Can you stop reincarnation

Please log in with your username or email to continue. No account yet? Create an account. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great. By using our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Cookie Settings. Learn why people trust wikiHow. Download Article Explore this Article Steps. Tips and Warnings. Related Articles. Author Info Last Updated: May 6, Recognize suffering. The quest to stop the eternal cycle of births and deaths begins with an internal realization that one is weary of chasing youth, beauty, wealth, status and power.

We have done this in so many lifetimes and found earthly rewards to be fleeting, temporal and shallow. Replace the chase for earthly desires with a single longing to be one with God. For a Hindu this is believed to be the will of God. Buddhists develop a single longing for Nirvana, the end of suffering. Remember God throughout the day by speaking His or Her Names. Buddhists remember the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

Recognize God, or the Dharma spiritual teachings , in everything around you. Stop frequently throughout the day and bring to mind how God or the Dharma explains the world around you and whatever situation you currently find yourself in.

Give up all types of intoxication. Excesses of all sorts, even good food is bad in excess , and other bad habits all interfere with the energy of both your body and mind. Treat your body as a living temple!

Give up the need to control others. Whether it is holding onto family, friends or anyone else, you need to let them live their own lives. This is not to be confused with relinquishing your obligations towards your dependants, such as young children, spouses or parents.

Each cycle in one's life has a purpose, and when one has dependants their needs have to be met first. Renouncing them to seek God is a serious dereliction of duties that will result in further rebirths. Live as simple a life as possible. Reduce your belongings and debts to the bare minimum and learn to trust that you will receive what you need.

Give up ambition and ego. These are the two biggest obstacles to ending the cycle of reincarnation. The less you want, the less draw earthly life has on you. As the desire to acquire evaporates, greed, jealousy, ego and the need for power all disappear, leaving the path and mind clear to focus on God. That's up to you. People might not be interested. The life as we know now, after death therefore moves on to another form of life based on the merits and demerits it accumulated in its current life.

The path to becoming a supreme soul is to practice non-violence and be truthful. Actions are seen to have consequences: Some immediate, some delayed, even into future incarnations.

So the doctrine of karma is not considered simply in relation to one life-time, but also in relation to both future incarnations and past lives. The souls bound by karma go round and round in the cycle of existence. As a result of this doctrine, Jainism attributes supreme importance to pure thinking and moral behavior.

The Jain texts postulate four gatis , that is states-of-existence or birth-categories, within which the soul transmigrates. The four gatis have four corresponding realms or habitation levels in the vertically tiered Jain universe: Demi-gods occupy the higher levels where the heavens are situated; humans, plants and animals occupy the middle levels; and hellish beings occupy the lower-levels, where seven hells are situated.

Depending on its karma, a soul transmigrates and reincarnates within the scope of this cosmology of destinies. The four main destinies are further divided into sub-categories and still smaller sub-categories. In all, Jain texts speak of a cycle of 8. In Jainism, God has no role to play in an individual's destiny; one's personal destiny is not seen as a consequence of any system of reward or punishment, but rather as a result of its own personal karma.

Violent deeds, killing of creatures having five sense organs, eating fish, and so on, lead to rebirth in hell. Deception, fraud and falsehood leads to rebirth in the animal and vegetable world.

Kindness, compassion and humble character result in human birth; while austerities and the making and keeping of vows lead to rebirth in heaven. Each soul is thus responsible for its own predicament, as well as its own salvation. At the death of one personality, a new one comes into being, much as the flame of a dying candle can serve to light the flame of another. The consciousness in the new person is neither identical to nor entirely different from that in the deceased but the two form a causal continuum or stream.

Transmigration is the effect of karma Pali: kamma or volitional action. The basic cause is the abiding of consciousness in ignorance Pali: Avijja , Sanskrit: Avidya : When ignorance is uprooted rebirth ceases.

Observation reveals each moment as an experience of an individual mind-state such as a thought, a memory, a feeling or a perception that arises, exists, and ceases.

Sikhs believe that the soul is passed from one body to another until liberation. God may pardon wrongs and release us. Otherwise reincarnation is due to the law of cause and effect but does not create any caste or differences among people.

Reincarnation is refuted by all the main monotheistic religions of the world. The first life? The last life? Considering this, Quran rejects the concept of reincarnation, though it preaches the existence of soul. The principle belief in Islam is that there is only one birth on this earth. The Doomsday comes after death and will be judged as to one has to once for all go to hell or be unified with God. Modern Sufis who embrace the idea of reincarnation include Bawa Muhaiyadeen. Reincarnation is not an essential tenet of traditional Judaism.

Medieval Jewish Rationalist philosophers discussed the issue, often in rejection. Other, Non-Hasidic, Orthodox Jewish groups while not placing a heavy emphasis on reincarnation do acknowledge it as a valid teaching. The 16 th -century Isaac Luria the Ari brought the issue to the center of his new mystical articulation, for the first time, and advocated identification of the reincarnations of historic Jewish figures that were compiled by Haim Vital in his Shaar HaGilgulim.

