In Hindu and Buddhist sources that talk about reincarnation, a birth in human form is always described as something rare and precious, that provides the opportunity for attaining liberation. Sankaracarya narrows it down further – human birth is precious, but being born as a male is even more precious, and being borne as a brahmana is most precious. Before women start making noises about it, consider this: the Hindu civilization is very strict, it prescribes duties very precisely, and if you’re born a sudra, you are expected to be a physical worker or a servant, if you’re born a vaiśya you’re expected to became a skilled tradesman or a merchant, if you’re born a ksatriya you’re expected to be a soldier, policeman, politician or a ruler, and if you’re born a brahmana, you’re expected to be a religious scholar, a priest or a yogi. A woman, even within the highest caste, is expected to be a mother and a housewife, albeit very highly educated and intelligent one, and is not supposed to be a wandering sannyasini. Even the feminine gender of the word sounds weird and uncommon. So, what Sankaracarya said is actually common sense – since he was a wandering monk, a sannyasin, who thought this was the best way of life if you want to attain liberation, it’s obvious that being a male brahmana is the only birth where such a choice will be approved of, and even encouraged.

What is interesting is that even in those ancient times a choice to be a yogi and a wandering monk who seeks liberation from the world was seen as exceedingly uncommon, a thing only a few do, and even fewer attain success. Even in those times, when human birth was seen as a rare and precious thing, there were discussions on whether sudras have a soul or not, because, apparently, their appearance and actions allowed for such questions.

The model of reincarnation is quite different between the Vedic, Hindu and Buddhist religions. The Vedic system sees spiritual life in ways that resemble that of Christianity – there is heaven, hell and the physical world, but you are not necessarily stuck in either heaven or hell forever. Saints and gods can commit an offence or a sin and end up born on Earth, even in animal form. Humans can end up in either heaven or hell, and in various forms, depending on their actions during life. Beings in hell can rise up when the punishment for their sins is exhausted.

Buddhism, however, adopts a Jainist, rather than Vedic theory of soul, and develops it further, stating that soul is in fact an aggregation of karma that follows a path that is of its nature – desires create rebirth focused on their fulfilment, basically, and good and evil deeds create rebirth that will allow for reward and punishment. Hinduism in essence adopts the Buddhist view on karma, but revises it to accommodate for the concept of atman, an individual soul that is an aspect of brahman, the Absolute, and is a core of infinity captured under the layers of karma.

The commonly understood truth between all three systems is that human birth is the pinnacle of what is possible in this world, but that sophisticated souls that explore high spirituality are very rare in this world. Basically, they would be a fraction of a percent of a population. Even great gurus had only a handful of disciples, and deep understanding was exceedingly uncommon.

Also, in Hinduism and Buddhism, the systems that work with the assumption of spiritual evolution through many incarnations, there is a common assumption that it takes an exceedingly long time for a soul to develop the level of sophistication or purity that would allow for a human birth, and also a very large number of human births to slowly evolve towards the point where liberation is attainable.

Regarding the concept of delay between incarnations, things are less clear. There is a theory according to which reincarnation is something that happens with very little delay between lives, because the momentum of karma very quickly creates another birth. There is another theory according to which the souls wait in the astral world until their karma for another birth ripens. In any case, the theory according to which there is a huge number of sophisticated souls queued up somewhere in the astral world, waiting until a human body is made for them to be born in, because there’s a lack of human bodies available on Earth, could be easily falsified even in ancient times – you see, there is a tantric concept according to which most humans are pashavi, animals in human form, without any spiritual interests or abilities. Obviously, the majority of human beings were hardly more than cattle even in those times, which is not what one would expect to happen if human body was a rare thing only the best and brightest of souls could qualify for. Yogis were exceedingly rare, and pashavis were the rule. So, let’s err on the side of caution and say that there were twice as many souls somewhere on the astral planes that were queued up for incarnation in human form, or in the lack of human bodies inhabited bodies of the more intelligent animals, some of which are in fact self-aware. So let me show you this graph:

As you can see, during the times of Buddha, when the concept of rare human birth was articulated, human population worldwide was around 300 million. According to the aforementioned model, let’s say that half the qualified souls inhabit the human form, and the other half is waiting for their turn, due to the scarcity of bodies. The total result is 300 million humans, of which 99% would be qualified as pashavi, meaning they could as well be horses, donkeys, cows or elephants for the amount of high spirituality they show interest for. This means that some 3 million souls, when incarnated, would manifest symptoms that would qualify them as obviously supra-animal by qualified spiritual people, meaning that they seek knowledge, spirituality and transcendence, rather than sensuality, possession of goods and control over other humans. Those 3 million souls are obviously something you can’t just make more of quickly; if so, we would be dealing with a situation where a significantly larger percentage of human population was “filled” by those.

