Reincarnation

Beloved Osho, is each successive life we live a spiritual advancement on the previous one?

When I reached there he was very happy. Putting all his bank accounts on his heart and holding them with both hands, he died. I have seen many people dying, but he died so beautifully. He had millions of rupees and property worth millions and he was dying like a beggar in a free ward. But he was absolutely happy. There are people who can get addicted to money, people who can get addicted to power, but they are doing the same thing, in a little more sophisticated way, as simple people are doing by taking marijuana. No marijuana taking person can become Adolf Hitler -- impossible. He will not find it interesting. No opium eater would bother to become a prime minister; then who will take the opium? I have told you about the opium addict barber, a friend of my grandfather. I had told him, "You are so…

You have said that you remember your former life seven hundred years ago. Can you remember your name at that time and the occasion of your death? What I am interested in is what happened between your last life and your present life.

The question seems meaningful, but it is not. Life means that something is happening, and between two lives, there is nothing happening. Between two lives there is a gap. If something is happening, then again it is another life. Nothing happens in the gap. You can remember it only as a gap, not filled by anything. When we say that someone is alive we mean that something is happening in him. Life is the realm of happenings. Without a body, nothing happens: the body is the medium for things to happen. The moment you are beyond the body, or not in the body, nothing happens. Then you can either be aware or unconscious: these are the two possibilities. If you are unconscious then you cannot remember. If you are conscious then you can remember. But the remembrance is only of the gap; there are no events.

A friend has asked: he has some friends who are yogis, and they say that in a past life they were a bird. So can a human being also be an animal?

In our present condition, everything we have ever been is present within us. Yes, there are layers inside; if you dig a little, you can reach those inner layers. We can even reach the layer of stone—that, too, is one of our layers. In some very deep interior, we are still stone. And so, if we are scratched to that depth, we behave like stone—we can behave like animals, too. And what lies ahead are only our possibilities; they are not yet our layers. Therefore, sometimes we touch them in a leap, and then come back to the ground again. Those are our possibilities. We can become divine, we can even become gods—but we have not yet been that. What we have been is our present condition. So there are two points. If we are dug into a little, our past conditions are found within us. And if we are…

Another friend has asked: my friend, who is a yogi, claims he was a sparrow in his past life. Is this possible?

It is possible that in the course of his evolution a man may have once been an animal, but he cannot be born as an animal again. In the process of evolution one cannot fall back; retrogression is impossible. It is possible to move ahead from the previous form of birth, but it is not possible, from an advanced form of birth, to fall back. There is no going back in this world; there is no chance. There are only two ways -- either we move ahead or stay where we are; we cannot go back. It is just as when a child passes first grade he moves on to the second grade -- but if he fails he remains in the first grade. There is no way, however, to pull him below first grade. Similarly, if he fails in the second grade we can leave him there, but in…