Hindus support the belief that when a person dies physically his Atma (soul?)lives on and either takes on a new body or achieves freedom from this round of births and deaths. Much has been written on how to attain “mukti” (freedom from the cycle of births and death) and much has been written on what our goal should be. For example, many devotees feel that their goal is not simply liberation from the birth-death cycle but progression into a higher lifestyle – an eternal life in which they could serve God forever, unencumbered by the laboriousness of taking birth and dying over and over again.
My desire was to discover “why” reincarnation takes place.
I remembered that Sigmund Freud had once written that following your dreams and unearthing their latent contents by free association brought you into the throne room of the Great King…God.
For some thirty-five years I faithfully recorded my night dreams to get into the throne room of the great King.
I tried to discover the causal forces that precipitate dreams in sleep. I found, as did Freud, that dreams are overdetermined. That is, a number of causes could work simultaneously to precipitate a dream event in sleep. But I also made an interesting discovery – an unfulfilled curiosity in pre-dream life almost always resulted in a dream event. It is as if the brain is working overtime to work out or resolve the bug of curiosity planted into it. I will explain this with examples and more detail in future notes.
That brings me to point of this article. I believe that a major unfulfilled curiosity in this life can have the effect of precipitating a new life in the “sleep of death” of the person. That is re-incarnation. For example, if a Swami seeds you with a Guru Mantra “TTVMSEE”i.e. “THAT THOU ART” this could make you think “I am THAT. But what is THAT?” You may meditate on this mantra for decades and find reconciliation. Or the curiosity aroused by this mantra may remain unresolved. Even if you have one major curiosity in this life unresolved by the time of death of the body then re-birth is certain.
