[SPEAKER_00]: For me, that would raise questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it was eternal, I would wonder what's the purpose of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what was the purpose of this, you know, waking dream that we're experiencing now?
[SPEAKER_00]: How does that all hold together?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, of course, you'd get all those kinds of justice questions, because, and this is a problem for materialism as well, if, say, the Holy Mother and Hitler are both going to the same dreamless state after death, that the whole concept of justice and Karman and Hall seems to have gone out the window then, if we're just wall going into the same dreamless state.
[SPEAKER_00]: state.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, again, someone could say, well, yes, that's the case, you know, that there's kind of amoral universe and that, you know, that this whole concept of reward and punishment is a mistake and is our projection.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't personally agree with that, just because there's something in phosphorus called a performative self-contradiction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, if I live as though there's such a thing is right and wrong, but there's really not, then I'm living a lie.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet I find
[SPEAKER_00]: without a concept of right and wrong, it would be a completely chaotic, meaningless kind of existence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, there are those who, I mean, there are philosophers who argue quite persuasively that that is the case.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just, I don't think that's Vedanta, and I don't think that's, for me, I would not see that as a productive way of thinking.
[SPEAKER_00]: I could envision, after lives, so it's a period maybe between rebirths that are something like what you described, and there's some literature which talks about souls needing to rest, so that we're not reborn right away, there needs to be a period where we sort of process what we experienced in a given lifetime.
[SPEAKER_00]: And do you have accounts of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, Plato says something kind of like that in the 10th book of his Republic, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: There's this intermediate space between lifetimes where, you know, we're learning the lessons of our past lives and then making the choices about the next one that we'll take.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, and I can certainly say that, you know, there are very, very busy and hectic days where a very, very long, dreamless, sleep sounds very good.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wouldn't say that that's not possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't want to say that it's eternal or unending, because then that raises these other kinds of questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, thank you.
[SPEAKER_06]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_06]: Your story about the twilight zone, I think, helps to answer your question about the urgency and putting off in rebirth because I sometimes feel that.
[SPEAKER_06]: OK, you know, good enough, just get better.
[SPEAKER_06]: it becomes boring and after a while that's punishment and you just say, I've got to get this over with.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there's this wonderful, you know, in the Kathmandu, there's a line where Shuron Krishna talks about a kitten calling out for its mother and he says, who cries out for God?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this is often the purpose of the very difficult experiences we have and this is again why we can't really judge like someone has bad karma good karma It's all just karma, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all just work We have certain things that happen is that are very difficult that then evoke and push us to that point where we cry out And that may be exactly what we need in order to get onto the path
[SPEAKER_00]: And it can be traumatic, and it can be, yeah, something has to be traumatic sometimes to shake us out of our complacency.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this so often when we read the stories of people who got on the spiritual path and became in a very, you know, enlightened beings and became great teachers, most of them suffered a lot at some point in their life, and very often that was the thing that sparked their journey.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I always think of the story of the Buddha who it was not even his own suffering, but when he ventured out of his father's palace and saw people dying people sick, it just appears to him to the heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's something has to be done for these people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think we all have versions of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we need that to shake us out of our complacency.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because otherwise,
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, thank you for your talk, Dr.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lung.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd like to especially open with, you know, how it's heavy to talk about death in the winter.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think, yeah, the heaviness of the subject is what part of what makes it so interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when it comes to the afterlife, I think,
[SPEAKER_01]: to some extent we're looking for something comforting and I think the Christian world view if you're very attached to your body, you're identified with your memories, your personality, your relationships, it gives you a version of the afterlife where you get to be a body, have the memories.
[SPEAKER_01]: have your friends, your family, and I think that is very reassuring.
[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, if you're more identified with the spiritual self or the op-mon, I think you could see reincarnation as being comforting that there is this continuity, but it is a very abstract continuity.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I'm just wondering for you, personally, is there any way that you've made this in a sort of a practice where you're using this idea of rebirth to try to shift identification.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that I think that's exactly how, that's a wonderful question.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's from a, so stereotypical perspective, right, from from the perspective of spiritual advancement.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's the point of the idea of rebirth is to shake off to some extent to unsettle our identification with our physical body.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it does that because, you know, if you've identified with many bodies, then that sense of identification can loosen to a certain extent.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember being that this was really driven home, and I mentioned my father's injury.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was paralyzed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of his body was paralyzed after his injury.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just remember thinking, you know, his body has become a prison.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if your body can become a prison, you are not your body, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I've had a number of dear ones who died of cancer, and that's essentially the body turning on itself, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, if your body can turn against you, if it can be your prison, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not, it's not you, it's this being that you're co-existing with, and you want to, you want to get along with it well enough that you can do your sadhana and get through life from day to day and be, you know, reasonably happy, but it's not you, and it's, you could come up with all kinds of images, like this horse that you're writing everywhere, you know, and you've got to feed your horse, make sure your horse is healthy.
[SPEAKER_00]: But sometimes your horse might want to, you know, buck you off or you know, it might miss behave.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you're not your horse and eventually the horse is going to pass on.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in this metaphor, you're going to continue and you're going to have to get onto another horse and keep going.
[SPEAKER_00]: And or another image, you see the idea of the body is a chariot, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You see this in the Kathopanashad.
