In Hin­duism, what hap­pens af­ter death is where we dif­fer from our col­leagues in the oth­er re­li­gions. They hold the be­lief that there is a ‘judge­ment day.’ When we start talk­ing about life af­ter death, we must ful­ly un­der­stand what the word Kar­ma means.

Hin­dus see death as a pass­ing of one’s own spir­it in­to an­oth­er be­ing, rein­car­na­tion in a con­tin­u­ous se­ries of birth, death and re­birth – called Sam­sara. Where the spir­it or soul goes af­ter death de­pends up­on how well the per­son be­haved in a pre­vi­ous life.

Kar­ma is re­ferred to as cause and ef­fect. Some even re­fer to it as the ‘boomerang’ the­o­ry. What­ev­er you throw out there will come back to you, and some peo­ple even re­fer to it as “you reap what­ev­er you sow.”

Kar­ma is ba­si­cal­ly en­er­gy. I throw en­er­gy out through thoughts, words and deeds, and it comes back to me. In time, through oth­er peo­ple. Kar­ma is our best teacher, for we must al­ways face the con­se­quences for ac­tions and thus im­prove and re­fine our be­hav­iour, or suf­fer if we do not.

Kar­ma is a word we hear quite of­ten on tele­vi­sion. “This is my kar­ma,” or “It must have been some­thing I did in my past life to bring such good kar­ma to me.” We hear kar­ma sim­ply de­fined as “What goes around, comes around.”

We do not be­lieve in a ‘judge­ment day’ and we do not be­lieve that some ce­les­tial be­ing, whether that be­ing is God will be your judge. We be­lieve that each one of us is our own judge. We judge our­selves by our be­hav­iour – how we live our life.

The con­cept of rein­car­na­tion is al­so found among some Na­tive Amer­i­cans, the Tro­briand Is­landers and in West Africa. The con­cept of rein­car­na­tion was al­so at­trib­uted to Pythago­ras and Socrates.

Our most pop­u­lar man­i­fest­ed God is Bhag­wan Ram, who ‘came down’ to rid the world of evil do­ers and pro­vide ex­am­ples to us of how to be­have. If we be­have ac­cord­ing to the in­junc­tions and the pre­scrip­tions of the de­scend­ed God, then we could on­ly ‘rise’ as hu­man be­ings. And if we do not fol­low the prin­ci­ples laid down by these in­car­na­tions, then we de­scend the lad­der of cre­ation. So, we are re­al­ly our own judges.

The Kar­ma that we ac­cu­mu­late is the good or neg­a­tive deeds which we per­form and this fol­lows us through from life to life. We should not blame the Cre­ator for cre­at­ing prob­lems. Our God is a just and mer­ci­ful God, who gives us many op­por­tu­ni­ties to achieve Mok­sha or Sal­va­tion.

Hin­dus do not be­lieve God is so un­mer­ci­ful that he would on­ly give us one op­por­tu­ni­ty, and if we fail in this life­time, we ei­ther go to hell and damna­tion or heav­en. My God is a mer­ci­ful God, just like par­ents are, and he will give us end­less op­por­tu­ni­ties to as­cend the lad­der of cre­ation. And this brings me to the the­o­ry of the trans­mi­gra­tion of souls.

The fi­nal des­ti­na­tion of man is Mok­sha, which is the merg­ing of the in­di­vid­ual soul with the su­per soul. That is, we be­lieve that all of us have a soul, which is a spark of the ‘Su­per Soul.’

By not per­form­ing good acts and deeds in this life­time, like se­wa or ser­vice and cre­at­ing wor­thy in­sti­tu­tions and as­sist­ing oth­er less for­tu­nate hu­man be­ings, then the oth­er ob­vi­ous thing is that you are go­ing to de­scend the lad­der of cre­ation.

If, how­ev­er, man is at the top of cre­ation, it means that at some stage he as­cend­ed. There are many ex­am­ples in our scrip­tures where or­di­nary peo­ple did these good acts and deeds and they as­cend­ed the lad­der of cre­ation. I am drawn to the sto­ry of Shabari. This sim­ple woman, whose on­ly pas­sion was love for Shri Ra­ma, and be­cause of that di­vine pas­sion for God, she was able to en­sure that God came to her.

We be­lieve that we have the abil­i­ty to humbly re­quest God. We can ask and plead with Him; we have many il­lus­tra­tions in our scrip­tures where peo­ple, by good be­hav­iour, have seen God ap­pear.

He ap­peared in the pres­ence of Shabari and she was saved. The man­i­fes­ta­tion of Lord Ram came about by the plead­ings of this devo­tee to save the world from the de­mon Ra­van.

While we do not wish to en­gage in any philo­soph­i­cal con­flict with oth­er re­li­gions, we need to let it be known that our be­lief in the prin­ci­ple of life af­ter death is unique. You’ll find this in Bud­dhism and oth­er off­shoots of Hin­duism be­cause it is unique to us.