“We opened in December ’07. Cupola wasn’t even there. We had our eight-hour meditation that day, first use of the temple, and it was storming and blowing. Nobody would sit under there because they didn’t know if the plastic covering would come down and they’d get soaked.
But it reminds me, when he just read about memory, suddenly there came into my memory a dear friend of Padma. She passed away not long after that. She was from New Jersey, you know, kind of a little bit tough. She would say, ‘My memory’s really good. It’s just short.’
Well, I kind of relate to that now, at this point in my life, going into the other room and not remembering why. Although you don’t need to be any age to have that problem. Of course, reincarnation, you know, there’s no proof for reincarnation often. Even recently, I talked about a book that I appreciated called ‘The Sole Survivor.’ It was made into a movie. The movie is lousy, the book’s lousy, but the story’s great. The only reason it’s great is that it isn’t from India or anywhere else in the east. It’s from America with a couple who were, you know, born-again type normal Christians or whatever. They had a son who had nightmares of being a fighter pilot, et cetera, et cetera.
I won’t go into the story. My point is, I wanted to refresh my memory about the story yesterday. Sure enough, I typed it in, and up came a website called Joe Skeptic or something. Some guy trashed the story totally. Okay, now I happened because I read the book and watched the movie, I could tell that his objections to the authenticity of the reincarnation of this little boy were not very intelligently grounded.
But the point is, you can’t, you know, even the great scriptures of India admit that God can’t be proved, not to the skeptic, not to the sense-bound, rational mind. And so, there’s kind of a dividing line. I’ve felt this for much of my life. We see it again and again and again.
Palestine, the Middle East, it’s like tectonic plates in an earthquake. East and west meet there, and the conflict never seems to end. At that meeting point of east and west, we find reincarnation. You know, in Jesus’ time, so far as my research has shown, there wasn’t even a Hebrew word for reincarnation at that point. It was vaguely mentioned here and there. But because Jewish tradition isn’t so much dogma-oriented, but more behavior-oriented, the rules and so on, it isn’t a big thing.
Even in Jesus’ time, there was one sect of people who didn’t even believe in an afterlife, and another sect, actually the Pharisees, who did. There were intimations of reincarnation in Greek philosophy, for example, which had had a lot of contact, by the way, with India in the centuries before Christ, when Alexander went east, shall we say. Anyway, so it’s not something you can prove.
There’s a wonderful recording. We used to call them CDs, but anyway, whatever they are nowadays, there’s a beautiful recording. I say beautiful; it’s inspiring and kind of fun. That of Yogananda’s voice. He gives a talk, and he asks the question, well, one life or reincarnation? And so, he gives the arguments for one life and reincarnation, and it’s kind of charming.
So, you can approach the whole subject through logic. There’s something to be said for one life, isn’t there? Because how’s your memory? What do you remember of your past life? Oh, I’ve had a few intimations here and there, but it’s mostly like astrology, just kind of fun, but don’t take it too seriously kind of thing. And so, we don’t remember anything.”
So why should we worry about it? We don’t know. We don’t even know why we were born. We don’t know where we came from when we die, and we don’t know. We can’t say we know; we have opinions, but we don’t know.
There’s a lot to be said for one life. You know, it’s kind of like the path that I’ve always admired, kind of “chop wood, carry water,” or is it the other way around? Anyway, whatever it is, it’s the path of stoicism. ‘Be here now’; this is all you’ve got. There’s a lot to be said for it, unfortunately. It doesn’t really satisfy the heart, at least as far as I’m concerned. You know, it’s like, be here now. This is all like Frank Sinatra’s song: “Is this all there is? Then let’s go dancing.”
Okay, so you don’t remember the song, I do. And so it is that there’s much to be said for living here in the present moment, for not going into past life regressions and all this woo-woo stuff that people get into. There’s much to be said for it.
