Video Information: 11.02.23, MMMUT Gorakhpur (Online), Greater Noida
Context:
~ Where do we go after we die?
~ Is there really an afterlife?
~ What happens after we die?
~ Where does our desire come from?
~ What science and factories cannot produce?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
#acharyaprashant
Context:
~ Where do we go after we die?
~ Is there really an afterlife?
~ What happens after we die?
~ Where does our desire come from?
~ What science and factories cannot produce?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
#acharyaprashant
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00 Good evening, sir. Myself is Skanthi Parthi. And my question to you is that in the recent
00:07 past I have experienced around me and with my friends as well that the people whom we
00:14 have very close and loving relationships with and whom we spend our time on a daily basis
00:21 are suddenly not there with us among us anymore. So that makes me wonder where do we really
00:28 go after we die? So that makes me wonder where do we really go after we die? So, sir, can
00:36 you please throw some light on this? Thank you, sir.
00:55 You just disintegrate. You don't really go anywhere. You arose from the soil. You go
01:04 back to the soil. You go back to the air, the water, the soil. That's all. And then
01:20 one day randomly those things, those atoms, they again combine and the self rises again.
01:38 There is hardly any difference in the body in the moment before and after death. The
01:53 body is exactly as it was when you called it alive. Exactly. It's just that a particular
02:07 configuration is gone. You see, what is it that you call as life? When the male cell
02:19 meets the female cell in the womb, it's not immediately that you say that the embryo is
02:31 alive. It takes a few months before you can ascribe life to the fetus. And that's the
02:44 reason why in the debates over abortion, you often talk of the month of pregnancy, till
02:57 which it is ethically sound to terminate the pregnancy. Someone says second month, someone
03:06 says fourth month. The Hindu books say it is in the seventh month that the lump of flesh
03:25 attains the ego agency, Atmabhav. Before the seventh month, there is the thing, but the
03:37 thing has no self. So the self arises from the body, from the development of the body.
03:51 So the self is a thing of the body. The self is a thing of the body. And the self appears
04:02 when the body attains a certain configuration, a certain maturity. When that configuration
04:12 is gone, the self is gone. But where does it go to? It does not really go to anywhere.
04:25 You have burned the body down. The body is ashes. The ashes are the soil. The soil will
04:31 definitely give birth to another body.
05:00 Lord Krishna talks of this very beautifully in the Gita. He says what you consider as
05:05 living and what you talk of as not living, animate and inanimate, they are really one.
05:14 So consciousness and material, mind and matter are really not two. And the moment you say
05:27 that, the entire discussion over where does consciousness come from disappears. Consciousness
05:37 does not come from anywhere. Consciousness is material. It arises from matter. But does
05:46 it want to remain confined to matter? That's a totally different question. No, it does
05:51 not want to remain confined to matter. But its genesis is definitely material. But the
06:02 very strange thing about consciousness is birthed by the body. It does not want to remain
06:18 confined to the body. And that urge is desire. That urge seen in the purest sense is the
06:32 urge to be liberated. The spiritual quest towards liberation. So what happens? Nothing.
06:50 It was a thing from the body. It could exist only when the body had a certain shape. Only
06:58 when the body had certain processes happening within it. Chemical processes. No spiritual
07:05 process. Nothing out of the world. Those processes are no more possible for purely material reasons.
07:14 It just cannot happen now. So the life is no more. And if science in material ways can
07:25 make those processes happen for a longer period of time, you will find yourself alive for
07:31 a longer period. Is that not already happening? So if certain medicines are not there, you
07:46 will find you are not alive anymore. A person is provided ventilator support. If the ventilator
07:56 is not there, the person will be no more. What is the ventilator doing? The ventilator
08:00 is obviously not providing life. The ventilator is doing something very material, right? And
08:06 if you can sustain the material, you have sustained life. If you can sustain the material
08:14 basis of the body, you have sustained life. And therefore, the kind of life most people
08:21 lead is just material. That's what Shri Krishna says, right? What you call as Jada and Chetan
08:29 are hardly different. One you could call as Aparaprakrti, the other as Paraprakrti. If
08:41 life is about you breathing in and out, about you blinking eyelids and your heart pumping
08:57 blood through your veins, all that can be taken care of by machines. So what you call
09:05 as life is really something very mechanical and very material. And advances in science
09:12 and technology will enable this kind of material life to be extended beyond imagination. It's
09:20 another matter that even 400 years of such life will be no good. Just as today, 80 years
09:29 of life prove to be insufficient. Similarly, even those 400 years will prove to be insufficient
09:38 because it is not material that consciousness strives for. It's a tricky thing to understand.
