The Hindus in India believe that properly performed religious rituals release the soul from ties established in a lifetime.
A fortnight in September is designated “Shradha Paksh”, when people perform a small religious ritual and feed the monks or poor, to pay respect to the departed souls.
Crows are treated as representatives of ancestors for reasons unknown, and are fed with respect.
Priests propound the theory that difficult times in life are a result of bad Karma of ancestors, and certain rituals need to be performed to atone for the same. It is a kind of cleansing.
I’m not sure how intertwined our lives are with those of ancestors. I can stretch my imagination to think that some souls are reborn in the same family and are asked to atone for their past sins. Or it may be the power of intention, that sends out positive energy.
What remains unclear is the time a soul takes to travel out of this lifetime, deliberate over next moves in an intermediate stage (described by some as a mezzanine floor or waiting room), and then return in a reincarnated version. I can believe that I carry the burden of my past Karma, but why that of my ancestors?
Certain questions remained unanswered due to human limitations and the erasure of past life memories.
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It’s the erasure of past memories that really boggles my mind. If we don’t have the memory of what went wrong, how do we rectify it? Being human, we do not seem to learn from the past until it’s too late.
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True. It looks like a delaying strategy. Perhaps, this will be the topic of research in the world, and then things will fall in place.
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Shradha Paksh sounds like a lovely tradition. I read that Hindus believe that when people die, the soul leaves the body and remains alive till the end of the universe.
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Yes. They believe that the soul reincarnates in different forms to complete the Karma cycle. The final step is called Moksh or Nirvana, when rebirth is not necessary, and the soul mingles with the Higher Universal Energy.
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