Where was I
before I was born?
What will happen to me after I die?
For a moment, please close your eyes and recollect your
date of birth now. You know that before the day you were
born, you were in your mother's womb for about nine
months or so. You also know that you are a part of your
mother and your father. But have you ever wondered where
you were even before the moment your mother conceived
you? Were you in the air which your father and mother
breathed? Were you in the food which they ate? Or were
you in the water which they drank? Just where were YOU?
It
has been such a long time, since the evolution of man on
this earth. Every single day, millions of babies are born
the
world over, and a large number of people die. When we
consider other living creatures like the birds, animals,
insects, fishes… a countless number of them are born and
die everyday. Death is like the dark night. Most of us
are
scared to go out alone on a dark night.
Here's this weeks verse from Bhagavad
Gita where Lord Sri Krishna sheds some light on this
topic
Bhagavad Gita - Weekly
Verse
Click here if you
can't see the verse in sanskrit.
utkrāmantaḿ sthitaḿ vāpi
bhuñjānaḿ vā guṇānvitam
vimūḍhā nānupaśyanti
paśyanti jñāna-cakṣuṣaḥ
Bhagavad-gītā As It Is 15.10
His Divine
Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda
TRANSLATION
The foolish cannot understand how a living entity can quit his
body, nor can they understand what sort of body he enjoys under the
spell of the modes of nature. But one whose eyes are trained in
knowledge can see all this.
PURPORT
The word jñāna-cakṣuṣaḥ is very significant. Without knowledge, one
cannot understand how a living entity leaves his present body, nor
what form of body he is going to take in the next life, nor even
why he is living in a particular type of body. This requires a
great amount of knowledge understood from Bhagavad-gītā and similar
literatures heard from a bona fide spiritual master. One who is
trained to perceive all these things is fortunate. Every living
entity is quitting his body under certain circumstances, he is
living under certain circumstances, and he is enjoying under
certain circumstances under the spell of material
nature.
As a result, he is suffering different kinds of happiness and
distress, under the illusion of sense enjoyment. Persons who
are everlastingly fooled by lust and desire lose all power to
understand their change of body and their stay in a particular
body. They cannot comprehend it. Those who have developed spiritual
knowledge, however, can see that the spirit is different from the
body and is changing its body and enjoying in different ways. A
person in such knowledge can understand how the conditioned living
entity is suffering in this material existence. Therefore
those who are highly developed in Kṛṣṇa consciousness try their
best to give this knowledge to the people in general, for their
conditional life is very much troublesome. They should come
out of it and be Kṛṣṇa conscious and liberate themselves to
transfer to the spiritual world.
