PLATE TWO
Reincarnation of the soul, the first fact that we need to understand on the path of spiritual enlightenment, is graphically shown here. . . . As a child grows, he becomes a boy, the boy becomes a young man, the young man becomes an adult, and the adult becomes an old man. Throughout all this time, although his body is changing from a child to an old man, the person still feels that he has the same identity, the same “self.” But what is this “self,” and what happens to it at the time of death? Lord Kṛṣṇa explains in the  Bhagavad-gītā  (2.13 and 2.20), “Within the body is the soul [the “self”], and just as the soul passes from one’s infant body to his youthful body, and from his youthful body to his aged body, so the same soul passes into another body at death. . . . For the soul there is never birth nor death. Nor, having once been, does he ever cease to be. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying, and primeval. He does not perish when the body perishes.” Later in the  Bhagavad-gītā  Lord Kṛṣṇa compares the process of changing bodies to discarding an old set of clothes and donning a new set. But the soul’s “new set of clothes”—his new body—need not be human. There are 8,400,000 species, including all kinds of one-celled creatures, aquatics, plants, reptiles, insects, beasts, and human beings. By the law of karma, what kind of body a person gets in his next life depends on the acts he performs and the desires he cultivates in this life. ( pp.  25–35)