Birth is the passing of the soul from a lower to a higher body in the process of evolution, in the course of the soul’s journey of reincarnation. The Sankhya system affirms the absolute identity of cause and effect. Cause is the effect silently and secretly involved and effect is the cause actively and openly evolved. Evolution, according to the Sankhya philosophy, can never come into existence from nothing, from zero. The appearance of “is” can be only from the existence of “was’: Let us fill our minds with the immortal utterance of Wordsworth from Intimations of Immortality:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God who is our home:

Here the poet carries us into the mystery of the soul’s eternal journey and reminds us of the perennial Source.

Sri Chinmoy