REINCARNATION IN VEDANTA

According to the Hindu sage Adi Shankaracharya, the world, as we ordinarily understand it, is like a dream, fleeting and illusory.  To be trapped in samsara, the rounds of birth and death, is the result of our ignorance of the true nature of our existence.  It is ignorance, avidya, of one's true self, the Atman, that leads to ego-consciousness, grounding one in desire and a perpetual chain of reincarnation.

The idea is intricately linked to action, karma, a concept first recorded in the Upanishads.  Every action has a reaction, the force of which determines one's next incarnation.  A person is reborn through desire: he desires to be born because he wants to enjoy a body, which, it so happens, can never bring deep, lasting happiness or peace, ananda.

After many births every person becomes dissatisfied and begins to seek higher forms of happiness through spiritual experience.  When, after spiritual practice, sadhana, a person realizes, by intuitive insight as opposed to merely intellectual understanding, that the true self is the immortal Atman rather than the body, or the ego, all of his desires for the pleasures of the world, all of his wanting to have this, to do that, or to be that, vanish.  Worldly pleasures and ambitions seem insipid compared to spiritual ananda.

When all of his desires have vanished the person will no longer be reborn.  When the cycle of rebirth thus comes to an end, a person is said to have attained liberation, moksha.  All schools agree that moksha implies the cessation of worldly desires, the result of which is freedom from the cycle of birth and death, but the ultimate end differs among them.

Followers of the Advaita Vedanta school believe that they will spend eternity absorbed in the perfect peace that comes with the realization that all of existence is One, namely Brahman, and that Brahman and the Atman are identical.  Dvaita schools do not believe in particular that Brahman and Atman are one.  They are two distinct entities in their view.  Moksha means spending eternity in a spiritual world or heaven, loka, in the blessed company of Vishnu.  Vishnu is the “preserver” in the Hindu trinity that includes Brahma and Shiva.