07/07/2025
Is reincarnation real?
Short answer. Very likely.
Why? Because the math adds up.
In the Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 9, verse 8), Lord Krishna describes His manifestation process to Arjuna telling Arjuna:
"prakṛtiṃ svām avaṣṭabhya visṛjāmi punaḥ punaḥ
bhūta-grāmam imaṃ kṛtsnam avaśaṃ prakṛter vaśāt"
Prakriti - The natural condition or state of anything, nature (3 gunas)
Svām - of My
Avaṣṭabhya - embracing, taking assistance
Visṛjāmi - I create
Punaḥ - Again, repeatedly
Punaḥ - Again, repeatedly
Bhūta-grāmam - Bhuta: being, existing. gramam: multitude, collection (multitude of beings, totality of material existence)
Imam - (ayam) this
Kṛtsnam - All, whole, entire
Avaśam - Necessarily, inevitably
Prakṛteḥ - original nature
Vaśāt - (indeclinable) "through the power or influence of"
There are many verbose, and colorful translations of this text, but this is how I read this.
Embracing My original nature (Brahman), I create, again, and again, entire totality of material existence, through the power of this original nature.
The basic gist, regardless of the more flowery translations, is that Krishna (As the Ultimate Truth) creates, and recreates everything, over and over, through the power of his nature (sat chit ananda).
And thus this cyclic dance of yuga (eras) repeats.
Mathematician Roger Penrose, whose work with Stephen Hawking on the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems proved that black holes are a natural consequence of Einsteins theory of general relativity, proposed the model of the Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, in which existence has no beginning or end. Instead, the universe(s) begin with a Big Bang, expand, and then contract, into a singularity, and then another Big Bang repeats, again, and again. Sound familiar?
Imagine, if you will, the universe as a balloon, or a box(currently expanding), which is seemingly infinite. But, the universe is not 100% full of matter, therefore, there is a finite amount of matter. The poincare conjecture, penned by Henri Poincare in 1904, posits the "apple in a box" thought experiment to visualise this exact scenario.
The conjecture goes a little like this.. You have an apple, and you put it in a box. It's and "excellent box", in which nothing can get in, or out, not even light.
Over time, the apple will decay, and bacteria will do their job, and the apple will rot. Eventually, the rotted apple will turn to dust.
All of the chemical energy and particles that apple ever contained are still inside the box, and over a very long time, this energy is released, and begin to nuclear fuse, and the inside of the box will get extremely hot, eventually breaking down the particles into their component atoms, and then into protons, and neutrons.
Now, let's look at how the protons and neutrons experience this. They jog along, just obeying the law of physics. The state (inside) the box is changing from one to the other to the other. So if there is 10^24 particles in an apple then there is something like 10(10^24) different states (of matter) that those particles can be rearranged in. That’s a gigantic number. But it isn’t infinite.
What that means is that if you let the box sit there for an infinite amount of time, it will use each of the different states of matter which could exist. And so eventually, if you wait a very, very long time, and this is the power that infinity has over the finite.
At some point you could open the box and there is your apple again. In fact every possible thing that could exist in the box will exist, and they will each exist an infinite number of times.
This is a way to visualize the concept of an infinite universe and the potential for cyclical patterns. It suggests, mathematically, that given an infinite amount of time, all possible states of the matter within that system will eventually be revisited, including the original state of the apple.
A simpler analogy might be a Rubik's cube. There is only one "right" or "ordered" way to solve it, however, there are many different (unordered) combinations. This is a large number, but it isn't infinite.
Eventually, as there is a limited number of combinations, you must re-use previous combinations. If you have an infinite amount of time, you will re-use each of those combinations an infinite amount of times.
In a cyclic model of the universe, the same holds true. Each and every state which can exist, will exist, an infinite amount of times. In fact, I may ave penned these very same words, and infinite amount of times in the past.
Re-incarnation, in this model, is simply the re-using of different combination, or re-arrangements, of the universe(s).
A strange aside to this, is that all of the people who allegedly recall past lives, all seem to have been members of royalty, or Jesus. No plumbers, no cleaners...
Each of us will exist, in every possible combination, again, and again.
