Is Reincarnation True?

Does human embodiment happen more than once? If so, how exactly does that happen? Is there a soul that migrates from lifetime to lifetime? Are the effects of past lives reflected in the present?

Avatar Adi Da Samraj Avatar Adi Da does not approach any subject merely to satisfy our philosophical curiosity or to suggest a set of consoling beliefs. He asks us to examine our presumptions.

If reincarnation is true, why do we tend not to remember past lives? Even if we do have such memories, how can we know that they are what they seem to be? Are we, in fact, the same one who existed in past lifetimes? If so, in what sense is this true? Who or what is it that persists from lifetime to lifetime?

Avatar Adi Da does not ask us to believe in reincarnation, or to believe in anything at all, for that matter. He offers His own observations on the afterlife process for us to test in our intuition and experience.

Even if His argument could somehow "prove" reincarnation - and He certainly does present a compelling and enlightened logic - is reincarnation really a consoling prospect?

The Ultimate Message of our Mortality

When the inherent suffering in life is felt, then reincarnation looks more like an indefinite extension of that suffering, rather than a hopeful answer of any kind.

Avatar Adi Da does not suggest that reincarnation is consoling, or in any way a resolution to our suffering. Rather, He reveals the total picture of existence to us, exactly as it is to His open eyes.

He does not suggest that we look for some glorious or exotic experience, either now or after death. Instead, He uses the discussion about reincarnation to bring us to the ultimate message of our mortality - the cosmos has no regard for any specific "individual".

Instead there is a ceaseless play of change, an endless dance of numberless births and deaths throughout the infinity of time and universes. And somehow, in the midst of this dance, we must love. To move beyond our mortal dilemma, we must embrace Love Itself without any limit whatsoever, even the limit of separate individuals.

Our Destiny Beyond Life or Death

There is no ultimate fulfillment to be found within the conditions of life. Likewise there is no ultimate experience of any kind, even within all the realms that may be beyond this life. Adi Da clearly describes the bondage involved in all our seeking, at any level, "high" or "low".

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: "Use your lifetime for the sake of Divine Self-Realization. If you use it for anything less, then what is less becomes your destiny. All destinies, fulfilled, have a force that leads you to dissatisfaction. There is an emptiness in acquisition. In getting, a dissatisfaction arises, because one was already full of the search. The search is an agony, a disease, a kind of stress you want to be relieved of.

"You believe you cannot be relieved of it until you achieve union with your object, whatever that may be. Therefore, in your stress, you desire to pursue that object. That pursuit is what you are full of.

"When you acquire your object, you are empty, because you are no longer full of the stress of the search. And, all of a sudden, you feel, in that moment of absence of the search, a glimpse of something greater, Freedom Itself, Happiness Itself.

"There is a kind of a feeling that Happiness is not to be identified with any object or the achievement of any goal at all. That space is illuminating. In that space of dissatisfaction and freedom from seeking, an individual may find the motivation to take up Spiritual life.

"Perhaps all of you are here because something of that has happened in your life somehow, that crisis of dissatisfaction and freedom from identifying Happiness with acquisition of this or that or life just as it is.

"Perhaps you have had enough of that anyway, just a taste of it to make you dissatisfied with what life is presently and even perhaps dissatisfied with what it can become. There is an overriding impulse in you that you are perhaps only beginning to understand.

"Its first signs are that it leads you to do sadhana [spiritual practice], to begin to grow again, and to continue to grow altogether."

Our ultimate destiny is not within the cosmos. It cannot be understood as an experience that any separate "individual" may know.

Our ultimate destiny is to grow beyond all limited conditions, to realize our birthless and deathless Self-nature. This deep ground of being both transcends and includes every individual life and the entire mind-made cosmos, including every realm we may know after death. This destiny is Consciousness Itself, Love Itself, and the Only One Who Is.

The Heart of Understanding

Death is utterly acceptable to consciousness and life. There has been endless times of numberless deaths, but neither consciousness nor life has ceased to arise. The felt quality and cycle to death has not modified the fragility of flowers, even the flowers within the human body.

Therefore one's understanding of consciousness and life must be turned to That Utter Inclusive Truth, That Clarity and Wisdom, That Power and Untouchable Gracefulness, That One and Only Reality this evidence suggests.

One must cease to live in a superficial and divided way, seeking and demanding consciousness and life in the present apparent form, avoiding and resisting what appears to be the end of consciousness and life in death.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
Prologue to The Knee Of Listening

Page 1:
The Truth About Death
· "Death is a Perfect Insult"
· Wisdom About Death Should Inform Our Living
· How Can an Ordinary Person Face Death?

Page 2:
Near Death Experience
· Universe is Mind
· Mind Is More than the Brain
· Can We Prepare for Death?

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As powerful as Adi Da's open-eyed instruction about death is, it represents just one facet of what He offers. It could not be otherwise – He actually Is our own birthless and deathless Self-nature.

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