What Makes You Come Back is Samskara

When we are in a train we want to get out; first we have rushed to get in, then we are waiting to get out. Same thing in a plane, same thing in anything. You get into a boat to cross the Hoogly, you are waiting to get out on the other side. So all the time we are getting in and out, getting in and out, getting in and out, crossing railways, crossing bridges, crossing rivers. And our whole existence is a journey through life. We have got in at birth, we have to get out at death.

When we die, how are we getting out that vehicle which we have called life here on earth? Am I going to be happier out from the train or am I going to stand like a bewildered man from a kheth, who does not know where he is, why he is there, what is he going to do there and he stands in bewilderment you see. What am I here for? Where am I? Why am I here? Because if you have not taken the pains to create an environment, which will be familiar to you after death, we are going to be bewildered and like a dog which is locked out of the house because it is troublesome you know. That dog runs round and round the house, yelping, barking, scratching at doors, we too will be yelping, barking and running round and round trying to get back into this life which we are familiar. No Mukti. 

We are all very funnily oriented in that we think what is vital to our existence is money, power, position, prestige – things like that. But what happens when a man dies? You know in the Hindu tradition, when we put a corpse on the final funeral pyre even the clothes are removed. You must go out of this world as you came into it; no clothes. ‘I came naked – I go naked.’ It also applies to the wisdom that you have garnered in this world by education. The soul does not carry wisdom with it. It also applies to your nationalities. You can not carry your passport and say, ‘I am an American Citizen. I have free entry into Heaven.’ There are no visas, there are no passports. So what are we carrying? Our samskaras; the impressions that our thoughts and our actions have made upon us which we have to carry life after life and which come to fruition in the next existence.

Now I would like to suggest something, which, in India is much misunderstood – the idea of rebirth. People seem to imagine that rebirth is some sort of a punishment by God, that God sits in the Heaven and says, “You have sinned, go back.” I don’t think we can have a God who is punishing or rewarding, because He loves His creation. He, like a human parent, loves His children. Do you punish your children? You correct, but God does not even correct. In His infinite liberality, He has given us complete charge of ourselves. He says, “Go, live and come back.” And what do we do? We form the samskaras. And rebirth is nothing but the Bhoga of those samskaras. Nobody else is to blame but ourselves.

That is why each life is only so long and it is variable between a few days and perhaps eighty years, because we are taking the time that we need. Again this is not something which God has forecast or foreordained. We say “This much I can bear.” You know you wake up in the morning and you can live in the waking stage for so long and not more. After that you have to sleep. A sleep is nothing but a regeneration of the day’s efforts, the energy that I have consumed in living my waking life, which I recuperate when I go to sleep.

So death is a pause from this life to enable me to recoup and to live the next life more fruitfully, more evolutionarily and continue to move up. It is like when we are walking up a hill, we go a few kilometres then take a little rest – ten minutes, recoup our lung capacity, our circulation and take the next few kilometres again. Can you say I am dead, when I stop on my walk, up the hill? I am only pausing so that I can gather together my physical resources and take the next stage. And so we climb mountains. But if you are foolish and you try to do everything, all at one stage, well, you could burst your lungs or pull some muscles and then have to be carried back down, not up. This, all mountaineers know. People who climb hills have known ‘Use your capacities step by step in graded limits so that you don’t exhaust yourself.'

Now if you live life in such a way that we are exhausting our resources with foolish indulgences and wasteful energy consumption, whether physical or even biological, we are doomed. You see the next stage becomes something which we have to defer. And then we may have to live in the “Limbo” condition, for as long as it takes to recuperate, to come here again. It is a punishment we put upon ourselves by our own foolish way of living. There is no God who punishes. So to think of Heaven as God’s reward and Hell as God’s punishment, then death as something which is miserable, is stupid. You know people in the west say, “Oh, if all I am going to do is to die, why should I live?” It is like saying, “If all that I have to do at the end of the day is to go to sleep, why I should be awake? Or if all that I am going to do is to work, why should I go on a holiday?” A holiday is a pause between two work periods. Sleep is a pause between two waking periods. Death is a pause between two lives – not even a pause between two lives, it is a pause in the life stream. Like sleep is a pause in the waking stream, death is a pause in the life stream itself which we take because we are exhausted, the soul has to, sort of, write its diary of life, go over it and say, “Well, this and this and this. I have now to do if I am to continue on my upward path.”

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