Is who you think you are, really who you are?

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When speaking of reincarnation we are speaking of a person transmigrating from one form of life to another form of life.

Obviously, a physical body cannot move into another physical body. So it means that after the death of one body there is something that continues to exist and it is not the material body.

At death, the person leaves the body, the body starts to decay and everybody who was relating to that person who was in that body, starts crying and gets very unhappy. Why? Because the person they were relating to has left.

To understand the science of transmigration of the soul means understanding that the person or living being who was in that body has left that body and if they are not purified spiritually, will now enter into another gross material body.

From the above brief explanation we can understand that the living being is the soul. Temporarily encased within a material body.

Anyone can understand that consciousness is spread all over the body. We are all conscious of the pains and pleasures of the body in part or as a whole. What pleasures and pains each of us experiences is unknown to another. Therefore, each and every body is the embodiment of an individual soul, and the symptom of the soul’s presence is perceived as individual consciousness.

Living entities in lower species of life exhibit less consciousness that those in the highest form of life, the human, which exhibits greater consciousness.

The point being that when the body dies, you do not die. It’s like a suit of clothes. When your clothes become old and torn you throw them away, but that doesn’t mean that you no longer exist. In the Bible it says that the material body is like a house that the soul or person temporarily resides in.

With regard to belief or disbelief, it’s not difficult to understand. The body is constantly changing. All the cells die, the molecules change and presto, you have a new body. It has been documented that every seven years all the cells in the body become new ones. So the body you had when you were three years old is long gone but you are not.

This means that the material particles that are making up your body now are not the same material particles that made it up previously. But, there is a substance, which has continuity and continues to exist even though your body kept changing.

If you look at a picture of yourself 20 or 30 years ago you can understand that although that body in the picture is not the body you are wearing now. Yet you still exist. This is evidence of transmigration: from baby body to boyhood body to youth body to man body to middle age body to old age body and so on.

Then there’s the confusion that we are the mind. But the mind is actually a subtle material body. In the same way that the material body is always changing, so is the mind. And who is the person watching the mind change? You!

Did you ever try to control you mind? Did you ever say, “I changed my mind”? What happened? Total frustration, that’s what happened. What do you do when you mind is driving you crazy? You try, to no avail, to control it. Or, you try to make your mind blank and think about nothing. Riiiiight!

The point here is whether you try to make your mind blank, or you try to move you mind in one direction or another, or you can or you cannot, it is something other than the mind that is trying to do all of this. And that is you, the soul that is the witness of the mind.

So then, how does the mind figure in the process of the transmigration of the soul? The soul leaves the gross material body but is still covered by the subtle material body like the material desires and the recordings on the mind of the impressions, which are made on the mind from past experiences in the previous body.

For example, you have many central experiences. You see a bird and by your eyes seeing that bird, that leaves an impression on your mind of the form of the bird. All of these forms and all of these subtle images and material desires are still covering the soul. In other words it is the subtle body, the material mind that is still covering the soul. When the soul leaves the gross body, this covering makes it so that the soul takes on another gross material body. The subtle material body, the mind, is a nucleus around which the gross material body develops.

So, if the mind is still in existence when the soul leaves the body and all that stored information is not erased and the soul is still covered by the subtle body, which is the material mind, that means that I should be able to remember my past lives because I still have the same mind or that information is still there? Yet, I cannot remember my past lives. Does that mean there were no past lives?

Well, despite not remembering my birth in this lifetime I still know that I was born. I can’t remember leaving the womb nor can I remember being in the womb but I know that I was. It is nature’s arrangement that our memories are imperfect.

Some people spend all kinds of money to go back to remember past lives. What’s the value? There are 8,400,000 species of life in the material world of varying bodies. What value would it be to know what kind of animal or flower or microbial creature you were? An intelligent person will not be enamored with the mysticism of it all but rather, will seek a solution to stopping the process.

Actually many people do not recognize that it is a problem for the living entity who is eternal by nature, to be bound up in the temporary, finite, material dimension, having to undergo repeated birth, diseases, old age and death. As such, they fail to see this as a suffering condition.

To put is another way, the activities one cultivates in his or her lifetime has a definite bearing on the life they take on next time around. For example, a dog eats, sleeps, mates and defends. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? What sets us apart from the dog is the cultivation of consciousness. It means being in the world but not of the world.

