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Part 1: The Mechanics of Reincarnation and the Role of Karma Śrī Dīp Nārāyaṇa Bhagavān, Kī Jai, Bhakti Nirmira Bhāī, Kī Jai, Hari Om. After the lecture on Aum, a question came from Jitka. I hope he or she is still here. When Jasrach handed it to me, he said, “That’s a difficult one for you.” I remembered his story about Einstein, so I think that’s a question for my driver. Can you read the Czech? The English translation is already on the paper. Dear Swami, the morning lecture on the topic of Om has brought a question to me. How is it with the departure or ending of animals and humans? How is it with their death? How does reincarnation work? Is it about dividing and reuniting the sound, vibration? What part does the essence, ātmā, and the level of this vibration play in it? Thank you for answering. That’s a topic about which even Swāmījī doesn’t speak so often, and it was troubling me a little now. The connection with the Aum lecture arises because reincarnation basically has nothing to do with Om. That’s maybe the first thing we should try to figure out a little. When we spoke about Aum, we remember from the Upaniṣads. It is said that Oṃ has four aspects: A, U, M—these are three—and they represent the three different states of consciousness in which we usually are. They also represent the three guṇas. Oṃ as a whole is the divine consciousness. So Oṃ as a whole represents actually nirguṇā ātmā, the formless divine self. And the A-U-M, these are the guṇas; this represents actually saguṇa. They are the origin of the creation, A-U-M. I was thinking how to make the relation a little more clear. Instead of three guṇas, we could maybe say simply three colors. You know that it is reality, and it is true that from three colors we can make all existing colors. Every printer knows that, and everyone who makes designs on the computer also knows this. There are three colors, plus black and white, and from this you can make any color you desire. So from these three colors, you can make all colors. But when you have all colors together, you have no color; you have white. So you could say white represents the formless aspect of Aum, and these three colors represent the three guṇas from which everything that has form is created. Now you can mix these three colors and create many, many colors—light red, dark red, and all the different colors. But these are principles, the principle of the color red. In reality, we don’t see the principle; we see something red, a red pullover, for example. So out of these colors, everything is created, each with different colors. And then we say, not that there is a red, but we say there is a pullover. When we start to think about reincarnation, about what we are actually thinking, reincarnation means change of form. If now the red pullover is suddenly cut into pieces, that changes the form, and maybe it is replaced by a green pullover, later by a coat, or whatever. So with reincarnation, when we think about reincarnation, we are simply on another level of our thinking. We are not here on the level of the origin of all colors; we are also not on the level of the different color principles. We are here on the level of the different appearances which are created through these colors. Therefore, basically, reincarnation has nothing directly to do with Om. Whatever we see has a color, and there is a color principle in it, but that is not affected by any change on the physical level. So the divine in us is eternal; it’s not affected by any change on the physical level. The divine consciousness, the divine color you can say, is in everything, even in a stone, even in a plant. On that level, there is no development, no change, nothing. Now, when we start to think about reincarnation, we must understand at what level we are thinking. Basically, we come to a completely different topic: the topic of karma. Reincarnation means that according to our karmas, we go through different experiences. Reincarnation is basically based on our karmas, as if we were wearing different clothes. The whole aim is the development of our spiritual awareness, our consciousness. Now, the question was about how it is with the death of animals and the death of humans and their reincarnation. That’s a question about which we usually don’t speak and don’t think. But maybe when we try to analyze a little, we can understand deeper why it is so precious to be a human. I was thinking myself some time ago about this question: What karma should a cow do to be promoted to a higher level of incarnation? And what bad karma could a cow do to go into a lower level? The same you can ask for a lion. Can we blame a lion for hunting, killing, and eating its prey? Not at all. Because the lion is a lion; it’s an animal. As such, it doesn’t have intellect. As such, it doesn’t have free will. And as such, actually, it cannot create karma. That’s the most important point