Question: Can one be reborn during one's lifetime?

Sri Chinmoy: Yes, through the development of one's inner consciousness. If someone says that he has had a new birth, it means that he has achieved something in his inner life. A new world, a new consciousness, has dawned in him. Then you can say that it is a new birth.

In India, the brahmins at the age of twelve or thirteen are invested with the sacred thread. In the Jewish system also, at the age of thirteen, a boy gets a new life. It is a new consciousness that enters into the particular boy. In our case also, when we launch into the spiritual life and get higher experiences, deeper experiences, these experiences determine our new life.

So, in spiritual terms, we can have many lives in one human lifetime. So far as the question of evolution is concerned, inner evolution, we have many, many lives, countless lives.