Q.535 Transmigrating Soul

Q: On your website it seems that, in the ‘Question and Answer’ section, it implies that there is an individual soul going from body to body. But in this interview from your same site Ramesh Baleskar explains how that is not the case:

http://www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/teachers/interview_balsekar3.htm

Could you please help clarify the truth?

A: Glad you find the site useful. I presume you know that I hardly ever change the advaita.org.uk site these days. All of the new material goes to https://www.advaita-vision.org/ and has done for the past 10+ (?) years.

The ‘truth’ of Advaita is that there is only Brahman. ‘Everything’ is Brahman. ‘You’ are Brahman. And, pedantically, that is all you can really say. But of course simply telling someone that is unlikely to enlighten them! Accordingly, there are lots of ‘prakriyā-s’ (ways of explaining things, stories, techniques etc.) to help seekers move their understanding in the right direction. Traditional Advaita has many of these, proven over several thousand years to be helpful in explaining things. For example, karma and reincarnation are fundamental to these. The jīva is ‘trapped’ in saṃsāra – the eternal round of birth and death – until Self-knowledge dawns and saṃsāra is ended. But this is only a prakriyā. In reality, there is only Brahman. There has never been any creation and no one has ever been born, let alone re-born.

Most modern teachers try to bypass all of the gradual traditional methods and endeavor to leap to such final pronouncements as the one above. But, to my mind at least, they are not very successful. The ‘bottom line’ of Advaita is so radical that very few can accept it without lots of preparation. If you want to get there, you are far safer, and more likely to ‘reach the destination’, if you follow the proven techniques. They may be slow and ponderous… but they work!

Q: I agree that people need stories.  For me Karma was created to give people incentive to do good and also keep them afraid of doing bad.  I see people blame innocent kids who get disease and their suffering because they did wrong in a so called past life and yet still go on to be terribly mean to people.  So when people are like this, some type of system I felt needed to be created.

The Gita says that all action is done by prakriti, not soul (whether you want to call it jiva, atman, brahman, its all the same as you said), so the good and bad a person is enjoying or suffering in this life cannot be attributed to a past life.  As your prakriti was only formed in this life.

It is just that so many people online, including swamis who claim to be teaching advaita vedanta,  claim that a singular soul/sukshma sharira moves from one body to another, and I get confused why are they teaching the wrong things.

A: The traditional teaching is not quite like that. Karma is taught as the lawful manifestation of cause and effect in our lives. For example, doing ‘bad’ things will reap bad karma, which will generate suffering in a future life. If you are suffering in this life, it is the result of actions that you, the jīva who moves from body to body, carried out in a previous life.

I suggest that you read an ‘introductory’ book on Advaita that covers all of the essential teaching without presupposing any prior knowledge. There are several which are quite good but (hopefully without any prejudice!) the best that I am aware of is ‘Book of One’ second edition. You can read extracts from this at https://www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/thebook/thebook.htm.

As regards navigating the Advaita Vision site, probably the aspect that you will find most useful is the question and answer section. The questions are listed at https://www.advaita-vision.org/questions-and-answers/ and there are currently over 530 of them. These formed the essence of the book ‘Answers… to the Difficult Questions’. If you have specific questions, this is the best place to look first. Several other bloggers sometimes provide answers but I always do.

As I said in my last response, the teaching of Advaita addresses the seeker at the level of experience in this world. From that vantage point, within the context of the teaching, a ‘soul’ moving from one body to another is perfectly valid. So do not condemn the swamis who teach this – practically ALL Advaita teachers will do so. A few will temper this with the admission that no one is ever born ‘in reality’. I do this because I know that many seekers will have heard it and I want to make sure that confusion is not introduced from the start.

Q: I have read different readings by different authors and videos by different swamis and each time I hear something new, so I get confused. Even from the site and answers and questions, some answers say there is a unique jīva in each of us, but others say that unique jīva inside of us is just ātman, and it is just our ego-sense/ignorance making us think it is different, and the 2nd explanation is the right one I believe.

The only thing I don’t get, which I could not find an answer for on the site, except for the interview from Ramesh Balsekar, is what determines our prakriti/mental tendencies that we falsely assume to be “I” at birth.

And for the site, I sometimes find some answers to questions to be contradictory, I just try and listen to the ones you write, I could be wrong and maybe my lack of understanding is causing this belief.

But pretty much, after years of reflection and reading, there is no “individual jiva”, karma happens to the body, not the doer, and when a human is born its a whole new brain, so therefore a whole new ego-sense.  (this is why I get confused at some swamis, because they say that jīva is completely different and try to say there is some  constant x number of jīva-s in existence.  Some of the answers on the site seem to imply this too, so that gets me confused.

A: Questions are asked by individuals and answers are intended to satisfy that individual’s present level of understanding. Hence the answers may not ‘suit’ others! This is why you really need a progressive teaching covering all of the topics. Once you have a general understanding of the complete teaching, then you can ask specific questions which can be answered within that context. If you want those answers at the website with extra clarification, you will have to read the book ‘Answers…’, since I added introductions and summaries etc., and grouped all the questions into topics.

In empirical reality (experience in the world), there are lots of jīva-s. Each jīva is born to resolve accumulated karma from past lives. After gaining Self-knowledge (enlightenment), a particular jīva carries on with that life, in order to resolve the karma that was relevant to that life. On death of the body-mind, there is then no further rebirth for the enlightened jīva. That is an extremely abbreviated account of the teaching of reincarnation in Advaita.

From the perspective of absolute reality, there is only Brahman (no jīva-s at all), as I explained earlier. You should only listen to, or read, material from a traditional teacher if you want a consistent story (and even then there are likely to be discrepancies, as my present books on ‘Confusions in Advaita Vedanta’ make clear). If you dip into the likes of Balsekar, Nisargadatta, Ramana, you will only end up being more confused!