A new thought....

 

Sometime ago, I read this exceptional book titled “Death”. Now, if you are a sadhguru follower, you might already have read it or least heard of it. The book in itself is a one of its kind. It is something that questions our understanding of life and death, and answers some of our questions and again leaves us with even more queries in mind. There are numerous things in the book that caught my attention and made an strong imprint in my mind, one of them was this paragraph from the chapter “Baby Hitler” where the writer beautifully explains his understanding of how reincarnation works, which actually came as a surprise or should I say as a shock to me!!! Forgive me for copywrite issues, but I would like to include his words hereby as I don’t feel myself capable enough to translate these virgin words of wisdoms in my own language.

“If a particular quality is very dominant in you, your karma will seek whatever kind of body and physical situation is best for you to fulfil that quality. Suppose your whole thing is to eat—you want to eat, eat and eat. Suppose you die without eating, unfulfilled, thinking of food even on your deathbed. The next time, you may come back as someone’s pet pig and be really well-fed. People think it is a punishment to come back as a pig. This is not a punishment for you. Nature is not thinking in terms of punishment or reward. Depending on your tendencies, whatever is unfulfilled within you, you get the kind of body that is best suited to fulfil those tendencies. It need not necessarily be an animal form; it may choose that kind of human form in that kind of situation and in that kind of surroundings where it can be fulfilled. But it could be any which way. This is like a game of snakes and ladders. You go step by step, sometimes jumping, sometimes leaping, sometimes falling back. You climb one ladder, but as long as the snakes are there, it can swallow you and bring you back to square one. You climb up for a few days and again go back down. It just goes on.”

The concept of soul and reincarnation itself is not a hard to digest topic to me. I had read few books like “Journey of Souls”, “An autobiography of a yogi”, and “Sadhguru, More than a life”. But none of these books actually explained the process and concept of death and reincarnation as crudely as this book “Death”. What caught my attention here was that, is it possible for me to be born as an animal!! It actually felt like a demotion to my naïve, silly and un-wise mind. What is the whole point of the struggle with life and emotions of the human life when I could be born as an animal in my next life? Obviously, it was the human ego in me that forced such thoughts. Me, the human, the most superior species on the planet, the one species that conquered the, land, sky and much more with our intelligence, how could we be reborn as an animal!!! this thought didn’t go out of my mind for a really long time. But as time passed by and these thoughts kept dangling in my silly mind, it enabled me to see the world from a little different perspective. Slowly with time, as I saw a dog in the street, I didn’t visualize it just as a dog, my mind also wandered about the soul residing within the creature. Is the life of a dog that bad? Why does one has to feel demoted to be reborn as a animal. Afterall, they have their own cycles of struggle and surrender. Seeing the world from that dog’s perspective, it wasn’t much different than ours. Somedays it would be chased by humans, some days it would bark back and chase them, even they struggled in their own way for basics of life like food and shelter. They had their own level of emotion, empathy, and feelings. Well, I don’t think a dog would wish to be born as a human, the way humans wouldn’t wish to be born as dogs. But if we drop out the body (of humans or any creature), maybe it is all the same in a dog and a human!! A soul without legs or hands or mind that differentiates between a human and an animal. Maybe it doesn’t matter to a soul what level of intelligence or what level of sophistication it beholds in the earth. Well, maybe that is what the above paragraph in the book wanted to explain. I wouldn’t say I still understand or am wise enough to understand the soul perspective, but as a silly creature with discriminative mind, I am trying to understand the world where I belong or more precisely the world beyond the “human world”.