Radha Krishna Dharmic Mandir

THE JOURNEY OF THE SOUL AFTER DEATH

The conversation between Garuda and Lord Vishnu, Garuda asked about the Kingdom of Lord Yama. Lord Vishnu not only explained the Kingdom of Yama, but also described the procedure to be followed after death. At the time of death, Lord Yama's messenger arrives on the scene. The soul can see Lord Yama's messenger and Lord Vishnu's servant. The soul has to undergo a long journey to reach the world of Yama. The path becomes difficult for sinners, while do-gooders find the path comfortable.

Lord Vishnu then described Lord Yama with four arms, holding a conch, disk, bow and staff. Lord Yama treats good people with respect, while sinners are treated harshly. Lord Yama uses iron rods and clubs to punish them, while sitting on a buffalo. His appearance was frightening to sinners and radiant to good people.

Then Lord Vishnu explains that the bodies of sinners are tortured by Lord Yama's messengers on the 18th day after death. The soul is drawn to the Kingdom of Yama, where many souls rest before reaching the final destination. While resting, the subtle body reflects on past actions and is able to look back on its life journey.

When the soul reaches Lord Yama's Kingdom, it is confronted with the beauty and majesty of the kingdom. The souls have to pass through all the cities that are heavily guarded by Lord Yama's messengers. Only on the sixth month, the soul is allowed to rest. While undergoing torture, the soul realizes its mistake and crosses the Vaitrarani river as one of the tests.

Lord Yama's messengers treat the subtle-body with anger and beat it for its bad deeds during life. They conveyed that only good deeds alone can save the soul. After a year, the soul reaches Lord Yama's abode known as the Dharma King. There, the soul sees the Celestial Musician and the heavenly nymphs. The place is inhabited by subtle-bodies living in human or Divine form.

Within Lord Yama's abode, live the eight Sravanas, and sons of Lord Brahma, who have the ability to move according to their own will. They travel from heaven, earth and hell. They have the ability to know the details of one's life and thoughts. When reporting to Citragupta, they reminded him that every good and bad action is recorded in the karmic cycle.

-Pt.A.Sharma

The katha in the Garuda Purana and such other scriptures, even in the Bhagavata, are really enlightening. When the soul departs from the body in the case of these lower, unpurified and negligibly religious souls, it is taken away by the messengers of Yama and placed before the Lord of Death for judgment.

It is said that Yama asks the soul, “What have you done?”

Ordinarily, it cannot remember anything. It will say, “I don't know.”

The shock of separation from the body removes all memory, and it cannot remember what it has done in the previous life. It is said that then a hot rod, called a yamadanda, is kept on its head, and immediately it remembers its entire past. It knows every detail of the actions that it did, both good and bad.

The soul says, “I have done a little good, but have also made many mistakes and performed so many erroneous actions.”

Yama asks, “What do you have to say about it now?”

The soul replies, “I have got relatives. They will expiate them for me. They will conduct yajnas, charities, worship, sankirtans, bhajans and meditations in my name, and I shall be free from the consequence of the sins that I have committed or the mistakes that I have made.”

“Go then!” says Yama, “And see what they do.”

Apparently, it takes ten days for the soul to be brought back, the 10 day ceremony is usually done on the tenth, eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth days. The soul hovers around, observing what the relatives are doing, and Yama's messengers stand behind like policemen to see what is done. If an expiatory ceremony is done in the name of the soul, such as the Bhagavata Saptaham, the Rudra Yaga, the Narayana Bali and the Vishnu Yajna, and varieties of charities are done, and all those things that were dear to the soul are also given in gift, the effect of these good deeds is credited to the account of the soul and it is exonerated to that extent.

If the soul has no merit at all, it will be sent to the land of punishment, whatever the punishment be. In the Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana, the Garuda Purana, etc., the type of punishment and difficulties that the soul has to undergo are described in such gory language that we would not like to be born into this world again.

When the soul is expunged of all its sins by suffering in the prison of Yama's hell, it is released. It is said that then it is sent to Rudraloka, and will not be allowed to leave. To release the soul from Rudra's clutches, Rudra Yajna is done. Then it is sent to Vaikuntha, so Vishnu Yajna is done; and after many, many years, the soul attains moksha. This is how a bad person gets purified in a very painful way, and then finally attains blessedness.

Or, if the soul has a tremendous attachment to relations and to wealth, it can be reborn into this world

This is the effect of attachments. And very intense attachments, which do not even give the soul time to take birth in this world, convert it into a ghost. Preta yoni is the outcome and, as described in the Bhagavata Purana, it hovers around in space, hungry and thirsty.

Here the Bhagavadgita describes the more glorious paths to the higher realms. Those who are not spiritually awakened but have done immensely good deeds reach a lower kingdom called Chandraloka, the realm of the moon, where they stay invisibly and enjoy the fruit of their good deeds. When the momentum of their good deeds, charitable deeds, etc., is exhausted, they come back into this world. But if a person is spiritually awakened and is not merely a good man—not merely a charitable or a philanthropic person—then the path is different. These two paths are called the northern path and the southern path.

Yatra kāle tvanāvṛttim āvṛttiṁ caiva yoginaḥ, prayātā yānti taṁ kālaṁ vakṣyāmi bharatarṣabha (8.23): “I shall now tell you,” says Bhagavan Sri Krishna, “about that path treading which one returns, and that path treading which one does not return. These two paths I shall describe to you now—uttaramarga or jyotirmarga, and dakshinamarga or dhumamarga, as they are called.”

