Our theme tonight is the reincarnation of souls. Why should we be interested in reincarnation? Isn’t one lifetime sufficient to worry about? In one sense, it is good to think that we live only once. And if it is so, we must not waste our time, but live every minute grandly and beautifully, in a spiritual way. It is true that no individual has been born on earth twice as the same person. This is according to God’s wishes, and since the beginning of time He has not changed His policy. Shakespeare wrote of “The undiscover’d country from whose bourne/No traveler returns.” Once the hand of fate writes that you must depart, the decree is final and you are gone; and there is the end of your present form. So in that sense there is no return, because regardless of your identity in your previous incarnation, you start this life anew, with no recollection of who you were before. Because of that limitation on our consciousness, we see this life as the beginning and end.
It may seem to you that I am teaching a philosophy contrary to that of the Hindus. But I am dealing with truth from the relative standpoint of God’s creation. I read from the book of God, and from that library I speak to you. This is the way I learned from my guru, [Swami Sri Yukteswar] and the way he learned from his master [Lahiri Mahasaya]. Without direct perception you can’t really know at all if something is true.
Again, relatively speaking, if we incarnate only once, then we see in nature a devastating, iconoclastic method. Some babies are stillborn, or die after only a little while, without having had a chance to experience life. People of all ages are stricken with suffering, disease and death. There is no certainty about life. Every year when new models of cars come out, there are always some that are “lemons,” having mechanical defects. Is life like this, too? That somehow in the process of nature some souls are made with firm, sound bodies and minds and others are accidentally given weak bodies and defective brains? Are we just factory productions, with no control over what happens to us? If this life is the beginning and the end, then I say it is a terrible injustice. It is ruthless. We don’t want to think of a God who could create such a life- this world would just be God’s great zoo, with us as merely experimental animals, His human guinea pigs. If God deliberately made specimens with great talent and others with poor mentality, some beautiful and others deformed, then there is no justice, and no use in religion. And if this is the only life, with no existence hereafter, then there is no point in making any effort beyond satisfying our selfish whims of the moment.