In fact, when you think about it, I know the Christians get a lot of criticism for the fact that they believe in heaven and hell. But my answer to that is, you don’t have to go far to see heaven or hell, and you don’t even need to die. It’s all around us. But besides that, if your starting point is—and it’s a valid starting point—that I only have one life, this is all I know, then if you also happen to believe there is an afterlife and no more lives or evolution or opportunities, then you’re stuck. You’re stuck with heaven or hell. Because how can you not believe that there aren’t consequences for what you do? If you didn’t believe there were, you wouldn’t brush your teeth.
We are convinced by our actual experience that there are consequences. I won’t go into it, but it’s one of the learning things that a young person, a teenager, a young adult has to come to grips with. Eventually. We couldn’t live, we wouldn’t have an incentive to live if we didn’t know or at least believe that there were consequences for what we did. You wouldn’t even be in this room if you didn’t.
And so, you see, that’s how they got there. It’s perfectly logical. Now, it’s pretty intense to either go to heaven or hell, right? So, they came up with something else. They said, you know, that’s a little intense, so why don’t we create purgatory? Good solution. I think they did the right thing. I won’t go into more than that. Let’s just say that speaking as I am logically, it makes a lot of sense.
And then somebody said, well, what about those poor little babies? They didn’t get baptized, and they died. Well, let’s see, more to the gate. Where can they go? So, they came up with something else. Fine. I don’t really criticize it; it just makes sense, okay? You’re kind of stuck with it. Okay?
So, in the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali says there are three basic ways by which we acquire knowledge. The first way is by direct perception. You know, I can see that it’s not raining here. Direct perception. Now, direct perception also includes the more metaphysical aspect of intuition. Intuitive perception is valid knowledge as well. It’s just that it, like reincarnation or like the existence of God, only goes as far as you are concerned until it gets proven in some other way.
The other way, he says, is by inference. And there are, you know, when we read the countless stories of reincarnation, we discover by inference that the child remembered this and all the different facts that are offered for the case in reincarnation, it’s inference. It’s not proof. It’s an inference that this child must have been that person before.
And then of course, there’s valid authority: traditionally considered scripture. Of course, in east and west and religion, generally, your authority is your scriptural teachings. But there are many kinds of valid authority. An expert in computers would be a valid authority, and so on and so forth. And so, for us, for disciples of a guru, our valid authority would be the teachings of the master.
Okay? So, Yonda, in this recording, goes on, and using logic, we look around and we see the incredible diversity of circumstances in the world. We see great injustices in the world. We see people born with birth defects, disadvantages, disabilities, subjected to abuse. Particularly nowadays, with the kinds of education and awareness that we have, we can see that a disadvantaged birth will lead to an unhappy life, to even a life of crime. And so, we look around, and in this day and age, certainly more so than before, because we can see this whole world. We can see all the different countries and cultures, and we know so much more about the patterns of life. Then we say, “Hey,” and in fact, we do, we rebel against injustice. And so, we look around and then we happen upon this idea of reincarnation. It begins to make a lot of sense. Some of the great thinkers of the West in more modern centuries endorse this idea of reincarnation. But we can’t prove it. We can’t prove that there’s God.
Yet, for those of us who look to the wisdom teachings, we can see that we are offered reincarnation as a teaching. You know, there’s a chapter by our founder, Swami Kriyananda, in his life story “The New Path,” called “Reincarnation.” He traces the history of reincarnation and its teachings in the West in a very interesting way, showing how different Jewish teachers and so forth have talked about reincarnation. As I said earlier, it is woven into the Jewish tradition. It’s just not clarified.
When you think of the age at the time of Christ, it was a barbaric age. I mean, people enjoyed seeing people covered in oil and burned to death. I mean, what fun. What we have is football, which Padma loves, and I don’t care much for, unless it’s the Super Bowl. I’ll watch that for fun, just to keep her company. But it was a barbaric age. People’s awareness, in general, including of their bodies and the world around them, was pretty dark. I’m not saying it’s great nowadays, okay? But it’s not as bad.
And if Jesus had come and announced to his listeners the dogma of reincarnation, his ministry would’ve been a non-starter. Nobody was talking about that. It was hidden there in the bushes, as it were. Jesus said, “Whom do men say I am?” And his disciples, who weren’t really all that bright, but they were great souls—they just weren’t all that bright in certain respects—he was always chastising them for being a little bit dense. One time, they thought he had a sandwich on him. And when he said, “I have meat you know not of,” they looked around.