So, if we concede as fact that sophisticated souls with transcendental inclinations were an insignificant percentage of a population of 300 million, and 1% is probably an overestimation but let’s leave it at that, and we also concede as fact that spiritual evolution takes a long time and you can’t just make more souls at will, or get them from some adjacent pool where they are waiting for their turn, because if you had 200 million of them, spiritual people and yogis would form 66.67% of the population of 300 million, instead of 1%, we must contend with the following situation: human population held rather steady until the advent of the industrial evolution, at which time it doubled; furthermore, with the introduction of modern agricultural technology and medicine, the population spiked exponentially – 3.5 billion in the late 1960s, 8 billion now.

So, if less than 1% of a population of 0.3 billion could be filled with souls that deserve the name, while the others could interchangeably fill humans or other smart animals, such as cows and horses, and let’s say there was a queue of souls in the astral plane waiting for a physical incarnation, and let’s say that this queue can’t be that deep, or more than 1% of human bodies would show more-than-animal inclinations, what the hell do we do to explain 8 billion additional human bodies appearing in just a few centuries?

Sure, we can’t really know how deep the astral pool of souls is, but honestly, I am willing to extend the number to one billion souls. After that point, you lost me, because even millions of actual sophisticated souls were a stretch in times of Buddha, and of 300 million, most were total animals. Having all that in mind, what the hell inhabits the other seven and a half billion human bodies? It’s not like there’s a lack of sophisticated, intelligent animals for pashavis to inhabit, either – in modern farming, huge numbers of cattle are grown, to accommodate the larger human population that needs food. There’s all that talk about wildlife extinction, but I would venture a guess that the total number of land animals actually increased due to industrial farming – you can’t say that you have less cows and sheep and more humans, so the animal souls are born in human bodies. You actually have more cows, pigs and sheep.

I thought about this for quite a while – obviously, the first idea I had was that the pool of souls of available for incarnation is unknown, which makes any theorising unreliable. However, then I understood that souls that didn’t have a human incarnation would have a really, really hard time “driving” a human body, considering how I saw humans having great difficulties driving a human body of the opposite sex they are not accustomed to, or displaying signs of mental imbalance or even outright psychosis when trying to push the human body into directions where it doesn’t want to go naturally. Let’s assume that you have a planet of sentient aliens somewhere, and due to depopulation their souls are incarnated here on Earth. They would have a huge problem “driving” a body that is completely different from everything they are used to. Their subconscious memories would attempt to manifest themselves in ways that would push a human body into directions where it doesn’t really work properly, or they would just remain autistic, unable to make the body do anything at all, or even process the sensory stimuli of this type. This, however, made me think about how incarnation actually works, and things get weirder from here, so much so that I actually have a problem when I try to put it into words.

First of all, we need to understand that incarnation of one soul into one body (1:1 relational model) is not the only concept people have come up with. Advaita vedanta, for instance, uses a 1:M model, where one soul incarnates as literally all bodies, and the apparent differences between them are on the order of the Sun transferring energy to Earth, and various gasses, liquids and solids accepting this energy in various ways, manifesting all kinds of complicated fluid-mechanics phenomena, that would seemingly have multiple and unrelated causes. Vedanta uses this highly innovative approach to explain the concept of soul – brahman is the original light, that passes through the multiple layers of maya, illusion, causing apparent difference and separation of entities, and when light of brahman attains self-awareness in human form, it thinks it is atman, a soul. As strange as 1:M model of incarnation might seem, I can easily demonstrate it by citing identical twins, who started as a single entity, which then split into several branches, and analysing identical twins they look like a single karmic entity that was spliced into several separate physical entities, and often those separate lives have all-but-identical “plots”. It’s even easier to explain this with plants, because we can take a cutting and grow it into a separate plant, or grow several plants by splitting the same potato. When you think about it from this perspective, it’s the 1:1 model of soul and incarnation that leads into paradoxes and creates serious issues.

So, if we take identical twins as an example of a single incarnation line that can be split into multiple physical beings, and explain it as a separation that took place below the astral plane, creating two separate physical beings, we can also imagine a single karmic being that creates several apparently separate astral incarnations, each of those proceeding to create multiple physical incarnations, such as a colony of bees or ants.

