Reincarnation: What Happens to the Soul After Death?

What becomes of the soul once a human being stops living? According to the teaching of Yoga-Originel, reincarnation is the long journey through which the soul, issued from the infinite Ocean, matures from one existence to the next through samsara, until it consciously returns to its source. From the three gunas to the Holy-Name, from the last veil to Liberation, this text follows that movement and shows why human life is its decisive threshold.

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What becomes of the soul once a human being stops living? According to the teaching of Yoga-Originel, reincarnation is the long journey through which the soul, issued from the infinite Ocean, matures from one existence to the next through samsara, until it consciously returns to its source. From the three gunas to the Holy-Name, from the last veil to Liberation, this text follows that movement and shows why human life is its decisive threshold. This text is inspired by chapter 35 of the book: "The Fundamental Experience".

Before the first incarnation

Beyond the fleeting identity of the mind, there is a deep awareness of the true "self", which the words of satsang and spiritual Observance reveal in a human being. This deeper awareness is the soul. A question arises, as old as the first grave dug by human hands: what becomes of the soul once the incarnate human being stops living?

Before answering, we must go back further still, before even the first incarnation. The soul (purusha) is a reality distinct from the mind and the ego. In a human being, for the span of an existence, the soul does not change; it is the motionless witness, whatever it passes through. But on the scale of samsara, from incarnation to incarnation, it does change, slowly, through the ripening whose movement we are about to follow.

How does the soul come to incarnate, to become a distinct consciousness rather than the infinite, undifferentiated Unity from which it proceeds? Before the very first incarnation, the individual soul does not yet exist; there is only the infinite Ocean, which is called by several names: Tao, Kingdom, or the Whole.

Incarnation draws the individual soul out of this infinite Ocean, the way a drop gradually stands apart from the water around it, receiving a provisional, distinct form, like a drop of water held by its "surface tension".

By incarnating, the soul, purusha, becomes jivatman, the soul incarnate for the span of an existence, a whole made up of purusha and the ego-mind complex, or citta. Neither the ego, nor the mind, nor the body are mistakes according to the teaching of The Path of Yoga-Originel; they are instruments the soul needs. Without them, no distinct consciousness could ever appear, nor choose, one day, to return freely to its origin.

It is precisely this choice that sets this return apart from a mere dissolution. If a drop, the soul, were reabsorbed by the Ocean, the Whole, without knowing it, the cycle of reincarnations, samsara, would have no meaning.

A drop that recognizes, in full awareness, that it has never stopped being made of the same water as the Ocean has passed through samsara. That journey will have made it able to return to the Ocean in full awareness and freedom.

The threshold of human consciousness

Human life holds a special place in samsara: it is the threshold where consciousness becomes able to recognize itself as consciousness, to question its origin and the meaning of life.

This is why so many spiritual paths regard it as a rare opportunity not to be wasted. This does not mean, however, that other forms of incarnation, plants and animals for example, should be seen as inferior: all souls pass through these stages before incarnating in a human form.

Some ancient texts have considered the possibility of a regression into animal forms, as a consequence of ignorance or illegitimate violence. The Spiritual Path holds that such a regression is not possible, since it would bring the soul nothing. What seems certain is that once the threshold of human consciousness has been crossed, something is never quite lost again.

Ripening through the gunas

In the beginning, the incarnate soul is still largely carried by collective, almost instinctive movements, like a drop still swept along by the current. It is subject to the conditioning of the three gunas*: sattva, rajas, and tamas.

Slowly, a capacity for discernment takes hold, and the incarnate soul gradually stops being carried only by the conditioning of the guna rajas, animality, life energy, vanity and passion, desire; and of the guna tamas, inertia, ignorance, procrastination, and draws closer to the virtues of sattva, knowledge, reason, harmony.

When the incarnate soul, by leaning toward sattva and moving away from the influences of rajas and tamas, becomes equal in purity to purusha, it no longer reincarnates. This is Liberation.

The mind and the ego, for their part, do not survive the body that carried them; they dissolve with it. But the incarnation they made possible leaves imprints on purusha. These imprints are what ancient India calls samskaras.

The Path describes this ripening of consciousness through the cycle of incarnations with the image of a ratchet, a mechanism that allows movement in one direction but prevents any full return backward.

As purusha ripens through these successive incarnations, the oldest imprints lose their sharpness, like very old dreams fading at dawn, and often all that remains is a last veil, almost transparent, tied only to the most recent incarnation, like the last speck of dust on a mirror that is already almost clear.

The last veil

A soul that is young in the cycle of incarnations often carries all three gunas at once, but in unequal proportions. A young man is naturally drawn to the senses, the joy of living, desire, good food, the curiosity of discovery: these are the traits of rajas, and there is nothing abnormal about them.

Tamas, the great procrastinator, often makes him careless; one need only look at the mess in a teenager's bedroom to be convinced. Sattva, for its part, gives him his idealism, but that idealism is often taken over by the other two, rajas and tamas, and then gets lost in poorly understood causes whose harmful consequences are never foreseen.

Through meditation, Observance, service, and attention turned toward the Holy-Name, something slowly becomes clearer, existence after existence, until the idealism of sattva stops letting itself be diverted by rajas and tamas and at last finds its rightful place.

The Holy-Name, seen this way, cannot be reduced to a word one might write, say, or repeat for its own sake: it is a presence older than the mind, able to gradually dissolve the dissonances that have built up within it.

When an instrument has long been out of tune, a single perfectly true note is enough for everything else to begin finding its place again. The last veil, through attention given to the Holy-Name, gradually fades away.

It remains to be seen what becomes of the soul when this veil vanishes entirely. Liberation, which other traditions have called Kaivalya, Moksha, or Mukti, is neither annihilation nor frozen solitude, nor is it a return to the unconsciousness of the beginning.

Some schools, drawing on the Yoga Sutras, hold the seedless samadhi, nirbija-samadhi, reached through deep meditation over long periods, to be the ultimate goal. The Spiritual Path does not share this reading: in its view, this samadhi does not mark the end of the road.

The goal is another state, distinct from this samadhi: Realization itself, sahaja-samadhi, which others reach differently, in the very midst of ordinary life. Neither of these two paths, nor of these two states, should ever be confused with the other.

The conscious return

Bhakti, devotion, opens a third path, where this same transparency is gained through love and trust rather than through inner discipline alone.

Whatever path is taken, the drop then returns to the Ocean, but it does not return as it left. It comes back enriched by all it has been through, aware of a unity it did not know at the beginning. This merging remains an act of consciousness, not an erasing of consciousness itself.

A fish in the ocean's water has no awareness of the Grace it is to be in the ocean's water. If one day a fisherman pulled this fish out of the water, it would experience what the absence of water means: it could not survive, and it would suffer. If the fisherman released it and it went back into the water, it would then become aware of the Grace it is to be in the ocean's water. This is the reason for incarnation and for the cycle of samsara.

One could almost say, with the image of the son who comes home after a long detour, that nothing of this journey has been lost; the Ocean itself seems a little vaster for it, a little more aware of its own expanse, for having welcomed this freely consented return.

Understood this way, reincarnation stops being a threat hanging over an existence, or a reward to be earned. Seeking only a better future life would still mean settling more comfortably into the cycle, without leaving it. What we have called Realization aims at something else: recognizing, in this very life, what within us already no longer belongs entirely to the movement of births and deaths.

* The gunas are elements of human conditioning. There are three of them, and they influence human beings. The guna sattva influences clarity, knowledge, and reason. The guna rajas influences love of life, vital energy, and desire. The guna tamas is the guna of procrastination, laziness, confusion, and ignorance.

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