Life After Death

Death is but the destruction of this outer, gross material body. We all have experience that although every night our body lies in bed, with my subtle body, which consists of mind, intelligence and ego, by dreaming I leave my bedroom and go elsewhere. Thus we all have experience of leaving our gross bodies and taking our subtle bodies to do something else while the gross bodies are still here. Therefore, I, the soul, am changing back and forth between gross and subtle bodies. I dream with the subtle body, and when the dream is over I return to the gross body. And the change that takes place when the subtle body carries the soul from one gross body to another is called death.

The subtle body of mind, intelligence and false ego carries one to another body according to the nature of his mind. The mind is always full of thoughts, and at the time of death, according to those thoughts in which his mind is absorbed, the soul is given another gross body. This is explained in Bhagavad-gita:

"Whatever state of being one remembers when he quits his body, that state he will attain without fail." [Bg 8.6] Thus bhava, the attitudes of the mind, carry one to the next gross body at the time of death.

Bhagavad-gita says that after death the soul gets another body (tatha dehantara-praptiḥ). What kind of body will one get? It is necessary to prepare oneself. Now, we can see that there are so many kinds of bodies. In the water there are 900,000 species, in the vegetable kingdom, among the trees and plants, there are 2,000,000 kinds of bodies, and there are also 11,00,000 species of insects, 1,000,000 types of birds and 3,000,000 types of beastly bodies.

There are 400,000 human species, and the civilized man is considered to be in the perfect bodily situation because nature gives us this human form of body to enable us to understand God. In other forms of life, there is no chance of understanding Him. Therefore, the duty of each of us, before our next death comes, is to understand God. If we simply misuse this body to live like cats and dogs, we are missing our greatest chance.

Because we are completely under the control of material nature, we cannot possibly say that we are free. That is stated in Bhagavad-gita:

"The bewildered spirit soul, under the influence of the three modes of material nature, thinks himself the doer of activities that are in actuality carried out by nature." [Bg 3.27] There are three modes of material nature, namely goodness, passion and ignorance. When we are under the control of material nature, we associate with these modes, or qualities. As stated in Bhagavad-gita:

"Those who associate with the mode of goodness are promoted to the higher planetary systems, those in the mode of passion remain in the middle planetary systems, and those in the mode of ignorance descend to the lower planetary systems." [Bg 14.18] Therefore, although we may like to think that we are independent, these three modes of nature have been carrying us from one planet to another and from one body to another since time immemorial. We are all eternal, but because our consciousness has been polluted by these three qualities of nature, we have to undergo repeated birth and death in the material world. Therefore, we should take advantage of the opportunity afforded by the human form of life to become free from these material qualities and rise to the spiritual platform of God consciousness, or Krsna consciousness.