Do Ghosts Exist? 👻

Karma has been such a buzzword lately. People have been throwing it around to vaguely express an idea of “you pay for what you do”

But today, let’s take dive into what “karma” actually is by investigating it from the Yogic system’s point of view.

The information that is carried forth is referred to as karma. Yes, this implies the idea of existence in multiple lives and this is not the only life you have lived. You were alive, probably in some other form, before you were born as you are in this life. I would love to dive deeper into that in a separate episode, but for now let’s assume that is the case.

The karmic philosophy can be broadly understood as a “cause and effect” principle. But, in order to understand whether Ghosts exist or not, it helps to consider Karma as memory. Simply information as we discussed earlier.

The whole stock of Karmic Memory a person has is called Sanchita Karma. You can say Sanchita Karma is the entire warehouse of karma that a person carries.

Out of this stock, a certain portion is allocated to be handled in a particular lifetime. This is known as Prarabdha Karma, or the karma that is allocated for that lifetime. This karma has some urgency to it and expresses a little more compulsion than the rest of the heap.

So, at birth, Prarabdha Karma creates an orientation and Sanchita Karma creates an unconscious tendency towards various things.

When you die, all the seven (out of 8) types of memory you have are gone:

· Evolutionary Memory, which determined that you took shape of the human form and when you ate something, it became you, not something else.

· Genetic Memory, which decides the colour of your skin, the shape of your nose, etc.

· The Conscious, Subconscious and Unconscious Memories are also gone.

So, it is only the Karmic memory that holds you together once you get disembodied. Within this, you may categorize something as Sanchita Karma and something else as Prarabdha Karma, but, essentially, it is karma which remains.

Now the difference between being in the embodied state and being in the disembodied state is this:

· When you are embodied, there is more possibility of using your will.

What is called as Ghosts are those beings who left their body, usually, in an unnatural way. They had strong Prarabdha Karma left unfinished, but they died either because of an accident, a disease, a suicide or murder.

Now, you would be wondering what would it feel like to be a ghost? Good question. Here’s Sadhguru’s take on this:

A ghost generally cannot have conscious intention because the intellect is gone. But they can function by tendency. Let us say, when the person was alive, his tendency was pinching people. Even after his body is gone, he will still want to pinch. It does not matter who, he will just want to pinch.

The only difference is now that he does not have a body, he can not actually pinch someone.

There is a misconception in our minds as a result of seeing horror movies and shows that Ghosts harm you.

These beings have no tendency to interact with human beings, as such. They don’t have a discriminatory intellect to choose, ‘I want to interact with this person or that person.’

Most disembodied beings are incapable of holding any intentions of their own. So, they cannot harm a person. However, you may get harmed because of them. They cannot kill you by direct action, but mostly by possessing someone or by just creating certain fearful situations they can be fatal.

Disembodied beings cannot even see you as a physical being. They see you as an energy form.

So, it can be said that Ghosts are nothing but disembodied beings who had some Prabadha karma left when they suddenly or violently lost their bodies.

As long as the karmic structure is intense, the being cannot find another body. In order for it to enter into another body, it needs to run down the left-over karma and run passive. And the more intense the karma is, the more experientally available the being becomes to people.

Only when the karmic structure is completely dismantled, can we say that the person is truly no more.

I do not have a lot of knowledge over this topic so I will refrain to speak directly about it. All the things I have talked about so far are either direct passages or paraphrases after reading the book Death: An Inside Story by Sadhguru. I highly recommend you to read this book for yourself.