ANSWERS: 4
  • Fulfilling the purpose is both rewarding and fun!
    • Roaring
      I agree
  • I believe our primary purpose is to survive because without survival, there is no life and secondary purpose is to replicate -- Live and Love my friend. ;)
  • Being attached to raising the deer, Bharata gradually became neglectful of his meditation upon the Supreme Lord. He thus became distracted from the path of self-realization, which is the actual goal of human life. The Vedas remind us that the human form is obtained only after the soul undergoes millions of births in lower species of life. This material world is sometimes compared to an ocean of birth and death, and the human body is compared to a solid boat designed to cross this ocean. The Vedic scriptures and the saintly teachers, or spiritual masters, are compared to expert boatmen, and the facilities of the human body are compared to favorable breezes that help the boat ply smoothly to its desired destination. If, with all these facilities, a person does not fully utilize his life for self-realization, then he commits spiritual suicide and risks taking his next birth in an animal body. http://www.harekrishna.com/col/books/KR/cb/chapter4.html It is difficult for me to understand how life forms lower than human beings, such as plants, insects, and other animals, could have souls.... With that free will comes responsibility. Humans who misuse their free will have to loose it, at least for a time. Chapter 16 of the Bhagavad Gita describes such human beings as having to take birth in lower species of life. http://www.beliefnet.com/story/186/story_18677_1.html and migrate into all sorts of animals, reptiles, birds, beasts, and men, according to their rank and character, and even into vegetables, and minerals, there to serve on probation. If they passed without reproach their several graduations, they were permitted to become cows and men. http://www.harekrishna.com/col/books/KR/cb/chapter1.html It is not an endless cycle of birth and rebirth. It is meant to end after the human form, which is considered to be most evolved of species. Why? Because in the human form of life, one can question. Who am I? Where have I come from? What is the purpose of life? The lower species do not have that ability. If not, even as a human being, if one dies, then according to one's activities, karma, the soul would have to take another birth. It is not necessarily another human birth. If one's actions were very abominable, if one's consciousness was very degraded, then the desires one is left with at the time of death may force one to take a lower birth again in a lower species of life. This is called transmigration. http://www.atlantaharekrishnas.org/newsgroup/kcprinciples/0093.htm According to the Hindu tradition, 'a jiva (from the stage of a protozoan, perhaps) attains competence for a human body after undergoing 8,400,000 births (in lower forms of life). Brihad Vishnu Purana gives the details. http://www.vedanta-newyork.org/articles/concept_of_evolution.htm http://www.sriramakrishnamath.org/magazine/vk/2006/01-2-1.asp According to Vedic knowledge, it is not necessarily so that a human will always reincarnate as a human being. If a man exhibits beastly character throughout his life, the low consciousness that he develops will see to it that he reincarnates as a beast. A glutton may take birth as a pig or another lower form of life. The Vedas talk about 8.4 million species of life, right from an amoeba up to human beings and demigods. A person can take any of these life-forms. Sometimes the soul will also remain in a standstill state for long periods of time without taking any body at all. http://www.stephen-knapp.com/vedic_culture_hinduism_a_short_introduction.htm The principal cause of rebirth as an animal is ignorance. In other words, the blind, heedless pursuit of one's animal-like desires, the preoccupation with eating, sleeping and sexual desire, and the disregard of developing one's mind to the practice of virtue and so forth lead one to be reborn as an animal. http://www.buddhanet.net/funbud10.htm GNOSTIC BELIEFS: By misconduct and neglect in life, a human being can descend downward (transmigrate) to a lower form of being which it once emerged from. Thus, a human soul can inhabit a sub-human body. Such a descent may involves a loss of enormous time in the spiritual evolution process. http://alandpeters.tripod.com/id21.html One who dies in ignorance is reborn as a lower creature (Bhagavad Gita, 14.15). According to this verse, if one develops the mode of ignorance, after his death he is degraded to an animal form of life. From there one has to again elevate himself, by an evolutionary process, to come again to the human form of life. Therefore, those who are actually serious about human life should take to the mode of goodness and in good association transcend the modes. http://veda.harekrsna.cz/encyclopedia/newage.htm Learned persons dedicated to Vedic culture are elevated by the mode of goodness to higher and higher positions. The mode of ignorance, on the other hand, forces one to fall headfirst into lower and lower births. And by the mode of passion one continues transmigrating through human bodies. Satha Patha Brahmana 11.25.21: http://www.veda.harekrsna.cz/encyclopedia/vedicsystem.htm
  • I say we all just have fun.

Copyright 2023, Wired Ivy, LLC

Answerbag | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy