Reference: DEATH: An Inside Story

“Right now, most people are not even able to handle what is happening in this life, so why do they want to dig into their previous lives? They don’t know how to handle the thoughts, emotions and relationships of this life. How will they handle the thoughts, emotions and relationships of many lives?” ~ Sadhguru

11.1 Taking on a New Body

After conception, there is just a bundle of cells. After forty to forty-eight days, the other life occupies the womb and this bundle of cells becomes a being. Maybe not yet a full person, but in many ways a person. If life has not entered the womb after forty-eight days of conception, then that is the sign of a phenomenal being arriving. Somewhere between eighty-four to ninety days, the engagement with the body for this life truly begins. There are millions of wombs and millions of beings looking for a body. They will settle down according to their attributes and tendencies. The chakras also start developing gradually in the womb. The Sahasrara Chakra generally is not developed for most at the time of birth. That slowly evolves thereafter.

11.2 The Arithmetic of Reincarnation

Life is just one. Numbers are only in your mind. The fundamental life force is not in terms of numbers. What we are referring to as the being is beyond the physical. Once there is no physical, there is no boundary. For that which has no boundary, there is no one or two or ten or million. So that is not the way to think at all. You must understand that by cloning, all that you are doing is just producing a human body. If it is hospitable enough, if all the ingredients are there, life will occupy it. It does not matter how you produced it.

11.3 Past-life Recollection in Children

Apparently, 70–80 per cent of the children below three to six months of age remember their past life because the memory screens between lifetimes are not set up yet. During this time, the memories of many lifetimes are playing within them in so many ways. Slowly, it consolidates. It is not necessary that a person be born the same gender as in their previous life. What gender or form you take is determined by the type of longing that you create. This is determined by your tendencies.

11.4 Exploring Past Lives

Whatever you call ‘past life’ is just unconscious layers of the mind in terms of memory. If you bring yourself to heightened levels of awareness, these unconscious layers of the mind, which are ruling you from within, could be broken down, could be dissolved. So if you go through a process where, with heightened levels of awareness, you bring unconscious layers of the mind into conscious states—not in terms of memory but in terms of energy and experience—you can work these things out and leave yourself completely free in a big way within yourself. In that context, it is relevant, but remembering something memory-wise is not of any consequence. It will only complicate and mess up your life.

11.5 Baby Hitler

Life can be very different existentially from what the society perceives. It is very much possible that a man who tortured everyone else lived well within himself, and a man who tried to do good to everyone tortured himself. How a person is within himself existentially is what counts. People have certain urges and desires. It is desire that becomes the karma. 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 fulfill that quality. 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 fulfill those tendencies. The moment you realize that you are the source of everything that is happening here, you cannot build any more karma. Now, you have to handle only what is stored up. There are no unfulfilled tendencies. There is only freedom.

11.6 Couples for Lifetimes

If the only way you can hold on to someone is by believing that you have been stuck together for many lifetimes, it is a horrible way to live. If you have been together for three lifetimes, maybe it is time to part! What happened yesterday is of no consequence, but now you are trying to create a consequence for what might have happened. This memory is crippling you. It is not allowing you to use your mind as an instrument of penetration, as an instrument to open up dimensions of life. If that is the only way you can relate to your husband or wife, what a pathetic way to relate to people! You should find value in the human being who is sitting in front of you for what he or she is now, not for what they were somewhere. What you are right now, what you have made out of your life right now is the most significant thing.

11.7 The Only Enduring Relationship

Whatever kind of relationship you form, whether it is emotional, psychological, social, financial or physical, fundamentally, it is concerned with the body. When the body drops, the relationship just evaporates. Only if a relationship transcends the physical limitations, then there is a possibility of this relationship extending beyond the limitations of the physical body. Generally, it is only the Master–disciple relationship which gets carried for lifetimes. This relationship is always energy-based. It is not emotion-based, it is not mind-based, nor is it body-based. It continues until the energy reaches dissolution. For the energy, there is no rebirth. Some Karmic relationships are energy-based too. In Nature, wherever there is emptiness, everything rushes there. This is so with karma also. When someone’s karmic bag is empty, all those other bags of karma which have been one way or the other connected to that for so many lifetimes tend to move towards that direction, knowingly or unknowingly. But unless there is some spiritual significance to these things, we do not pay attention to the past connections.