That means turning to God and using the world for His pleasure. To put it another way, the point is to develop an attachment for God, or God consciousness. If you’re attached to God and do everything for Him, you’ll automatically be detached from the world. Then the question of coming back to the material world is then non-existent. And since your consciousness will be directed toward God you will go to Him when you leave your body.

It is said that we all began in God’s spiritual world. Due to our envy of God’s enjoyment He sends us to the material world, which is full of suffering and false enjoyment, to fulfill our desires to act like God and try to enjoy our senses to the fullest. Even though we are constantly unfulfilled, depressed and miserable, we try harder to enjoy our senses and create more and more frustration.

True happiness is found when we link back up with Him and that affords us the opportunity to not have to come back to the material world when we leave our bodies.

Namaste!

Sources:

Vedic Scriptures:
Bhagavat-Gita As-It-Is
Sri Isopanisad
Caitanya Charitamrita

Hesh Goldstein
When I was a kid, if I were told that I'd be writing a book about diet and nutrition when I was older, let alone having been doing a health related radio show for over 36 years, I would've thought that whoever told me that was out of their mind. Living in Newark, New Jersey, my parents and I consumed anything and everything that had a face or a mother except for dead, rotting, pig bodies, although we did eat bacon (as if all the other decomposing flesh bodies were somehow miraculously clean). Going through high school and college it was no different. In fact, my dietary change did not come until I was in my 30's.

Just to put things in perspective, after I graduated from Weequahic High School and before going to Seton Hall University, I had a part-time job working for a butcher. I was the delivery guy and occasionally had to go to the slaughterhouse to pick up products for the store. Needless to say, I had no consciousness nor awareness, as change never came then despite the horrors I witnessed on an almost daily basis.

After graduating with a degree in accounting from Seton Hall, I eventually got married and moved to a town called Livingston. Livingston was basically a yuppie community where everyone was judged by the neighborhood they lived in and their income. To say it was a "plastic" community would be an understatement.

Livingston and the shallowness finally got to me. I told my wife I was fed up and wanted to move. She made it clear she had to be near her friends and New York City. I finally got my act together and split for Colorado.

I was living with a lady in Aspen at the end of 1974, when one day she said, " let's become vegetarians". I have no idea what possessed me to say it, but I said, "okay"! At that point I went to the freezer and took out about $100 worth of frozen, dead body parts and gave them to a welfare mother who lived behind us. Well, everything was great for about a week or so, and then the chick split with another guy.

So here I was, a vegetarian for a couple weeks, not really knowing what to do, how to cook, or basically how to prepare anything. For about a month, I was getting by on carrot sticks, celery sticks, and yogurt. Fortunately, when I went vegan in 1990, it was a simple and natural progression. Anyway, as I walked around Aspen town, I noticed a little vegetarian restaurant called, "The Little Kitchen".

Let me back up just a little bit. It was April of 1975, the snow was melting and the runoff of Ajax Mountain filled the streets full of knee-deep mud. Now, Aspen was great to ski in, but was a bummer to walk in when the snow was melting.

I was ready to call it quits and I needed a warmer place. I'll elaborate on that in a minute.

But right now, back to "The Little Kitchen". Knowing that I was going to leave Aspen and basically a new vegetarian, I needed help. So, I cruised into the restaurant and told them my plight and asked them if they would teach me how to cook. I told them in return I would wash dishes and empty their trash. They then asked me what I did for a living and I told them I was an accountant.

The owner said to me, "Let's make a deal. You do our tax return and we'll feed you as well". So for the next couple of weeks I was doing their tax return, washing their dishes, emptying the trash, and learning as much as I could.

But, like I said, the mud was getting to me. So I picked up a travel book written by a guy named Foder. The name of the book was, "Hawaii". Looking through the book I noticed that in Lahaina, on Maui, there was a little vegetarian restaurant called," Mr. Natural's". I decided right then and there that I would go to Lahaina and work at "Mr. Natural's." To make a long story short, that's exactly what happened.

So, I'm working at "Mr. Natural's" and learning everything I can about my new dietary lifestyle - it was great. Every afternoon we would close for lunch at about 1 PM and go to the Sheraton Hotel in Ka'anapali and play volleyball, while somebody stayed behind to prepare dinner.

