Why is the population increasing?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna.
Okay, yeah, good question. So, why is the population increasing? Although religion has been there for a long time, we see the human population increasing. First of all, if we look at the vastness of the time scales, we will talk about population increasing, but for how long do we really have a serious population count? Census itself, serious census started just a few hundred years ago.
Before that, we can have estimates of how much is the population. But, even if we look from that perspective, that okay, even if we stick to only the empirical, measurable data, we can’t say for sure how much is the population say, several hundred years ago. There was no hard data at that time.
But even if we go with the assumption right now, that okay, the population has been increasing. What it essentially means is that souls are eternal. And the souls are present in many different bodies.
So, we understand that the soul is not present only in human body. There is transmigration which happens forward and backward also. Forward means from the lower species to human species and from human species down also to the lower species.
It goes both ways. So, we may say that the human population is increasing, but the souls which are there in many many different bodies, they can go from one body to another body. Now, have we done a census of human beings? But has anyone done a census of say, the number of trees in the world? The number of grass in the world? The number of mosquitoes in the world? There are so many different species.
So, if we look at the history of the world in recent times, there is so much loss of biodiversity, so much trees have been cut down, so many animals have become extinct. So, the souls, if we consider the total number of souls, souls may go from one species to another species. So, all that we are seeing is the souls in human species are increasing or rather human population is increasing.
But conversely, there can be many other species whose count has gone down. And also another point is that in the Vedic understanding, in the soul’s perspective, the life is not limited to this planet. There are many levels and the soul can go from one body to another body also.
So, if we look from the perspective of cosmic time, the few hundred years that we have counted population, it’s like a very small time. If say, an alien came from an outer planet to Columbus, Ohio and came to this room and took a sample of this room’s population from say, 9 o’clock in the morning till 1 o’clock. 9 o’clock, the population was very low.
10 o’clock, it has increased more. 11 o’clock, more. 12 o’clock, there is an explosion of the population.
But, 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock, hey, what happened? The population has gone down. So, basically, that alien is taking a very limited sample, both limited in space and limited in time. And in that limited sample, there may be variation but that variation doesn’t mean extinction or creation.
It simply means relocation. People are coming here, people are going. So, at a particular time, there may be more, another time, there may be less.
So, similarly, with respect to the Earth and with respect to not even the Earth, just a small few hundred years and human species. So, yes, human population may be increasing but the other souls may be going down. So, we see, as I said, that other souls and other species may be going down.
Other species have also become extinct. And, another way to understand this is that when the soul wants to enjoy material nature, to some extent, the soul is given the facility for that. So, in the last few hundred years, we have put all our intelligence, which is meant for spiritual growth, we have used it all to try to improve things at the material level.
Try to combat disease, combat old age, combat infant mortality, combat… So, with this exercise of the intelligence, we can improve things. So, we have improved things to some extent. By the same time, there is the free will of the soul by which the soul can act and improve things.
But there is also the principle of karma. There is also the principle of that whatever actions we do, we will get the reaction. And this is Kali Yuga.
This is the age of spiritual darkness. So, what happens is that the people have created more and more comforts trying to make this world a better place. But the karma and the karmic reactions are going to come.
Whatever we do, the actions are going to come. So, one way the increased karmic reactions, the karmic reactions which we have avoided by avoiding diseases, by creating some and more comforts through technology. One way those karmic reactions can come is through the increased population.
So, earlier we didn’t have resources. People didn’t have food to enjoy. They had to struggle and scavenge to get food.
Even if we go simply by the narrative of history as we get from modern science. But now, because there is so much population, there is competition again for that. So, the increased population, even the relative framework of few years, could be a way in which reactions are coming.
The increased population is not necessarily a good thing for places where the population explodes. It may be a good thing where the life span is increasing and where the facilities are available for people. But it’s not true everywhere.
So, within the limited framework which we look at, we understand simply the variation from one species to another species. Souls in a particular species have gone up and souls in another species have gone down. And what could be the reason for that? As I said, one reason could be that the increased population is the way through which karmic reactions are coming to us.
The increased competition that happens because of that. Another could also be that the souls are not evolving upwards. So, Krishna says, So, those who live in rajoguna, in the mode of passion, they stay here.
So, by the natural process of evolution, souls from the animal species are coming here to the human form. But most of the world today is in the mode of passion. There are few people in goodness.
There are good number in ignorance also. But large, we are in the mode of passion. Those who live in the mode of passion, they stay, Krishna says, in the same level of reality.
The souls from the lower species are evolving to human species. Majority of the human souls, they are not evolving upwards because they are not spiritually inclined. Not only in the mode of goodness, but in the mode of passion.
So, they are staying over here. So, that could also be a reason why the population is increasing. But the population increase is simply a variation within space and time that we observe right now.
But that doesn’t necessarily in any way contradict any aspect of the spiritual philosophy. It’s fully explainable within the broad parameters of the spiritual philosophy that is given in the Bhagavad Gita.