Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume I - Part 5

Fragment ID: 10766

Mūḍhayoniṣu or adho gacchanti [in the Gita] does not necessarily refer to animal birth, but it is true that there has been a general belief of that kind [that a man may be born as an animal in his next birth] not only in India but wherever “transmigration” or “metempsychosis” was believed in. Shakespeare is referring to Pythagoras’ belief in transmigration when he speaks of the passage of somebody’s grandmother into an animal. But the soul, the psychic being, once having reached the human consciousness cannot go back to the inferior animal consciousness any more than it can go back into a tree or an ephemeral insect. What is true is that some part of the vital energy or the formed instrumental consciousness or nature can and very frequently does so, if it is strongly attached to anything in the earth life. This may account for some cases of immediate rebirth with full memory in human forms also. Ordinarily it is only by Yogic development or by clairvoyance that the exact memory of past lives can be brought back.