Since I was the new guy, and didn't really know how to cook, I never thought that I would be asked to stay behind to cook dinner. Well, one afternoon, that's exactly what happened; it was my turn. That posed a problem for me because I was at the point where I finally knew how to boil water.

I was desperate, clueless and basically up the creek without a paddle. Fortunately, there was a friend of mine sitting in the gazebo at the restaurant and I asked him if he knew how to cook. He said the only thing he knew how to cook was enchiladas. He said that his enchiladas were bean-less and dairy-less. I told him that I had no idea what an enchilada was or what he was talking about, but I needed him to show me because it was my turn to do the evening meal.

Well, the guys came back from playing volleyball and I'm asked what was for dinner. I told them enchiladas; the owner wasn't thrilled. I told him that mine were bean-less and dairy-less. When he tried the enchilada he said it was incredible. Being the humble guy that I was, I smiled and said, "You expected anything less"? It apparently was so good that it was the only item on the menu that we served twice a week. In fact, after about a week, we were selling five dozen every night we had them on the menu and people would walk around Lahaina broadcasting, 'enchilada's at "Natural's" tonight'. I never had to cook anything else.

A year later the restaurant closed, and somehow I gravitated to a little health food store in Wailuku. I never told anyone I was an accountant and basically relegated myself to being the truck driver. The guys who were running the health food store had friends in similar businesses and farms on many of the islands. I told them that if they could organize and form one company they could probably lock in the State. That's when they found out I was an accountant and "Down to Earth" was born. "Down to Earth" became the largest natural food store chain in the islands, and I was their Chief Financial Officer and co-manager of their biggest store for 13 years.

In 1981, I started to do a weekly radio show to try and expose people to a vegetarian diet and get them away from killing innocent creatures. I still do that show today. I pay for my own airtime and have no sponsors to not compromise my honesty. One bit of a hassle was the fact that I was forced to get a Masters Degree in Nutrition to shut up all the MD's that would call in asking for my credentials.

My doing this radio show enabled me, through endless research, to see the corruption that existed within the big food industries, the big pharmaceutical companies, the biotech industries and the government agencies. This information, unconscionable as it is, enabled me to realize how broken our health system is. This will be covered more in depth in the Introduction and throughout the book and when you finish the book you will see this clearly and it will hopefully inspire you to make changes.

I left Down to Earth in 1989, got nationally certified as a sports injury massage therapist and started traveling the world with a bunch of guys that were making a martial arts movie. After doing that for about four years I finally made it back to Honolulu and got a job as a massage therapist at the Honolulu Club, one of Hawaii's premier fitness clubs. It was there I met the love of my life who I have been with since 1998. She made me an offer I couldn't refuse. She said," If you want to be with me you've got to stop working on naked women". So, I went back into accounting and was the Chief Financial Officer of a large construction company for many years.

Going back to my Newark days when I was an infant, I had no idea what a "chicken" or "egg" or "fish" or "pig" or "cow" was. My dietary blueprint was thrust upon me by my parents as theirs was thrust upon them by their parents. It was by the grace of God that I was able to put things in their proper perspective and improve my health and elevate my consciousness.

The road that I started walking down in 1975 has finally led me to the point of writing my book, “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”. Hopefully, the information contained herein will be enlightening, motivating, and inspiring to encourage you to make different choices. Doing what we do out of conditioning is not always the best course to follow. I am hoping that by the grace of the many friends and personalities I have encountered along my path, you will have a better perspective of what road is the best road for you to travel on, not only for your health but your consciousness as well.

Last but not least: after being vaccinated as a kid I developed asthma, which plagued me all of my life. In 2007 I got exposed to the organic sulfur crystals, which got rid of my asthma in 3 days and has not come back in over 10 years. That, being the tip of the iceberg, has helped people reverse stage 4 cancers, autism, joint pain, blood pressure problems, migraine headaches, erectile dysfunction, gingivitis, and more. Also, because of the detoxification effects by the release of oxygen that permeates and heals all the cells in the body, it removes parasites, radiation, fluoride, free radicals, and all the other crap that is thrust upon us in the environment by Big Business.

For more, please view www.healthtalkhawaii.com and www.asanediet.com.

Namaste!