THE LIVES WE NEVER LIVED: What determines reincarnation as a different person?

October 18, 2026

A three year old Swarnlata Mishra was travelling with her father through Katni in Madhya Pradesh. As their vehicle passed through the town, the little girl suddenly asked the driver to turn towards “my house”.

 

The statement was strange because Swarnlata had never lived in Katni.

 

Over the following years she began describing another family, another home and another life. Investigators eventually connected her memories with a woman called Biya Pathak, who had lived and died in Katni. Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson investigated the case and later included it in his landmark work Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.

 

Years later, Swarnlata wrote that whenever she wanted something she did not possess in her present life, memories of having possessed something similar in the earlier life sometimes returned to her. For a moment, another existence seemed to stand beside the present one. (Psi Encyclopedia)

 

ANOTHER EXISTENCE AS ANOTHER PERSON

 

This raises an extraordinary question:

 

Can a life that has ended remain psychologically unfinished?

 

And what about the lives that never even began? The person we almost married.

 

The profession we nearly chose.

 

Psychologists call this counterfactual thinking: mentally constructing alternatives to events that actually occurred. “If only I had…” is perhaps its most recognisable expression.

 

Counterfactual thought is not necessarily pathological. Researchers Kai Epstude and Neal Roese have shown that it has an important adaptive function. By imagining a better alternative to a disappointing event, the mind learns how it might act differently next time. Regret can therefore become a teacher. (PubMed Central (PMC))

 

If I had prepared better, perhaps I would have succeeded.

 

The difficulty begins when the imagined life ceases to teach us and begins to compete with the real one. Then the mind creates a second biography. In one biography, I became what I actually became. In the other, I am richer, freer, more loved, more celebrated, living somewhere else beside someone else.

 

Since the second life was never tested by reality, it possesses an unfair advantage: nothing ever went wrong in it.

 

REINCARNATION

 

Indian philosophy answers whether an intensely held desire may outlive the circumstances, even the body in which it originated.

 

“As is his desire, so is his will; and as is his will, so is his deed.”

 

(Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.5) (Bṛhat)

 

The Bhagavad Gita states “Whatever state of being one remembers when he quits his body… that state he will attain.”

 

(Bhagavad Gita 8.6) (Vedabase)

 

The final state of consciousness is not ordinarily manufactured during the final seconds of life. It is the culmination of what consciousness has repeatedly dwelt upon. Death may therefore reveal the dominant orientation that life has spent decades creating.

 

Indian philosophy calls such latent impressions samskaras and vasanas: subtle dispositions that incline consciousness towards particular experiences.

 

The unfinished life may therefore not simply disappear.

 

Reincarnation traditions have long proposed something more nuanced: what survives is not necessarily the exact wish but the tendency behind it.

 

A musician who dies yearning for music is not guaranteed rebirth as a concert pianist.

 

Rather, desire merely points consciousness somewhere.

 

The Gita describes this mechanism earlier when Krishna explains:

 

“When a man dwells on objects… attachment is produced. From attachment springs desire.”

 

(Bhagavad Gita 2.62) (Madhva)

 

The spiritual problem is therefore not simply possessing something. It is the repetitive mental occupation with it.

 

For more than half a century, researchers associated with the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies have investigated children who spontaneously report memories of previous lives. The division says it has accumulated more than 2,500 such cases. Some children also displayed unusual preferences, phobias or behaviours associated with the claimed earlier life. (UVA School of Medicine)

 

One striking case investigated by Jim Tucker concerned James Leininger, an American child who developed an extraordinary preoccupation with Second World War aircraft and spoke of being a pilot whose plane had been shot down. Tucker published a formal case report after investigating the statements and the historical individual apparently corresponding with them. (PubMed)

 

DESIRE AS THE CURRICULUM OF THE SOUL

 

Why would consciousness return at all?

 

One spiritual answer is that life is education. A soul drawn powerfully towards power may have to experience power, perhaps both possessing it and losing it, before learning its limitations. This is why merely condemning desire misses its role in spiritual evolution.

 

Similarly, the soul, in the traditional Indian understanding, may move through many forms of experience until what once appeared indispensable gradually loses its hypnotic power.

 

In the teaching of the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha identifies tanha, craving, as that which leads to “future lives”: craving for sensual pleasure, craving for continued existence and even craving for non-existence. (SuttaCentral)

 

The problem is therefore deeper than “bad desires”. One can be chained to beautiful desires. I want my name remembered.

