Punar Janm as a Noble Lie

I was reading My Gita by Devdutt Pattnaik. It is really engaging, but sometimes I can't agree with its rationality, so I make up my own. The third chapter deals with the idea of reincarnation, and all this came to my mind while reading it.

NOTE: these are just my truth, neither your truth nor the truth

Punar Janam or Reincarnation is something we all have been fed since childhood. The body-cloth and the soul-body analogy of Krishna have been told a million time through different mediums.

And the noble lie is a concept discussed through history by people like Plato, Chanakya, Machiavelli and in recent stories like The Dark Knight.
The age-old dilemma is - do order and health of society at large lies above truth? Socrates believed that society benefited from unifying belief systems, whether that belief is true or false is irrelevant. Perhaps the same goes for the compilers of our Dharma-Shastras. Due to the lack of effective educational tools to spread the vast philosophical ideas in the masses, they resorted to cultural tools (stories, rituals, narratives) wrapping noble ideas into common beliefs. Where the end result was far more important than the means of it.

I am agnostic about the physical concept of reincarnation as it is described in the Gita. Soul changing body as clothes is just not scientifically rational (till yet). The explanation of Charvaka in Ship of Theseus seems more plausible (poetic too). As we all know matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed. What we do know as of now is when the functioning of the body completely stops, it starts degenerating and the elements get dissolved in nature from where they came from. After my death, part of me will mix in the air which is gonna be inhaled by someone, partly mixed in soil that will go to plants and bud like a flower, partly mixed in a river which will fertile the soil and many other permutations.

I think rebirth can better be understood metaphorically as a noble lie propagated by Hinduism to liberate us from the shackles of fear, the quest of meaning and the need of validating ourselves. As proposed by Devdutt Pattnaik in his lovely My Gita - "When you live many lives, alignments and achievements are rendered meaningless. What matters is wisdom: an understanding of why the world exists, why we exist and why we live. When we understand, we do not seek control of the other, hence liberated." He also contradicts Indian mythology to that of greek where life is defined as terminal, a race to be won, a name to make, a value to consume, a value to attain.

The theory that we live many lives can be also understood metaphorically.
'There were Ujjwals before me, there are Ujjwals coexisting with me and there will be Ujjwals after me'. This can be understood by the vastness of humanity, there must be other Ujjwals with a similar set of memes (ideas, behaviours, desires) in different environments. So if Chitrgupt is keeping records of my actions then through the laws of causality, my action must affect the Ujjwals which are going to come after me. Hinduism must have chosen the self-replication of human life because humans are not so empathetic by nature, we are a selfish gene. If we get a notion that our actions are gonna affect us in our future lives then we will take more responsible ones.
Liberation (moksha) from the cycle of life can be understood as liberation from the cycle of suffering which is evident through human history. If we understand, observe (darshan) rather than controlling, we accept and appreciate the world and break the cycle of suffering.

Extrapolating upon this single theory reflects our limited and redundant understanding of our ancient culture. How we have stressed so much on the symbols that we have lost its meaning. We are no more able to decode the data which is engrained in our ancient knowledge. And carrying the rigid symbols without evolving the ideas behind them concerning the ever-evolving environment has made the cons using them to extract money from us and leaders using it as a political ideology to mobilise us.

This pulls us back to the question of Noble lie vs Truth. Today we are capable of understanding the truth. With the advent of the internet and mass communication, we have the requisite tools to provide ideas which can improve the lives of millions of people. Make them see the Sun of rationality rather than the shadows on the cave's walls.



                                                                                                                        - Ujjwal Narayan