Were We Really Born On Our Birthday?

By Mesha Oh

Some centuries ago, many people did not know the day, month and year on which they had been born (according to whichever calendar might have been prevalent where there lived--and there might have been many parts of the world where people did not have or use a calendar or even know of such a thing). In those days, many people simply did not feel the need to know or record their date of birth. There are still some such people in some remote parts. But today, many, or maybe most, people do know what they have been told is their date of birth—the day, month and year on which they emerged from their mother’s womb into this world.

Many people think that their date of birth is the day when they were born, or the day they came into being. But where did they come into being from? Was it that they did not exist before and that they suddenly came into being just then? Was it that on that day, they miraculously come into existence out of nothing?

I am not sure how many of us care to ponder on this subject. I didn’t, for many, many years.

The fact of the matter is that were alive long before what we conventionally regard as our date of birth. For one thing, as is known, we definitely existed for the several months when we were lodged in our mothers’ womb while our body was being formed and put into shape. Hence, we need to account for this period of time—say, eight or nine months—and take our actual date of birth back at least that much earlier. This means that we are actually at least eight or nine months older than what many of us think we are!

But the matter may not stop there. Many people believe that we were alive even before we entered our mothers’ womb and our body began to be formed. They distinguish between the real ‘we’—the soul’—on the one hand, and the physical body that we presently inhabit, on the other. They believe that the real ‘we’—the soul—has been alive since eternity, which means that it has never taken birth actually. There has never been a time when it never was, when it never existed. What does take birth at a certain point in time—and so may be said to have a particular date of birth or birthday—is the particular physical body that the soul enters and comes to inhabit in a particular lifetime. But since we are not the body that we inhabit but the soul, which is eternal, properly speaking, we do not really have a date of birth in the sense of a particular day when we came into being out of nothing, as it were.

For conventional purposes, it may be useful to speak in terms of our date of birth. But that does not mean that we came into being, out of nothing, on that day. What is conventionally regarded as our date of birth actually is simply the particular day of a particular month of a particular year that we (the soul) came out into this world in this particular lifetime, wearing this particular body of ours. We may well have been alive well before this—in fact, we were possibly alive all along, from the infinite past. It is good to remember that, strictly speaking, we may actually not have a date of birth at all in the sense of taking birth from out of nothing, because the soul—the real ‘we’—they say, is eternal, without a beginning, birthless.