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Easy Journey to Other Planets
traced. No one can trace the history of when the conditioned soul first accepted the material body. There are 8,400,000 forms of living entities—900,000 species of living entities are within the water, and 2,000,000 species of life are among the plants and vegetables. Unfortunately, this Vedic knowledge is not instructed by any university. But these are facts. Let the botanist and anthropologist research into the Vedic conclusion. Darwin's theory of the evolution of organic matter is, of course, very prominent in the learning institutions. But the  Bhāgavata Purāṇa  and other authoritative scriptures of scientific magnitude describe how the living entities in different forms of body evolve one after another. It is not a new idea. But educators are giving stress only to Darwin's theory, although in Vedic literature we have immense information of the living conditions in this material world.
We are only a fractional portion of all the living entities in the many universes of the material world. Those who are in the material world and material body are condemned. For example, the population in prison is condemned by the government, but their number is only a fraction of the whole population. It is not that the whole population goes to prison. Some, who are disobedient, are confined in prison. Similarly, the conditioned souls within this material world are only a fraction of all the living entities in the creation of God, and because they have disobeyed God—they did not abide by the order of Kṛṣṇa—they have been put into this material world. If one is sensible and inquisitive, he should try to
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understand: "Why have I been put into this conditional life? I do not wish to suffer."
There are three kinds of suffering, including miseries pertaining to the body and mind. In Hawaii, in front of my house, a man was keeping some animals and birds for the purpose of taking them to be slaughtered. I gave this example to my students: "These animals are standing here, and if you tell them, 'Oh, my dear animals, why are you standing here? Go away! You are meant for the slaughterhouse,' they cannot go. They have no intelligence."
Suffering without knowledge, without remedy, is animal life. One who cannot understand that he is suffering and who thinks that he is very well off is in animal consciousness, not human consciousness. The human should be cognizant of suffering the threefold miseries of this planet. One should know that he is suffering in birth, suffering in death, suffering in old age and suffering in disease, and one should be inquisitive as to how he may avoid the suffering. That is real research work.
We have suffered from the beginning of our birth. As a baby, the human is tightly placed in the abdomen of the mother in an airtight bag for nine months. He cannot even move, there are insects biting him, and he cannot protest. After the child comes out, the suffering continues. The mother undoubtedly takes much care, but still the child cries because he is suffering. There are bugs biting or there are pains in his stomach; the child is crying, and the mother does not know how to pacify him. His suffering begins in the womb of his mother. Then, after his birth,