to understand. Animals, of course, act, but in the strict sense, we cannot say that they create karma. Even plants are acting. Last week I read on the internet about one event they observed: a plant was catching and eating a bird. There are some plants that have a kind of glue, and then animals cannot escape anymore. I remember Swāmījī in a seminar in Villach once spoke shortly about that. Swāmījī said, the karma of animals goes straight away to God, because He created them like that. Animals can only act according to their nature. They are bound by instincts; they don’t have a choice. And they don’t have an understanding of what is right and what is good. I think everyone who has a cat and tries to train it as a vegetarian knows what I mean. Try to teach a lion to be vegetarian. No, it is not bad karma for a lion to kill, and there is no good karma for a cow to be a vegetarian. So you understand that. This is important: we get the point that free will is not there. Do you understand? Therefore, responsibility is not there. Only we, as humans, have this free will; we have the intellect, buddhi, and viveka that we can possess. And that is the one point about Swāmījī: he can never stop speaking about the value of human life. Reincarnation, basically from the karmic point of view, goes only from human life. We as humans experience our karmas, which we have done earlier. And we, as humans, create new karmas. The old karmas are done; we cannot do anything about them. We can just accept them. In fact, through our actual karmas, we can influence them, but never completely get rid of them. But our fresh karma—that is important, in which direction we go. So according to our deepest desires and attachments, what is the essence of our life? There we go. Do you remember the question from Arjuna to Kṛṣṇa in the Bhagavad Gītā? He says, “I’m a yogī, I’m practicing, and I try my best to get mokṣa. But if it happens that I die before I achieve the aim, then everything is lost. So what’s the point of doing spiritual sādhanā if death comes and takes everything away?” And Lord Kṛṣṇa’s answer is: nothing is lost. Every step is counted. If you have practiced and developed your consciousness to a certain level, then in your next incarnation you will incarnate in circumstances that are favorable for that. And then this level of consciousness will awaken after some time, so that actually we continue then from where we stopped in the previous life. I think every yoga teacher has made such observations. You have a yoga class of, let’s say, twenty people. They all tell you, “We never ever did any yoga; we know nothing.” You start teaching for some weeks, some months, and after a few months already, you feel clearly there’s one person who is different. This person shows much deeper interest, much deeper understanding. That is the stock which he brings from the previous life. That which he already knows is easily reawakened. The same actually applies for a divine incarnation, an avatāra. When God incarnates on earth, what does He need to learn? The example of Mahāprabhujī, we know nothing. He brought everything with himself. But God designs different roles for different avatāras. So most of them also practice, basically to give us an example through their own sādhanā. But once they start practicing, in the shortest time, everything is awakened, as we see it with Swāmījī. I don’t think he attended as many summer seminars as we are doing, and so much Kriyā Anuṣṭhāna. Yeah, there’s water. So that means reincarnation is a question of karma, a question of our desires. Where do we go? And the moment when it is decided that this is the time of death: the last thoughts when you leave this world. When someone is lifelong attached to his possessions and money, you will start worrying, “Who will get it now?” And if someone was very attached to the family, then basically he doesn’t want to leave them. So somehow it’s like we are in that moment, filing an application to God: “Oh God, please, I want my money back.” “Oh God, please, I want to see my beloved ones again.” And God says, “OK, approved.” That means you apply to God to reincarnate. That’s it. How can He give you the money back without a physical body? So you will need it. Okay, let him come. And then your soul goes in the other direction. So we as humans, we have very well—you can nearly say—control over in which direction we go. It depends where your awareness is, where your desire is. One must be careful with that. Life is quite tricky. Reincarnation in other forms, in non-human forms, can happen due to different reasons. Incarnation into other forms of life can also be due to other reasons. The main thing is our qualities. You remember, Swāmījī told so often stories that there are humans, but in reality there are no humans. They have no human qualities. So at least we should try to live with human qualities. Part 2: Reincarnation, Karma, and the Soul’s Journey