What’s the deal with Re-incarnation?
How exactly does re-incarnation or being born again work? Here’s the tea.
Our vedas & their summary in the “Srimad Bhagavad Gita” say that the body you’re in right now is the temporary sthula sharira, with your soul changing bodies in an endless cycle - we take our karma from previous lives into the new body, affecting our current lives.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (4.4.3) - "As a man acts, so does he become. One becomes virtuous by virtuous action, evil by evil action.”
Rigveda (10.16.5) - "Let him depart to those wise ones who govern nature; let him depart to the mighty ones who guard the sphere of the gods... Let him join the company of those who have obtained heavenly joy.”
Atharvaveda (5.1.2) - "O soul, as you leave this world, may you journey to the world of the ancestors and then return to the earth in a new birth."
Yajurveda (36.24) - "May our souls return again and again to the earthly abode, may we return to the home of our body.”
Bhagavad Gita (2.22) - "As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.”
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Our Padma & Garuda Puranas list well-categorized 84,00,000 yonis or places of origin (8.4 million) we can be born into right here on Earth, which is similar to the number of species scientists have reported on the planet, including:
Aquatics (Jalaja): 900,000 species
Plants (Sthavara): 2 million species
Insects and Reptiles (Krimaya): 1.1 million species
Birds (Pakshinam): 1 million species
Animals (Pashavah): 3 million species
Humans (Manushyah): 400,000 species
We choose our next body as per the karma we’ve done, with negative karma putting us into lower life forms or less fortunate human families. That means that getting a basic decent human life itself is rare & valuable, also being a sign of a past positive record because only humans, unlike trees & animals, have the chance to meditate & get access to even higher realms than our Earth with demigods & more advanced beings. So we shouldn’t waste this jackpot.
The Chandogya Upanishad (verses 5.10.8 - 5.10.10), part of the Samaveda, even has the entire process laid out, talking about how our souls, after a rest & self-evaluation period, merge into the wind, coming back as rain, going into trees, getting eaten by animals & ultimately coming back through our father’s semen as it merges with our mother’s egg.
But is there a hack to escaping this cycle & how exactly do we feel when we’re dying?