[SPEAKER_00]: And George Harrison kind of updates it in the song living in the material world because it says it bodies like a car right So you got your car and you drive your car and I tend to drive cars were very long time basically till they fall apart and
[SPEAKER_00]: So it does start to feel like an extension of your body after a while.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like I'm just going to get up and go to that other place.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, at a certain point it breaks down and you're sad, but you have to get another car and keep going.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I think your point is even more profound, though, than that, because we talk about the body, but as you framed your question, and when you're talking about sort of like the Christian idea of heaven, it's not just the body.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have all this whole set of associations with this life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have, I mean, because of the attachments that I have, I have had the thought before that, you know, well, if I am reborn, which I expect I will be, I don't think I'm quite to that elevated level yet, but, you know, it's like, well, I hope I know this person again, you know, maybe it'll be in another form, maybe it'll be a different type of relationship, but I hope I know this person again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or even just something like, you know, like, I love the Beatles music, like, whatever I'm reborn, I hope the Beatles music will still be around, you know, and I can hear it again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, and rediscover it and have that joy all over again, you know, imagine it being in some distant future and watching, you know, Star Trek and saying, ha, that's how they thought life was going to be, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: So those are those are attachments we have, and I think this is also why we get reborn.
[SPEAKER_00]: We, in effect, we choose to be reborn, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We want to be reborn, like on a deeper level, we don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're trying to find that highest fulfillment that'll take us beyond things that are only temporary, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We're trying to fill and infinite void with finite things, and that just doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_00]: And after a certain point, we realize that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But till we reach that, really, that full realization,
[SPEAKER_00]: We still get a very attracted by the things in this world and my wife and I were talking about this once.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like the phenomenon of binge watching a TV series.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, okay, you're watching this show and it's really good.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, what?
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's time to go to bed.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to have to go up, you know, get up in the morning early and go to work.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you really want to see what happens next.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we watch one more episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, one more episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's like us.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we come back in the material world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, let's do it one more time, you know, and so that's just, you know, but it's from these, these attachments we form and, and those attachments are very beautiful.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, they can become gateways, I think, to realization, like our relationships with people.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they teach us, if those relationships draw out the divinity within us, if they teach us to be kind and compassionate and have empathy and see the world through other's eyes, those are wonderful things.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what we're doing on the material world is kind of confusing the intermediate step with the ultimate goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: We think, ah, it's this person or this thing that's going to really truly make us happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's that great dialogue between Nagyavalkya and Katayani in the Breheader of Nukupana Shad.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's going off to renounce and she asked for him to share some of his wisdom.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he gives this long litany of, you know, the good things in life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for each thing he mentions, he says, it is not...
[SPEAKER_00]: loved for itself, but because of the Atman that is within.
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, the light of the divine is shining through all of these wonderful people and phenomena that we're experiencing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what we need to aim for.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I do one thing that I like about the multiple lifetime model is, again, not to put off the spiritual life, but it does give you time for that kind of unfoldment to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe you have lifetimes where you're learning certain things and you're taking certain capacities within the soul and bringing them to fruition and maybe it takes more than one lifetime.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think my people like Mozart who certainly had studied music before he was bored as Mozart.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he came back, I partially to keep doing what he was doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, I think that the rebirth model, what I like about it is you get a little bit of everything, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You get that sweetness of that sort of bittersweet realization of the thinnitude of life, because each lifetime is unique, it's its own thing, and it's not repeated, but that the Sun Scar is the imprint of that life is still there with you, and the learning you got in that life is with you, and the soul carries that on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we get to make the progress that we have the time to make the progress we need to make.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, it's a vast process.
[SPEAKER_00]: The last thing I'll say about this, too, is that, and because I've been in dialogue with people about near-death experiences also,
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, there is scope within the rebirth model, and actually you see this in Hindu and Buddhist texts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Four things kind of like the Christian heaven, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't go on for eternity, but that there is this sort of reunion that can happen among souls, that, you know, after they've all passed on, they kind of reconnect in the other realm, they process the experiences they've had.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's a time when they're ready to take the plunge back into this realm.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that sense of continuing to be with the people you love and so on, that there's a space for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's not seen as going on forever because then you get that issue of, I wouldn't be terrible to reunite with all your loved ones and then get bored of them after a while.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, well, I'm going to go down to be a plant for a while.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can join me if you like, but you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: And when we think on that big, eternal time scale, it does change our picture, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're looking at everything through the lens of these finite bodies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even setting aside the question of rebirth, I had another conversation with someone about extraterrestrial life, not long ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we just had longer life spans, we'd look at the world differently.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like if we lived a thousand years, like everything are economy, like we would design everything very differently, based on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so thinking, in terms of how, thinking, this is kind of funny way to say, but thinking of the way the soul thinks, and the way we think about these things are, there's a gap there that it's hard for us to bridge except just with our imagination.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know, very productive question, I don't know if I've answered it, but just kind of rambled on about it, but yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you for your talk today.
[SPEAKER_04]: Jeff, I really enjoyed it and thank you for not sharing it in advance because now I've seen how it played out, you know, and I really enjoyed it.
[SPEAKER_04]: I have one question and I think to end a talk like yours on the note of rebirth would be to sort of think of ourselves as consciousness, so technically.
[SPEAKER_04]: death the way we understand it does not really happen.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right, right, right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and that the Gita says that too You were never born you will never die the real you the consciousness You've you've driven in this car for a while.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I I find that very hopeful and and thank you for Well, and that's that's that's that that that that hope comes from Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's right We are the deathless saw.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's the final word from a bit on to perspective
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been a wonderful opportunity to share with everyone.