11.8 Life beyond a Thousand Moons

When one crosses 1008 full moons of time, which amounts to nearly eighty-two years of age, something wonderful starts happening within a person. The karmic grip on their life loosens up and they suddenly become very sweet. This process reaches a substantial level of maturity when one crosses eighty-four years of age, which is essentially the consequence of obliterating the illusion of life and death. Our very birth is rooted in the menstrual cycles of our mother, and that cycle is linked to the lunar cycles. With such concurrence we cannot aspire for further physical evolution. Attempts follow to evolve in ways other than physical. If we utilize the full moon and new moon situations with some understanding, we need not be swimming against the current. When the body has seen 1008 full moons, the energy body is not able to retain that structure very clearly. Now, it is very easy to liberate them. 

11.9 Birth: Always a Beginning

For most people, their moment of Enlightenment and their moment of leaving the body is the same. An Enlightened being has certain qualities, which cannot be taken away. But when he is born, he is born like anyone. The qualities are still there, inherent in him. It will wait for a certain time and space where it can find expression. Depending on what type of work he intends to take up, accordingly, he will develop. So this process of when it should happen is Nature’s intelligence. Whatever happens naturally is always right, there is no question about it. Nature does not decide things with thoughts and emotion. It just decides things as per your tendencies. With thought, you can always make a mistake as it functions with very limited data. But Nature operates out of tendencies. So for an Enlightened being who is reborn, it depends on what type of work that person has as an objective for his life. Accordingly, at the right time, things will happen. Enlightenment is about going beyond individuality and becoming available to Universality.

11.10 The Rebirth of Lamas

One group of people who give a lot of importance to the reincarnation of Masters is the Tibetans. Tibetan lamas are basically tantriks who converted to Buddhism. Some people in that culture were definitely capable of consciously determining their reincarnation, and some Masters chose to come back over and over again. Over time, this prediction of reincarnation and identifying the reincarnation all became a compulsive culture. 

11.11 My Past Lifetimes

There are any number of my lifetimes which are there in my memory but I pay attention only to that which has been spiritually significant in some way. The rest of it is of no consequence. I consider only my last four lifetimes significant. NOTE: Sadhguru relates these four lifetimes where his purpose became to consecrate a Dhyanalinga.

DHYANALINGA

1. “Dhyana” in Sanskrit means meditation and “linga” means the form. Dhyanalinga is a profound meditative space that does not ascribe to any particular belief or faith, and requires no ritual, prayer or worship. It is a powerful and unique energy form, which is a doorway to enlightenment and spiritual liberation. 
2. Dhyanalinga is a powerful energy form consecrated by Sadhguru at the Isha Yoga Center in Coimbatore. It is the highest manifestation of the Divine, it includes all aspects and manifestations of life. Dhyanalinga does not care whether you are living or dead. All it knows is to separate the chaff from the grain. It wants to separate what is you from what is not you. It does not care whether you have a body or not.
3. Dhyanalinga represents the power, the liberation of another kind of science, the inner science, the yogic science through which you can become the master of your own destiny. 

11.12 Will I Come Back

I am not coming back for sure, because my expiry date is long over. From the account books of humanity, I am gone a long time ago. This gives me much freedom, though. But stretching it one more time is not a proper thing to do. Even this time it happened only because I got tangled up with the project of the consecration of the Dhyanalinga. Otherwise, this one would not be. Some people who are a little more perceptive clearly see that I don’t even exist.

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