 

A chain made of gold still performs the function of a chain.

 

We normally imagine bondage as addiction, greed, anger or lust. The sages often recognised subtler forms: attachment to status, accomplishment, family identity, intellectual distinction, even spiritual achievement.

 

KING BHARATA

 

King Bharata renounced his kingdom and withdrew into contemplative life. Yet he became deeply attached to a young deer under his care. According to the traditional account, his consciousness became so absorbed in concern for the animal that at death his mind remained fixed upon it; he was subsequently born as a deer, retaining awareness of his spiritual error.

 

A person’s deepest bondage may therefore appear to the world as virtue.

 

The life not lived may be asking for understanding, not fulfilment

 

What we are searching for outside is ultimately the fullness of the Self. Therefore, liberation cannot consist in eventually experiencing every possible experience. The catalogue is infinite. Freedom arrives when consciousness no longer needs experience to certify its completeness.

 

The Katha Upanishad says:

 

“When all the desires that dwell in the heart fall away, then the mortal becomes immortal and here attains Brahman.”

 

(Katha Upanishad 2.3.14) (Vivekavani)

 

DO NOT MURDER YOUR DESIRES. UNDERSTAND THEM.

 

Renunciation is often misunderstood as suppression. A suppressed desire remains alive. It merely goes underground. One can renounce wealth while envying the wealthy.

 

The spiritual task is not necessarily to destroy desire by force, but to see through it so completely that its authority weakens. An experienced adult does not heroically renounce children’s toys. He has simply outgrown them.

 

Perhaps enlightenment is ultimately this kind of maturity.

 

An Antaryatra practice: Meeting the unlived self

 

Sometime this week, sit alone with a blank sheet of paper.

 

At the top write:

 

“The life I sometimes wish I had lived…”

 

Then complete the sentence without censoring yourself.

 

Perhaps you became a musician.

 

Perhaps you married someone else.

 

Perhaps you became enormously wealthy.

 

Now ask these questions:

 

What is this imagined life giving me that I believe my present life has denied me?

 

Can the essence of what I seek be lived now, without recreating the entire imagined life?

 

And finally:

 

If I carried this longing beyond death, would it liberate my consciousness — or call it back?

 

Do not judge the answer.

 

Observe it.

 

For perhaps this is the secret of the lives we never lived.

 

They are not always mistakes waiting to be corrected.

 

Sometimes they are mirrors.

 

They show us where consciousness still believes its completion lies somewhere outside itself.

 

But Antaryatra, the inner journey asks us to make a greater discovery.

 

That liberation begins when it discovers that there is nothing in another life, another body, another possession or another possibility that can add anything to what the deepest Self already is.

 

Parneet Sachdev, IRS is the Chairman of Real Estate Regulatory Authority and a leading author.

 

From Chandy to Vijayan: Can He Emerge Politically Unscathed?

 

Can former Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan emerge from a barrage of investigations with his political reputation intact, as Oommen Chandy did when the tables turned on the Left in 2016?

 

That is the question hanging over Kerala politics as Chief Minister V.D. Satheesan opens several fronts against the previous government. In Kerala, a change of government almost invariably brings a change of investigative priorities.

 

The new dispensation examines the decisions of its predecessor, revisits old allegations and promises accountability. But the political dividends of such probes are not always guaranteed.

 

When Vijayan took office in May 2016, his government ordered a review of controversial decisions taken by the outgoing Oommen Chandy government from January that year.

 

The move raised expectations of major revelations against the Congress-led United Democratic Front. Yet the scrutiny did not deliver the sweeping political gains the Left had anticipated, and several allegations failed to produce the decisive outcomes expected by its leaders.

 

Satheesan now faces a similar test, with investigations announced into the Messi event controversy, alleged irregularities in PSC appointments and the soon-to-be-announced probe into the functioning of the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board (KIIFB).

 

The government has also suspended police officers, including an ADGP, over alleged excesses against Youth Congress workers, signalling that accountability will extend beyond financial and administrative decisions.

 

The KIIFB inquiry could prove particularly consequential. Satheesan has alleged that the institution operated beyond normal government and Finance Department controls.

 

The government must now establish whether the reported irregularities warrant further action, rather than allowing the issue to remain another political accusation.

 

For Vijayan, however, the CMRL-Exalogic case involving his

daughter, T. Veena, presents a more immediate challenge. The case originated with the ED, not the Satheesan government.

 

What determines reincarnation as a different person?