I just got reborn…

Have you heard anybody telling that they had had a complete makeover over the last few years. If you know them closely enough, you may consider what they said with some seriousness, else you will discard it as just a pompous display of words effecting self-praise. Of course, they only mean to say that some specific incident or their experiences in life, have caused them to change the ways in which they think and act. Even Stephen R. Covey talks about a complete re-scripting of our lives for our own good, in his book titled 7 habits of highly effective people. By the way, this is a wonderful book, with so many ideas that are all pure common-sense, but all too forgotten. We will discuss that later, for that is not the real subject here.

Ok, whatever the speakers of these statements have actually in mind, when they make them, it is actually 100% percent true in the literal sense. Biology has proved this fact beyond doubt, and that it is caused through a mechanism, which happens 24 * 7 * 365 in all our physical bodies called cell division. A few months back, I was reading a book about life after death (I don’t remember the title of the book, but it was one by Srila Prabhupada, the founder acharya of the ISKCON foundation). It talked basically about the cycles of rebirth (fundamental to the Hindu religion in India), the reason it happens, its implications and a lot more spiritual stuff. The author argues that we are reborn every few years, since according to certain biological discovery, all cells that constitute the human body are dying with time, and get replenished with newer ones. This happens at a very steady pace, and by the time we lived around 7 years, our body won’t have any cells that were part of it when the process started. Your physical body is literally entirely new, and your soul is part of an entirely new system. Though, this process is not instantaneous and hence may not really agree with what the author wanted to communicate, the argument is very logical otherwise.

The other day, while listening to the audio book of A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson, I heard this once again in the Chapter 24, titled ‘Cells’. Of course, Bill Bryson didn’t touch upon the spiritual aspect of it, but repeated the same thing. The figure that marks the ‘rebirth’ is also slightly different. He says that ‘you’ are completely new every 9 years. If the average age of a human is 75 years (let us say), he/she would have been reborn nearly 8 times in his lifetime!

Wow! What a wonderful concept! Mind you, it is not just like any other fancy concept, but scientifically proven to be correct…