Are rocks alive – can we become rocks in our future life?

Thank you are rocks alive, can one become a rock in one’s future life ultimately no physical object is alive it is the soul that is present which gives life, so even right now the body is not alive it is the soul who is alive through the human body, that’s why the human body appears to be alive the Padma Purana talks about 8.4 million species and it does not mention rocks over there it mentions aquatics plants insects, birds mammals, humans animals, humans so and that classification seems to be the standard one which we have for understanding where all the soul wanders it goes to 8.4 million species stones don’t fall in that so in that sense you could say that stones don’t have souls present within them whereby the stone is the body for the soul now there are always exceptions in the sense that Krishna as a super soul is present everywhere he is present in our body, he is present in every cell he is present in the atom he is present in the space between the atoms also he pervades all of existence so there is a school of thought called panpsychism panpsychism means pan is everything, psyche is mind which is the western equivalent for consciousness panpsychism is everything is conscious, that is the idea and that school of thought holds that there are just degrees of consciousness and in what we call as conscious beings, consciousness is more so that is manifest to us but in stones and other objects, there is no consciousness the consciousness is not manifest but consciousness is everywhere now the if we consider the Vedic understanding or the Gita’s understanding we have to see that there are two kinds of consciousness there is the finite consciousness of the Atma and there is the infinite consciousness of the Paramatma the infinite consciousness of the Paramatma is present everywhere and even that is not manifest to us that way the Paramatma’s presence in our own heart also right now is not manifest to us when we become purified it will become manifest to us so in some situations Krishna can manifest himself specially through certain material objects so Gita’s are said to be of two kinds one is where they are fashioned with some material we take some marble we do some carving and then we do Pranapratishta where we invoke the Lord’s presence into the deity but the other is considered to be Swayambhuva self manifested that the Shaligram Shila that is a stone but we don’t do any Pranapratishta we don’t invite the Lord to come over there because in the Shaligram Shila the Lord is considered to be directly present so there are some special stones in which the Lord is Lord manifests himself at one level you could say the Lord is present in all stones the Lord is present in all stones but we don’t worship the Lord, He is present in the table over here but we are not going to offer obeisances here isn’t it so there are certain stones or certain Shilas which are considered to be sacred and there Krishna manifests his presence so those can be called as living stones, not in the sense that they are the bodies for a particular soul, rather the Lord is manifest over there and then we have this particular parameters which are used to test whether the stone is living that is more to sense the presence of the Lord over there so it’s not so much to sense the presence of the Atma so this is one exception where the Divine Consciousness may manifest itself so we agree with Panpsychism in the sense that the Supreme is present everywhere and He is supremely conscious but it’s not that everything is manifesting a unit of Consciousness say your body is manifesting a unit of Consciousness that is you, my body is manifesting a unit of Consciousness that is me but it’s not that this table is manifesting a unit of Consciousness of a soul present in it another exception could be that in some situations if somebody is cursed then they may be engaged in a stone not exactly a body but in a stone like structure that kind of curse can happen and in curses sometimes natural laws can be changed not permanently but temporarily like it is said that Ahalya was cursed by cursed to become a stone and then Lord Ram touched her and then she manifested herself again being purified by His touch so that is an exception so curses may especially curses given by certain powerful sages may lead to the soul getting into a particular body but there also it was not exactly a transmigration it was not that the stone was a body for the soul rather the soul was the same but that body was transformed into soul so it is not that soul left this body and went to another body generally how do we know whether Consciousness is present somewhere that is the first person experience which you know that you are Consciousness I know I am Conscious there is a school of thought which says that actually we can’t know whether anyone else is Conscious or not all that I can know is I am Conscious and everybody else is just a subjective I just infer that you are Conscious but you might just be a robo and have no Consciousness so now that is of course we don’t agree with that but it is very why I mention this school of thought is to stress the point that it is not so easy to infer whether Consciousness is whether something is Conscious or not from a second person’s perspective a robo nowadays can do many of the things which humans can do but the robo is not Conscious so Consciousness internally its symptom is there is thinking, feeling, willing there is not just perception but there is experience a robo may also see this door is red light hits it and says its red but for a human being when they see red they remember oh red is the color of blood I have seen that accident I feel some fear or red was the rose I offered to my beloved and I feel some feelings over there that sort of experience is not there so that is the internal symptom which is difficult to know externally but the external characteristic when we normally talk about embodied soul but you could also talk about ensouled matter matter in which soul is present so the external symptom is that normally matter undergoes three changes there is creation there is deterioration and there is destruction this table is created it will exist for 50 years, 100 years it will crack, deteriorate, it will be destroyed but when the soul is present in the body then there is creation, there is growth all of us were small babies at one time, we have grown now then there is maintenance now if the stone is cut if this table is cut, it will stay cut if our finger is cut it will clot and heal there is a tendency to maintain itself then there is reproduction which can happen through different means, sometimes sexual asexual, whatever but reproduction happens and then there is deterioration and destruction so when soul is present in a body these three additional characteristics are there growth, maintenance and reproduction, so if these three are present or even if any of these are present then that is a good indication that there is soul present in that particular material object so we don’t see souls, stones reproducing sometimes stones may grow but that is not exactly like sometimes in rainy season door seems to bloat that is not exactly growth it is just because of some water accumulating, it is bloating as growth means there is cell division and internal expansion is there not just of size but internal metabolism happens over there so that doesn’t happen in stones, so generally stones are not conscious and the two exceptions would be if Krishna is manifesting through Sheela and if somebody is cursed to become a stone so unless we offend someone who curses us we are unlikely