Monday, March 12, 2012

Mukti - not Moksha

Recently, I have been reading a Gujarati translation of Bhagwad Gita. The book tries to summarize the teachings of Gita. In 2nd Adhyaya of Gita, I read Krishna saying Arjuna that "whoever is born, has to go through childhood, youth, old age, and then die. Whoever dies has to reborn again, there is no escape from that." I found this very disturbing, I read it twice and probably I will try to read it again in that book and somewhere else. I am of the opinion (for whatever reasons) that you can balance your Karma and get free from the cycle of birth-rebirth, and I think this is what Moksha is. May be the translation is not done correctly, the interpretation of the person who wrote this book might be wrong, I don't know. This is why I do want to read the original books rather than reading some else's perspective and interpretation about it.

Then today morning, I was watching a program on Star TV called "Awakening with Brahmakumari", and there she said that you do not get free from the cycle of birth-rebirth ever permanently, but you get mukti from it for certain period of time. This period can be 100 yrs, few hundred yrs, or few thousand years, but you will need to come to earth sometime within a cycle. She said we go through Satyuga, Tretayuga, Dwaparyuga, and Kalyuga. Each of this is around 2500 yrs, and at the end of Kalyuga, God comes to earth and resets (finishes) the cycle (an episode). Some souls may come to earth only towards end of Kalyuga, within last 100 or 200 years, and hence they are there back home for a long period of time, and are here only for a short while. Some of us have to keep coming here often and for multiple times. So we all get Mukti, but it varies how long one gets Mukti. I am not very clear about this yet, but it seems interesting to read teachings of Brahmakumari too, it will give different perspective. But the point Brahmakumari also made is that you never get freed up from the cycle of birth-rebirth completely.

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