The major Christian denominations reject the concept of reincarnation. Christians believe that when a person dies their soul would sleep in the grave along with their corpse. However, there was a schism about understanding Jesus himself in early Christian history. Was he a man who became God? Was he God born as a man? The Roman faction rejected pre-existence and reincarnation and believed Jesus was God become man. The Jerusalem faction knew Jesus was a man who achieved the human-divine at-one-ment, which is the goal of everyone to escape reincarnation cycle of birth and death and have eternal life.

NRMs may be novel in origin or they may be part of a wider religion, such as Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism, in which case they will be distinct from pre-existing denominations. All spiritual schools accept the concept of reincarnation. They admit, with some differences, that the purpose of reincarnation is for the soul to get purified and gain wisdom, so that it comes out of the cycle of birth and death.

Osho, also known as Bhagvan Rajaneesh, says that the life is born when the existence looks upon itself. An individual is a consciousness localized in a body. The mind of an individual exists as a set of memories, both good and bad. Of course more of bad memories than good, as we always tend to remember the insults and criticisms more than praises.

Memory is nothing but energy in a very subtle form. Being energy, it cannot be destroyed even at death. It is liberated into the cosmos and dissolved. Just like riches attract more riches, such memories are pooled up, only to enter another womb. Thus when a person is born, he gets the bits of memories from many people. So he cannot remember his past birth. Nevertheless, in exceptional cases, when a new born gets the entire memory system of another individual, he can easily recall his past birth, though it is not actually his birth.

So in true sense, the person is not born again, only his memories are expressed in another individual. An enlightened person is not born again. This is because; his mind contains no memories, neither good nor bad. He lives in a moment to moment existence. It is like the path of a fish in water or a bird in the sky. They do not leave any track behind.

Thus when an enlightened person dies, he leaves no memories, to be picked up by other beings. Thus he is not born again. Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, from the University of Virginia, is an authority in scientific research on reincarnation. He investigated many reports of young children who claimed to remember a past life. He conducted more than case studies over a period of 40 years and published 12 books, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.

Stevenson methodically documented each child's statements and then identified the deceased person the child identified with, and verified the facts of the deceased person's life that matched the child's memory. He also matched birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records such as autopsy photographs, in Reincarnation and Biology. However, a significant majority of Stevenson's reported cases of reincarnation originated in Eastern societies, where dominant religions often permit the concept of reincarnation.

Following this type of criticism, Stevenson published a book on European Cases of the Reincarnation Type. Other people who have undertaken reincarnation research include Jim B. Tucker, Brian Weiss, and Raymond Moody. Some skeptics, such as Paul Edwards, have analyzed many of these accounts, and called them anecdotal.

Carl Sagan referred to examples apparently from Stevenson's investigations in his book The Demon-Haunted World as an example of carefully collected empirical data, though he rejected reincarnation as a parsimonious explanation for the stories. Researchers such as Stevenson have acknowledged these limitations. Ian Stevenson reported that belief in reincarnation is held with variations in details by adherents of almost all major religions except Christianity and Islam.

The authors reported that surveys have found about one-fifth to one-quarter of Europeans have some level of belief in reincarnation, with similar results found in the USA. In India, Satwant Pasricha, Professor of Psychology, is the authority on the scientific study of reincarnation.

Having worked as an assistant to Ian Stevenson, her research methods are similar to Stevenson. She documents the child's statements. Then she identifies the deceased person the child remembers being, and verifies the facts of the deceased person's life that match the child's memory. The consciousness sees all the glamour, illusions, attractions, and pleasures of the world, and it gets sidetracked. But even though the Soul gets pulled into these things, they are all a part of its learning.

As the Soul goes through its life plan, it is apt to create imbalance. Then when the time comes for the physical body to die, there are often karmic situations that have not yet been cleared or balanced. Thus, the Soul, at a later time, embodies again onto the physical realm so that it can clear its debts, right the wrongs, and bring balance and harmony. But if the consciousness again gets caught up in the illusions and the glamour, it may end up creating more karmic situations so that the Soul must again embody to clear them.

And so on. At some point, the consciousness will come into an understanding of this whole process; it will learn to be a responsible creator and to place its value and its concern on those things that are positive and spiritual in nature rather than on the materiality of this world.

In this way, the consciousness begins its evolution back towards God, fulfills its karma from the past, stays free of accruing more karma, and liberates itself from this world. Before you—the Soul — incarnate on the planet, you are in consciousness on some other realm; you are living another existence. But, for whatever reason, it becomes time for you to incarnate on the physical realm.

Keep in mind that it is the nature of the Soul to experience all levels and conditions of God.