Your Mind is the Most Powerful in Your Body - Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Knowledge does not mean informative knowledge. Here knowledge means aware-ness, the sense of knowingness. When you increase the sense of knowingness in you, karma gets reduced.

Animals only have prarabdha karma. This means the karma of which they do not have any control. Nature runs them. They do not accumulate a future karma. If you are like an animal totally, you don’t accumulate any karma. As a human being, this is impossible, because your mind gets into those impressions.

Reincarnation means coming again into a body. Our mind is energy and the law of thermodynamics in physics states that energy cannot be destroyed. If the mind is energy, what happens to this energy when someone dies? Death is almost like sleep. What happens to you when you sleep? The most ironic thing is that we sleep every night but we have never met our sleep. If we meet our sleep, if we happen to understand our sleep, we will understand death also.

While sleeping, your whole consciousness, your attention, your mind, shrinks and shrinks, and then one by one you are shut off from the outer experiences and move inward into a void, a space. And then how do you wake up in the morning? The same energy, the same consciousness that was shrunk starts expanding, opens up, and you wake up. If you observe the mechanism, the last thought that you had just before falling asleep becomes the first thought when you wake up.

This gives you a clue of your reincarnation. The mind that is full of different impressions leaves this body, but the impressions remain with the mind and wait for a proper situation for the same mind to come down into a new body. When there is a copulation and a proper womb formation, it just pulls that mind into that womb. Then a child is born. The body is gained. So it is said that the last thought is most important. Whatever you do throughout your life, at least in the last moment, your mind should be free and happy. If you are happy in the last moment before you leave the body, then you get a better body the next time.

Getting an animal body after human birth is almost impossible. It can happen but is very rare. If someone in the last moment of life keeps thinking about an animal, they could be born in that form. This happens because the last impression in the mind will be the strongest impression and will produce such a circumstance for the mind to take into the next body.

In many cultures there is a tradition of naming children and grandchildren with the same name as the father or grandfather. When someone dies, the strongest impression in their mind is of their children or grandchildren. In many families the children and grandchildren have the same life and do the same work as their fathers and grandfathers. This is true in a closely-knit family situation. The children even grow to act and behave like the fathers even though they are born several decades apart.

© "Deccan Chronicle" (dated February 5, 2003). Reprinted with permission.

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