Living in a Spiritually Better World

            As per the Hindu mythology, the Almighty created the world in the beginning of time and is said to have entered every living and non-living objects thereof. As per Biblical wisdom, He is said to have created the humans in His own image. It is believed that while He sent the chosen souls as humans to earth, He deliberately took our memory as part of His larger plan. So, while we play out our incessantly mutating roles as part of His larger design, we do the same as a tool in His hands, stuck in a never-ending ‘cycle of birth and death’.

            While we were deprived of the memory of our past lives, we were also deprived of the knowledge and belief that we all descend from Him even though numerous sages, saints, prophets and messiahs have tried to convince us about us being an inalienable part of His eternal being as well as about the ‘Grand Vision’ behind the play of cosmic drama as we see around us every day. Nevertheless, there have been few takers for this line of thinking.

The wheels of time, our selfish ‘Ego’ and the illusion of worldly drama have further added to our confusion and self-doubts, reinforcing human ignorance about the actual purpose behind ‘Creation’. With more and more scientific and technological progress, the humans have hypothesised and theorised different conceptions regarding creation of the world, ranging from ‘natural evolution’, ‘natural selection’ or a ‘chaos theory’ to explain the same. However, none can convincingly explain and explicate the real purpose behind the actual need for ‘Divine Drama’.

This is more so when all the living beings including humans live their lives only for a brief period, never to come back and connect with the deeds of a particular life. The Indian philosophy and spiritual thinking, as enshrined in its hoary scriptures and books, do give a clear understanding of the same. Many new-age Hindus, though, often debunk the same, influenced by the so-called rationalist-scientific discourse on the subject. This appears surprising, particularly because the Occident itself has been delving deeper into the spiritual explanations of Creation, approaching the same through gradually evolving scientific theories and discoveries.

            People in the West have, in recent times, started approaching the subject of spiritualism, Creation and rebirth with much more seriousness than ever, something the East has classically and culturally done. Countless stories of rebirth and reincarnation of human beings, because of human felicity to recount and speak unlike other animals and organisms, have surfaced over the years with a good number of them having been verified and confirmed through many empirical researches and studies.

            The phenomena of ‘past life regression (PLR)’, ‘séances’, ‘near death experiences’ and ‘out of the body experiences’ have been widely reported from across the world. Celebrated PLR practitioners like Dr. Brian Weiss and Dr. Raymond Moody in the West are the leading exponents of the ‘rebirth’ theory, long propounded and civilizationally believed by the Hindus. The PLR performed on many of their patients have amply revealed numerous interesting stories of their past lives, utilizing the instrumentality of ‘clinical hypnosis’.     

            Notwithstanding the PLR and many other confirmations of past lives, more than 99.9 percent people can’t remember their past lives as part of God’s larger design. As discussed above, God deliberately erases our memory of past lives so that we don’t remain stuck with the inconsequential details and complications of the same in our next lives. But He does allow the humans to carry the dominant learnings and impressions of past lives to the next one by grafting the same onto individual consciousness.

            It is because of the variously evolving individual consciousness that humans appear so different from each other in terms of their capabilities and faculties despite being made by the same God in His own image. The societal inequality and individual differences could be explained by variously evolved consciousness due to varied experiences of individual souls through their various incarnations.

The divinely ordained human amnesia also cushions him/her from becoming rather mechanical in his/her conduct while playing and performing his/her sundry roles and responsibilities. As a result, we all start almost on a clean slate, left to fend for ourselves to discover our inherent strengths and capabilities slowly, through trials and errors. Our learnings vary and are conditional upon the environs and backgrounds we find ourselves in.

            The wisdom and knowledge gleaned through all the studies on past lives and afterlives as we as PLR therapies do suggest that our life roles proceed as per a definite plan that we ourselves decide. Life’s major events and incidents are predestined as per our own felt spiritual needs rather than something handed down by the Almighty as part of our ‘Karma’ as believed by Hindus and some other religions. The humans are said to decide on a potential life trajectory in consultation with their putative ‘Guardian Angels’ who guide and help them in firming their decisions on their upward spiritual evolution. A rebirth is accordingly planned and executed. There is said to be no ‘Hell’, purgatory or hellish punishments after death and before rebirth.

As per some PLR findings, all souls are said to first undergo a deep, relaxing slumber or soak in the most soothing and pacifying shower of light following which they all see their life in reverse like watching a film in a flashback. It is while watching our own lives in flashback that we realise the sundry mistakes and lapses committed by us in our last life and accordingly, we plan our next life to correct the same including finding ways to indulge in reparations against all those whom we might have hurt in our previous lives. Much of this is in conformity with the Hindu beliefs on afterlife and rebirth as delineated in ‘Garuda Purana’.

            All the living beings including humans evolve from their lowest to highest forms, due to their own efforts, to slowly move from being an unenlightened being to a perfectly enlightened being. They gradually learn to see themselves as extensions of the Almighty, merely playing their role as part of the larger cosmic plan. According to this plan, we all intend to slowly merge ourselves with the cosmic consciousness. We strive to further stretch the limit of human knowledge while simultaneously stretching and extending our individual consciousness. Thus, we all together partake in the spiritual effort to further glorify God’s creation and being.

            While we do so, we ought to ensure that we live a righteous and noble life, helping fellow living beings in their journey of evolution to the top of spiritual hierarchy. However, many of us think of the humans as selfish beings who, while doing good to others, expect return on the favours done. We usually indulge in our altruistic escapades only when we ourselves have sufficient or when we don’t need something. We share only those things which we ourselves don’t require, but that does us no credit as there is no sacrifice involved therein. Sacrificing something that we ourselves need and if we still decide to share the same with others at the cost of our own pain and privation, then it reflects our real humanity.

            Likewise, when doing good, we usually do good to only those people who are capable and well-heeled but all these people return the favour sooner or later. Besides, we often help people because either they have helped us in the past or they may help us in future because we find them useful and resourceful. So, more often than not, our help is actually inspired by our selfish desires to get the returns on our help and utilitarian altruism. But these are more in the nature of bargains than true acts of altruism and do our spiritual growth little credit.

            As truly selfish, we should actually help those who can’t return our favour, who are really so helpless and powerless that they can never do any good to us, something Dalai Lama also advises. Doing good to these people not only keeps our favours unreturned, but also does a world of good because by uplifting the condition of such fellow humans who are otherwise weaker and downtrodden, we contribute to the betterment of our world. Such altruism shall make the world much more beautiful and liveable than the one we live in. The same shall also help us in our upward spiritual evolution while positively contributing to the betterment of the material and spiritual world.