Otherwise, if we are simply cruel — and meat eating is already one such point — then it may happen that we still have some lesson to learn. What does it mean to be killed, for example, as an animal? Therefore, the first principle when we take a mantra, the first rule, is to become a vegetarian, to be a vegetarian. But Swamījī once gave us very clear reassurance. People were worrying too much that they might come back in an animal form. And he said this when he translated the bhajan “Abhassampadiyya.” There was one verse which, in the original version, says, “If I come back as a human.” This was in the third verse, where the word yadi appears, which means, “If it should happen, that I come back as a human.” Swamījī didn’t like that and changed this line into jaba jaba, meaning “whenever I come back.” He said, “When you are human, when you are a bhakta, you should not doubt that you will come back at least in human form if you don’t manage to achieve mokṣa.” So if you are a devotee, basically you are on the safe side. But a real devotee — even for a devotee, it can be tricky sometimes. I remember a small story. There was a yogī who had already practiced for many lives, and now he was meditating in the Himalayas. It was somehow obvious that this would be his last life. His heart was full of devotion, and he was meditating, thinking on the divine all the time. Now, one day it happened that he found a deer that was hurt. In his heart rose compassion for this animal, and he started to care for the deer. Truly, he could help, and the deer recovered. But it didn’t want to go away anymore; it stayed with the yogī. The yogī continued caring for the deer, and when his samādhi time came, unfortunately, his last thought was not on God but on the deer — oh dear. As a result of that, he incarnated again in the form of a deer. Yet this jijñāsu, this spiritual longing, was even in this deer. It was always attracted by the ringing of prayer bells, always going around churches and ashrams. But what karma should this deer now do to get mokṣa? It cannot do karma — that’s the point. The incarnation as a deer is a result of karma. Other forms, non-human forms, are a result of our karma in human life. So the deer lived the life of a deer, and one day it passed away. But then, of course, the good karma came up again. So again he reincarnated, this time as a yogī in the next life, and that was truly the last life for this yogī. So, to come back to the question, I think it is not really within our understanding how the reincarnation of animals works. I guess this is one of the questions about which Lord Buddha spoke. He said, “I am teaching you what you need for your liberation. And what I am not teaching you, you do not need.” Very simple, Rāma. So I think that is a question we don’t need to think about. But what we have to think about very much is that now we are not in animal form. So, I hope that was the answer to this question. Śrī Dīp Nārāyaṇa Bhagavān — sorry, Gajananjī has got me thinking with the deer. Sorry, just a Jadan story. It’s not a deer, but close. Whatever karma one of our horses came to the ashram with, and whatever happened there — if you can just listen to this story, then I think you’ll be clear about what is going to happen next time, and also what is the beauty of living in an ashram. We had a horse called Rādhā. She was quite beautiful in nature, big and black. And she was really... horses have their different natures. She was really soft. Due to some accident, she got sick — what is called colic. It’s a disease where they get gas in the stomach and it can’t come out. If by luck you can treat it, then they survive, but otherwise, generally, horses die from it. We were fighting with it for four days, with the colic, not with the horse. It was a constant battle trying to keep her moving so that the gas could go out and trying to give her medicine. We had to move her so that the winds would relax, and we also gave her various medicines. But we weren’t succeeding; it was getting worse and worse. It’s extremely painful for the horse, and she got to the point where she was in so much pain that she couldn’t stand up anymore. She was just lying on the ground. If you know Jadan, she was lying outside the workshop. So it was coming to the point where we knew that soon she was going to leave. She’d been lying there for an hour or two, and suddenly she got up and started to walk. The boy who was with her was trying to stop her, because we were just afraid of where she would fall over when she fell over the next time. But she was so strong in walking that she was pulling him like he was skiing behind, holding on to the rope. She was walking towards the tālāb. Then she walked from the Thalava and around the workshop to the other side, and she made her way to the Śiva Mandir. She walked all the way there — maybe two hundred meters, let’s say. In the last six hours before that, she had managed to