When Does the ‘Soul’ Enter the Body?
Prasoon Joshi: Sadhguru, when does the soul enter the body?
Sadhguru: Let us use the word “life” because the word “soul” is heavily contaminated. The life that you are is different than the person that you are. The person that you are is the making and molding of many things that have happened around you. The life that you are has come with a certain information. If it runs out of the information or the software is gone, then this life exits the body because its term is over.
If its term is still on, but you break the body for some reason, it exits. When it exits like this, the reverberance of life is at a higher pitch. It should not have left, but it did. For this life, a lot of things have to be done, otherwise you will leave it in the wild and it will go on. Had it lived in the body, maybe it would have completed its term in another five years, but without a physical frame, these five years may become five hundred years.
A Question of Life and Death
Prasoon Joshi: When you say, “This life decided to leave,” you almost say it as if one has the choice to leave. At least the way we see our loved ones left, we see it as someone else decided, or some happening decided their death. There are also other kind of deaths. One hears about samadhi and conscious dying, probably that is not the kind of dying this is.
Sadhguru: Let us look at the varieties of death. Abortion is one form of death. The next is stillbirth – it could have happened beyond a certain time. After conception has happened, normally somewhere between forty to forty-eight days, life enters. I am saying this from my personal experience – that is the time when you enter. There are some lives that enter later. This is something a mother could feel if we train her a little bit. If she sees that a life has entered beyond forty-eight days, then she will deliver someone truly special because such a life takes time to settle in.
After conception has happened, normally somewhere between forty to forty-eight days, life enters.
You must have heard that someone saw Gautama’s mother and said, “You are going to deliver a phenomenal being.” Someone looked at Yashodha[1] and said, “You are delivering a phenomenal being.” If you notice that life enters after forty-eight days of conception, this means you can expect a phenomenal being to arrive.
The Different Ways of Dying
The womb is a manufacturing unit of this body. For some reason, if the body did not form itself appropriately for that life, then the life chooses to exit before it is delivered – this is a stillborn baby. Or sometimes because of whatever compulsions, a mother may choose to abort the child. The engagement of this life with the body truly begins somewhere approximately between eighty-four to ninety days. Until then, it is foraging and looking if this womb is suitable. This is not conscious – it is seeing if it matches tendency-wise. Traditionally, we call this vasanas. Depending upon your vasana, you are looking for an appropriate body.
The life gets properly engaged with the body between eighty-four to ninety days after conception. From then on, it is a proper baby, and you should not disturb it.
Though this life is partially engaged with the body, it can exit before ninety days. The life gets properly engaged with the body between eighty-four to ninety days after conception. From then on, it is a proper baby, and you should not disturb it. You must nourish it, no matter in what context it happened. If at all anything has to be done, it should be done well before eighty-four days. Beyond that, no one should touch a life that is already entrenched in the body.
The Best and Worst Ways to Die
The next thing is that some kind of accident can happen. An accident means that the body broke. Once the body broke, life exits because it cannot sustain itself in that body. The next thing is suicide. Because of some extraneous situation, someone decides to end their life. The next possibility is death by occult processes. This is one of the worst ways to die because it destabilizes the information match which entrenched you in a particular system.
The tendencies of that particular life are seeking a match with the genetic material that the parents provided. When that match is disturbed, people will die a terrible death. Terrible not only for what they may go through at that time, but because of the long duration it takes to solve this issue that happened within itself.
The next possibility is samadhi or a conscious way of exiting the body. If you had a choice to die the way you want, would you like to leave consciously or in any other way? Death is the last act that you perform in your life, and you can only die once. So you must do it in style.
