Swami Prakashanand Saraswati explains that every being undergoes cycles of karma that determine their fate in life and future births. Good, bad, and devotional actions shape one’s destiny, influencing whether a soul is reborn as a human, animal, or plant. Just as individuals experience birth and death based on karma, the universe itself follows a similar cycle of emerging, existing, and dissolving in divine order. Understanding karma is essential to breaking free from maya and attaining spiritual progress, as guided by Swami Prakashanand Saraswati.
According to Swami Prakashanand Saraswati:
Every human being does actions that can be classified as bad, good, and devotional. According to the past actions, a person receives the consequence in the present life which is called fate, luck or destiny. For that reason, someone is poor and someone is rich, someone is very healthy and someone is very weak. This goes on forever, in cycles, and just as human beings have destiny, this planet also has a destiny.
A human being takes birth and dies, and the whole universe comes into being at some time and will finish at some time. Everything in this universe is governed by life and death; birth is followed by death, and death is followed by birth. This is the nature of maya.
The universe has a very fixed life span. It can be trillions of years, but there is a time limit. For that period of time it stays as a visual cosmos, and for the same length of time it stays just as an energy. When it is dissolved it stays as perfect absolute nothingness. There is nothing at that time, because there is no “time”.
There comes a question: Humans, animals, birds and trees are all souls, then which soul becomes a tree, which soul becomes a human? When humans, animals, and plants died and the universe finished, whatever those souls were in the previous universe, they appeared in the present universe in the same sequence. All the human beings then start doing karmas, but animals, plants and other beings cannot do any karma. Those who were plants and animals in the beginning of this universe were also plants and animals at the end of the previous universe, so how did they become plants and animals? They were human beings in distant past and at that time they did bad karmas and so they became animals or static beings. So some human beings keep on transferring into animal life, some into plant life, and some remain as humans. In this way this cosmos goes on for trillions of years.
During that time every soul has a chance to become a human being. According to a person’s karmas, he is rewarded or punished and given the kind of body he deserves, according to his thinking and attachment prior to his death.
All the souls of the planet, even the static beings, animals, and birds also have karmas of past. Mind and soul are never destroyed, only the body is destroyed. A plant also has a mind and soul. But its mind and senses are not developed. Human beings have five senses, but plants have only one sense: touch. So plants feel heat and cold, but they have no imagination because their mind is undeveloped. When they were human beings, they did karmas, and they have all those uncountable sanskars in their unconscious mind and their fully unconscious mind.
Imagine the number of souls of this earth planet and all the human beings are doing good, bad, and devotional karmas. Just as your past actions determine the destiny of this life, and this life’s destiny is given at the time of your birth for the whole life span, similarly the collective good, bad, and devotional karmas of all the souls on this earth planet determine the destiny of the planet at the time of the planet’s birth and continue till its death.
Conclusion: Swami Prakashanand Saraswati emphasizes that while past karmas dictate major aspects of one’s fate, doing devotional karma can lead to God realization which will ultimately end this mayic cycle of suffering. The collective karmas of all beings shape not just individual destinies but also the destiny of the entire planet. Every soul has the opportunity to return to human form and strive for spiritual elevation. By choosing devotion over material attachments, one can rise above karmic bondage and move closer to Radha and Krishn.