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Question: When souls should be losing human bodies because of bad karma, why is the population increasing?
Answer: First of all, if we look at the vastness of the time scales, we may talk about population increasing, but for how long do we really have a serious population count? Serious census started just a few hundred years ago. Before that we can have estimates, how much was the population, but even if we look from that perspective, even if we stick to only the empirical measurable data, we can’t say for sure how much was the population, say, several hundred years ago. There was no hard data at that time. But even if we go with the assumption right now that okay, the population has been increasing, what it essentially means is that souls are eternal and the souls are present in many different bodies. We understand that the soul is not present only in human body. There is transmigration which happens forward and backward also. Forward means from the lower species to human species and from human species down also to the lower species. It goes both ways.
We may say that the human population is increasing, but the souls which are there in many, many different bodies, they can go from one body to another body. We have done a census of human beings, but has anyone done a census of say the number of trees in the world, the number of grass in the world, the number of mosquitoes in the world? There are so many different species. So, if we look at the history of the world in recent times, there is so much loss of biodiversity, so much trees have been cut down, so many animals have become extinct.
If we consider total number of souls, souls may go from one species to another species. So, all that we are seeing is the souls in human species are increasing or rather human population is increasing, but conversely, there can be many other species whose count has gone down.
Also, another point is that in the Vedic understanding from the soul’s perspective, life is not limited to this planet. There are many levels and the soul can go from one body to another body also. If we look from the perspective of cosmic time, the few hundred years that we have counted population, it’s like a very small time.
If, say, an alien came from an outer planet to Columbus, Ohio, and came to this room and took a sample of this room’s population from say 9 o’clock in the morning till 1 o’clock. You would say, 9 o’clock the population was very low, 10 o’clock it has increased more, 11 o’clock more, 12 o’clock there is an explosion of the population, but, 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock, hey, what happened? The population has gone down. (Laughter)
So, basically that alien is taking a very limited sample, both limited in space and limited in time. And in that limited sample, there […]