walk about ten meters, so it was a long way. And this fellow was still trying to stop her. She walked directly to the front steps of the Śiva Mandir and put her head down on the steps. She was there for about ten or fifteen seconds, then walked back to the workshop and was gone. I think you can imagine where her birth was in the next life. You can imagine where her birth was in the next life. Such a relation to the ashram — there was no mistake about it, there was no accident. She just went directly there, did her praṇām, and went back. And then afterwards, we ended up having satsaṅg there where she was. So although that animal birth may be there, for me, from that experience alone, something was there, driving from the past or whatever it was, that she should come to the ashram so that she could reestablish that relation. And it was just so clear that that final moment was for her — what was the purpose of her being there. There’s one very interesting little story in the Mahābhārata. Because I think the natural question arises when, as Gajanandajī said, animals are not creating karma during that birth — then what decides what happens next? Dhṛtarāṣṭra was asking Kṛṣṇa. He was blind, the blind king. “What did I do that I’m blind in this birth? What is that karma?” And Kṛṣṇa gave him a blessing that he could look back through his lives, and Kṛṣṇa said, “Look for yourself.” Dhṛtarāṣṭra looked back one hundred lives, and he didn’t see anything. He didn’t see any reason. He said to Kṛṣṇa, “I don’t see anything. I don’t see the reason.” Kṛṣṇa said, “How far back did you look?” He said, “I looked back a hundred lives; there’s nothing there.” Kṛṣṇa said, “You didn’t go far enough. Look more.” Dhṛtarāṣṭra started to look further back, and in the 104th life, he found that as a boy he had put out the eye of one insect with a thorn from a tree. And that was the reason that now he was in this incarnation. For me, you know, we can’t do much about that — what happened to us a hundred lives ago. But if you think of this relation between this physical incarnation which we have and our ātmā for a moment — the same, like you could think of this castle and the fact that if you’re a karma yogī, you’d be staying here. The castle is your ātmā, and the karma yogī is this physical body. The castle was here before the karma yogī, and it will be here after. What can that karma yogī give to the castle? The karma yogī can leave the castle in a better condition than when they arrived. The karma yoginī, or the karma yogī, can keep the castle in a better condition than it was before — maintain it, clean it, purify it, help to fix it, develop it. In the same way, this birth which we have now, our ātmā is traveling through. In this life, what we should at least aim to do is to leave that luggage in a better condition than when it arrived — that we accumulate something good from this birth. First is to get realization; that is the first aim. But in the opening of the Upaniṣad, in the first śloka it mentions that, and in the second one it says, if you can’t manage that, then at least aim to have a long life. It actually says, “Aim to live for a hundred years.” And in that time, do as many good things as you can, and do them selflessly. That karma will not stick to you. We keep progressing, we keep going forward on the path. That’s the best we can do. I have a little image of how I feel it is when you die — what is the relation between your ātmā and this present birth, and why does it seem so painful for some people to die, while for others it seems so easy? If you can imagine you have an olive and you have a cherry — an olive, they both have seeds inside. Imagine those seeds are like our ātmā. But in the olive, the seed is very much connected to the flesh of the olive. If you have a fruit like a cherry and it’s really ripe, if you squeeze it, somehow the seed would just pop out. With an olive, you know, you would have to peel it off. In the same way, as much as we are aware that our ātmā is something that is not actually together with this physical world — it’s here, it’s within it, the same as that seed is within that fruit — but the connection is different. And then it’s so much easier to move on at that time. So we cultivate our practice, and we try to establish that relationship with that seed, and realize that that peace and that energy of that ātmā, that love and everything which is inside — that, although it is part of this physical body, is not actually connected in that way, like the roots. This physical body is special, but there is something even more special. Om Bholē Śrī Dīp Nārāyaṇ Bhagavān, Kī Jai, Satguru Deva, Kī Jai. So therefore, don’t be attached. Do you understand which bhajan it is? Some notes just can’t let go. One last word which came to my mind about reincarnation: In Jadan we sometimes have many, many flies, and I remember Swamījī once said, “These are all my previous disciples who made...”