09:47 Consciousness arises from material but does not want to remain confined to material. So
09:58 you can extend the material basis of consciousness for long. That will not satisfy consciousness.
10:06 Man will beg to be killed. Euthanasia will become a sought after service. Is it possible
10:29 for science to give birth? Is not science already doing that? Is it possible for science
10:40 to give liberation? No. So science being the study of the material can definitely give
10:49 birth. You do not require a metaphysical agency to give birth. You do not require some God
10:58 to give life. Life can be provided even by science. Not too far is the day when you will
11:06 have life being produced in factories. You will have raw material coming in and living
11:14 things coming out. All that is possible. But if there is one thing that science and factories
11:24 cannot provide or produce that is liberation. You can create consciousness but you cannot
11:32 satiate consciousness. Consciousness is material. It can be created. Not too difficult. But
11:41 consciousness cannot be satiated by science. So where did people come from? They came from
11:55 the body. The person is the body. People are so body identified. And where has the person
12:05 gone? The person is still there in a very dormant way. You could say the body was breathing
12:18 the last moment. Consciousness was expressed. The body lost its configuration due to age
12:27 or disease or accident. Consciousness went back to all the atoms it came from. If consciousness
12:37 arises from the body, surely it was pre-existing in all the atoms in the body. Correct? Because
12:46 it comes from the body so it is already there in the body which means it was pre-existing
12:49 in all the atoms in the body. So what happens in the moment of death? Nothing goes out of
12:55 the body. On the contrary, consciousness returns to the building blocks of the body. Consciousness
13:08 returns to the very atoms it came from. Now life is contained in those atoms in a latent
13:14 way. All these atoms carry life. Every atom carries life in a potential way. In a dead
13:23 man life has returned to the cells and cell is a big entity, to the atoms. In a dead man
13:32 life has gone back to the atoms. Now it is no more manifest. It is still there but it
13:41 is not manifest anymore. It is not expressed anymore. Gone in the sense of returned. And
13:54 the body will become soil and all those things and all those things are, each of them are
14:03 carrying life within them. It is not without reason that the Upanishads say, "Annam Brahm".
14:11 Food itself is Brahm. That's a very curious thing to say, no? Food is Brahm. How? How?
14:18 Because every atom is carrying consciousness within it. And if atom is carrying consciousness
14:25 within it, that very consciousness in its purest form is Brahm. So, in the flow of time
14:35 and we are all talking in the stream of time, right? We are talking of persons, their life,
14:39 their death, all that is in the stream of time. So in the stream of time a day will
14:43 come when those atoms will again combine in a favorable way. And that which is latent
14:52 within them will again sprout just as a seed sprouts given the right conditions. So again
15:01 that thing will come. You can call that as reincarnation, rebirth or whatever if you
15:06 want to. So nothing flies out of the body. What happens is life returns to the very atoms
15:21 it comes from. That's what happens. So you will not find visible signs of life anymore.
15:28 The fellow will not speak or move or breathe. So all those signs are no more because life
15:33 has gone back to its foundations, the atom. So why does consciousness want to be liberated?
15:47 That's its nature. This question is coming out of consciousness. Just as you want this
15:54 question to be answered, consciousness wants to be liberated. In some sense you want to
16:02 be liberated of your ignorance towards the answer of this question. So you are asking
16:07 this question, right? This is the attempt of consciousness, a small, minor, feeble attempt
16:14 of consciousness to be liberated. So in your question lies the answer. Consciousness wants
16:20 to be liberated. You want the answer to your question. These two are the same thing.
16:25 Thank you, Sir.
16:37 [Music]