One of the viewpoints within Hinduism, Sankhya, works with Purusha-Prakrti dichotomy, where a spiritual entity, Purusha, animates an entity in nature, Prakrti, thus creating a soul-body composite, also known as an animate being. A relational model of 1:1 is possible, but not obligatory, so you can have one Purusha animating a whole planet of beings, and within that planet you can have additional influences by multiple Purushas, each creating either singular or plural incarnations, manifesting respective spiritual trends (and if you replace “Purusha” with “Bodhisattva”, you essentially understand what Mahayana Buddhism teaches about Bodhisattva manifesting tulkus). In essence, this would create a situation where one physical being is a manifestation of several different spiritual motivating forces. Also, since the control would reside with the physical being, it can accept or refuse “initiation”, by accepting or refusing to identify itself in certain ways. To put it in Christian ways, saying that a being is “born in original sin” would mean that originally, all humans are “evaporations” of Satan’s will and intent that is manifested as the whole of humanity, but Christ also manifests his influence in the world, that is optional, and one can choose it as his own, and choosing Christ as the Purusha that incarnates through him one “chooses Christ as his personal saviour”, and is “redeemed from the original sin”. One can thus say that “live not I, but Christ within me”.

This makes explaining the process taking place when you suddenly and exponentially increase the number of humans in the world in a short period of time much simpler. You see, in order to drive a human body you don’t actually need a soul at all; if anything, most living beings would simply grow into manifestations of the primary Purusha manifesting through that world; in essence, they would be incarnations of Sanat Kumar’s will and intent – the body of Satan, as I poetically put it in the previous article. This is the lowest-energy, basic state of being, and those incarnated are all of the same “spirit”, they all want the same things, fear the same things, share the same principal goals and are for all intents and purposes interchangeable.

If another Purusha casts his presence upon the world, this inherits, extends and overrides the methods of the basic state, to put it in terms of the object-oriented programming. Essentially, it’s similar to the situation where all things on Earth are heated by the Earth’s core, this overlaps with the heat coming from the Sun, and some places are locally heated by human-made nuclear reactors or combustion of fossil fuels. As a result, you can have multiple overlapping sources of heat, creating local thermodynamic manifestations, or, in spiritual terms, you can have multiple spiritual influencers, or Purushas, creating overlapping phenomena, where human will and choice basically implement formative decisions – you, basically, decide who you are, by accepting and rejecting spiritual influences that make up what you perceive as your inner spiritual life.

So, things are very far from being as simple and clear-cut as they initially appeared – instead of having a situation where you need to have 300 million souls to populate 300 million bodies, which raises the question of what happens when you increase the number of bodies by an order of magnitude, you have some sort of a field that manifests through all human bodies – 8 billion as easily as 300 million, and they are what the tantrics would call the pashavi, in essence the beasts of Satan, trying to fuck, own things and be famous. What you actually need to account for in this theory are the exceptions – the souls that manifest real spiritual interests and real spiritual diversity, and they can be overriding manifestations of other spiritual forces, superimposed upon the default field, which they locally outshine and create local divergences. This can be explained by understanding that we live in a palimpsest of superimposed forces, where the satanic one is the default – the obvious, the easiest, loudest, the non-choice almost everybody lives. However, as one navigates through the maze of inner spiritual choices, it becomes possible to navigate into segments of the labyrinth where other forces are dominant – in fact, by veering into those segments you choose to be influenced by those forces to such a degree, that your self-identity switches from the satanic default, to the high spiritual reality that dominates there; the Christians would phrase this as entering the Church by choosing to be of Christ, or something like that. In essence, those are initiatory choices, because they re-define what you are, as a spiritual being, and it’s not so much that you survive death by making the right choice so that God will recognize you as his own, it’s more along the lines of existing on a higher plane of being and seeing that plane as “self”.

This answers multiple questions at once – who will be saved, who will be destroyed, who will go where after death and so on. It’s trivial – that which you have chosen to be in life, will be your fate after death. If you were one of Satan’s “basic bitches” – the non-choosers who always do what is easy, believe what everybody believes, do what everybody does, the non-awakened, the generic – they are not really souls, they are merely the manifestation of Satan’s basic field of this world, and since they never chose to truly be, they have no future or destiny. They are reabsorbed into the pool of satanic energy that is born again in this world in some form, generic, main-stream and thinking it’s of course on the right side because every other side is wrong, and numbers are on their side because that’s what everybody believes.

If you chose to weave the fabric of self out of other, higher influences that permeate all, your true existence is already “up there”, made of That, and when death washes away the body, you awaken in the fullness of your choice, once the satanic darkness and illusion whimpers out of your existence. That’s all there is to it – those who chose to initiate themselves into higher realities, who made the actual choices to belong to God in one way or another, will see that this choice determined their destiny by making them partake in eternity. Only that, which is of God, can have eternity; the rest dies in time.