Anyway, he asked them, “Who do men say I am?” And one said, “Well, some say you’re Jeremiah or one of the prophets,” and one said, “John the Baptist.” Well, the guy had just been killed. I mean, what were they thinking, right? He had opportunities to address it, okay? In that particular instance, he sidestepped it. Yet again, after coming down from the Mount of Transfiguration, in chapter 35 of the “Autobiography of a Yogi,” I really encourage you to reread it. It’s really enlightening because Yogananda takes passages from the Bible and shows it’s right there for those with eyes to see—reincarnation is right there.
Jesus came down after being transfigured into his astral body, along with the presence of Moses and Elias, and the disciples. The Bible says right in its own print that they understood from the experience that he was the Messiah. And so, coming down, they don’t say, “Hey, congratulations, Jesus, you’re the Messiah.” No, that was just a given. Instead, they said, “Well, where’s Elias?” Because the last words of the Old Testament were a prediction of the return of Elias. Now, does that have anything to do with reincarnation? Go figure. So, the three disciples with him knew that Elias was supposed to come first. Well, what did Jesus say again? He sidestepped it. He said, “Elias has come already, but they knew him not and did with him what they wanted.”
And then it says in parentheses—I’m not sure if the person who wrote the King James Bible knew about parentheses, but it’s in parentheses now—and it says, “Then the disciples understood that he spoke of John the Baptist.” Is that reincarnation? It sure seems like it.
In Swami’s autobiography, “The New Path,” he traces, as other actual scholars have, that in 553 AD, at the Council of Constantinople, the teaching of reincarnation was in fact taken out. One of the early teachers in Christianity, a man named Origin or something, was a well-respected so-called father of the church. He said that reincarnation had been taught since apostolic time, since Jesus’ time and the time of the disciples. Yet, later, for other reasons, he was considered politically incorrect by the later church fathers. Nonetheless, the point being, it’s not as if it isn’t there, okay? It’s not as if the valid authority of teaching can’t be found even in the teachings of Jesus Christ.
But I say, so what? I can’t prove it. I don’t know anything about my past life. What’s the point? So, what is the point? The point of reincarnation is the hope and the promise that it gives to our souls, because the alternative isn’t very encouraging. The alternative, as I’ve already indicated, is eternal hell or heaven. The latter of which actually sounds a little boring to me.
Reincarnation offers us, through the valid authority of the saints and masters of East and West, the hope and the promise that “be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,” is our destiny. It’s the promise of the scriptures. When science gives us this incredible vision of a hundred billion galaxies, thousands of light years—what’s a light year? How far light travels in one year. That’s a lot of distance at 365,000 miles a second. So, the vision offered us by science, something that we more readily accept in our culture, maybe not entirely but more readily, coincides with this vision of countless innumerable reincarnations and lifetimes. Not to even mention lower life forms—you don’t even want to go there.
Paramhansa Yogananda once said he remembered a lifetime as a diamond. Now some people say diamonds are forever, but apparently not. Nothing in creation, of course, is forever. The point being, the concept of time and space is so incredible that it’s almost not worth going there. Where does that leave us, though? It leaves us feeling pretty hopeless when we look at it that way. And yet every atom, Yogananda said, is endowed with individuality.
He said, “I cognize in a state of cosmic consciousness the point of the center of the universe as a point of intuitive perception in my own heart.” In other words, in relativity, there’s time and space in these huge dimensions, but in the eternal present, there’s eternity. This is our hope. It’s not really about reincarnation. That’s simply, in the duality of time and space, the promise of the scriptures. But the transcendence of the other side of that promise, which is its burden, which is, “When will I get there? It’s hopeless. I look at myself in the mirror in the morning, and I think I’m never going to get there.”
It’s right here and now. The one-life people were right. It’s only here and only now. The promise of the scriptures with reincarnation is simply for those who aren’t quite here yet.
It’s all right here. And next week, we’re going to talk about karma and the transcendence of karma follows the one life here and now.