Agnir jotir ahaḥ śuklaḥ ṣaṇmāsā uttarāyaṇam, tatra prayātā gacchanti brahma brahmavido janāḥ (8.24): Everything is filled with light, everything is filled with divinity, and everything is superintended over by a divinity. The fire of cremation—that is the agni, the physical fire, which has a divinity of its own—assumes a divine form in the case of a person who is to rise up to the celestial realms. Then there is a divinity superintending over the daytime, in contrast with the night. If a person passes away during the daytime, and during the bright half of the lunar month, and during the northern movement of the sun, he shall reach the solar orb—Suryaloka. From there, he will be taken up further.

The Upanishads describe many more stages than the ones mentioned here. And at a particular stage beyond the sun, a superhuman entity is supposed to come and take the soul by the hand. Up to the solar orb, or even a little beyond, is called the realm of lightning. That is, beyond the sun, the lightning of Brahmaloka flashes forth. The individuality consciousness of the soul slowly gets diminished at that time, and it is not aware of any self-effort. It does not know that it is moving at all, inasmuch as the ego is almost gone. It is said that at that time an amanava purusha deputed by Brahma himself comes down in a luminous form, and leads the soul to the abode of Brahma, the Creator. This is the path of krama mukti, or gradual liberation, in which the soul is supposed to be glorying in Brahmaloka until Brahma himself is dissolved at the end of time—at the end of a hundred years of his life—and then the Absolute Brahman is reached.

But there is a possibility of immediate salvation without passing through all these stages—a hundredfold promotion, as it were. It is the dissolution of the soul in the supreme Brahman at this very spot. The soul need not have to travel in space and time because it is a jivanmukta purusha, one who has attained to a consciousness where there is no distance to be travelled. For him, there is no solar orb or anything else. He has spread his consciousness everywhere, in all beings: sarvabhūtahite ratāḥ (12.4). He is the soul of all beings, like S**a Maharishi, Vyasa, Vasishtha, etc. When his soul spreads itself everywhere in the cosmos, where is the question of moving? Na tasya prāṇā utkrāmanti (B.U. 4.4.6): His pranas do not depart, as is the case of other people. Brahmaiva san brahmāpyeti: They dissolve here, just now. That is, the moment the soul departs the body, it enters the supreme Brahman, the Absolute, then and there, without having to pass through all these stages. But in the case of krama mukti, the graduated steps mentioned in the Bhagavadgita, it is different.

The divinity of fire, the divinity of daytime, the divinity of the lunar month's bright half, and the divinity ruling over the northern movement of the sun will take care of the soul and bring it up. In the Moksha Parva of the Mahabharata there is the story of a great ascetic who rose up from his body, and a little flame rising up through the sky could be seen. It rose higher and higher until it reached the orb of the sun, where a divine being emerged from the solar orb and received it. According to our tradition, the sun is not a material substance. It is a divinity—hiranmaya purusha—in which a golden-coloured Narayana is seated.

-Pt.A.Sharma.

Anuvṛtti

In this chapter Śrī Kṛṣṇa answers the question of Arjuna regarding those who reject the Vedas, but perform worship with some faith. Arjuna wants to know to which mode of material nature they belong. The first lesson to learn here is that by not following the Vedic injunctions one automatically acts as one likes, but is henceforth always under the modes of material nature – goodness, passion and ignorance. Thus, one is never situated in transcendence. Śrī Kṛṣṇa then further describes food, sacrifice, austerity and charity as they are influenced by, or born of, the three modes of material nature.

First faith (śraddhā) is discussed. Śrī Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna that śraddhā arises in this life due to one’s own nature and from impressions in the mind from previous lives. All activities in life depend on faith to one degree or another. It does not matter what one’s creed may be – theist or atheist, one must have faith. The theist has faith that there is a God, and the atheist has faith that there is no God. If one states a particular doctrine or philosophy, but says he has no ‘faith’ then that is pure hypocrisy.

Sri Kṛṣṇa says that when one’s faith is in the mode of goodness, one worships the demigods such as Gaṇeśa, Śiva, Sūrya, Indra and Sarasvatī etc. When one’s faith is in the mode of passion, one worships the spirits in nature or the ancestors – this also includes humanists and atheists. When one’s faith is in the mode of ignorance, one is found to worship ghosts and spirits. All these types of worship are current in the world today.

To be transcendental to material nature means to accept the Vedas and thus be situated beyond the modes of nature in the realm of viśuddha-sattva, pure goodness. When one’s faith is situated in pure goodness, one worships the Supreme Person,sri Kṛṣṇa. This is the highest stage of monotheism – the acceptance of one Supreme Being. Pure-goodness is described by Śiva as follows:

"sattvaṁ viśuddhaṁ vasudeva-śabditaṁ yad īyate tatra pumān apāvṛtaḥ
sattve ca tasmin bhagavān vāsudevo hy adhokṣajo me namasā vidhīyate"

One should always worship sri Kṛishnṇa in pure goodness. Pure goodness is always pure consciousness in which the Absolute Truth, known as Vāsudeva, is revealed without any covering. (Śrīmad Bhāgavatam 4.3.23)

In the stage of pure consciousness, one is guided by the highest type of faith called nirguṇa-śraddhā, transcendental faith that is uncontaminated by the modes of material nature. After many lifetimes of following the Vedas and associating with the virtuous and pious, one develops sukṛti, accumulated merit. This sukṛti then leads one to the association of sādhus (self-realised yogīs) and under their guidance nirguṇa-śraddhā develops and progresses through various stages – ultimately reaching the highest stage of self-realisation, prema-bhakti.

-Pt.A.sharma.