At every moment our bodies are changing. The billions of cells that are the building blocks of our bodies are continuously dying and being replaced by new cells. In this way the body that each of us had a few years ago no longer exists\u2014our present body has replaced it. In one lifetime we actually have many different bodies\u2014baby, child, youth, adult, and so on\u2014but we remain the same person. We do not change our identity as the body changes, because we are not the body.<\/p>\n
But almost every one of us thinks that he is his body, Why is that? The Vedic literatures explain that there is a spark of life within the body that animates it. This spark of life\u2014the spiritual soul\u2014is the real self, the real person. When encased within, say, a white male body born in America, the self thinks, \u201cI am a white American man.\u201d When in a black female body born in Europe, the self thinks, \u201cI am a black European woman.\u201d And so on. This is illusion or (in Sanskrit) maya\u2014\u201cthat which is not.\u201d This illusion is very strong\u2014right from birth everyone identifies himself with his body\u2014so we require education. We have to learn that science which comprehends not only the material body but also the soul within the body. Although such a science is not taught in any Western university, it is taught in the Vedic literatures especially in the Bhagavad-gita.<\/p>\n
The Bhagavad-gita explains the first concept of Vedic science in this way: \u201cAs the embodied living soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, so the same soul passes into another body at death\u201d (Bg. 2.13). Our bodies grow and change because the living soul is present within the heart\u2014it\u2019s that spark of life, the soul, that makes the body alive. But when the soul leaves the body, then all physical activities cease, and the eternally living soul transmigrates to another body. This experience is known as death. In other words, even during the course of one lifetime the eternally living soul is imperceptibly moving from body to body, and \u201cdeath\u201d is simply another move\u2014a \u201ctransmigration\u201d to a totally new body\u2014for the deathless, changeless soul. The Bhagavad-gita explains transmigration with an analogy: \u201cAs person puts on new garments, giving up the old ones, similarly, the soul accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones\u201d (Bg. 2.22).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At every moment our bodies are changing. The billions of cells that are the building blocks of our bodies are continuously dying and being replaced by new cells. In this way the body that each of … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,140],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-area2"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-24 21:34:18","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/81"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}