Life Beyond Death — Swami Bhaskarananda

Recorded at the Vedanta Society of Western Washington on December 2, 2012.

In this lecture, Swami Bhaskarananda examines the question of what happens after death from the perspective of Vedanta, drawing extensively on the Upanishads and traditional philosophical reasoning. He begins with the story of Nachiketa from the Katha Upanishad, where death is explained as the discarding of a worn-out garment rather than the end of existence. The body, he explains, is temporary, while the true individual is the indwelling soul, which neither is born nor dies. He then addresses modern doubts about life after death, clarifying that direct proof belongs to personal experience, while philosophical inquiry relies on valid means of knowledge such as perception, inference, comparison, postulation, non-perception, and reliable testimony.

Swami Bhaskarananda goes on to describe what survives physical death according to Vedantic teaching: the soul accompanied by a subtle body consisting of vital energies, senses, mind, and intellect. Guided by the quality and tendencies of the mind shaped by past actions, the departed soul moves to subtler planes of existence, known as lokas, where it experiences the results of its karma before returning to earthly life through rebirth. He recounts traditional accounts and verified cases of past-life memory to illustrate continuity of existence. The talk concludes by emphasizing that freedom from repeated birth and death comes through spiritual discipline and direct awareness of the divine reality that is one’s own deepest nature.