About The 84 Lakhs

I asked the following of NotebookLM:

Meher Baba mentions that "The soul goes through 84 lakhs (8.4 million) of shakes (births and deaths) during this process". I'm unclear as to whether these are human births and deaths or whether these are the total through all the stages of evolution: stone, metal, vegetable, worm, fish, bird and animal. Can you seek clarification within the literature?

Here was the response:

Source: Gemini

The number 84 lakhs (8.4 million) is highly significant in Meher Baba's cosmology and actually applies to both the stages of pre-human evolution and the cycles of human reincarnation, which often causes confusion. Meher Baba explicitly noted that "Ninety-nine percent of the pundits have blundered in taking both evolution and reincarnation changes and rounds of births and deaths as 84 lakhs".

Here is how the literature clarifies the exact meaning of this number across the two different stages:

1. Reincarnation (Human Births and Deaths) When Meher Baba speaks of the soul going through 84 lakhs of "shakings" or reincarnations, he is directly referring to the exact number of times a soul takes a human form.

• Once the soul has attained the human form, the process of evolution is complete, and the process of reincarnation begins.
  
  
• To wear out the accumulated impressions (sanskaras) from evolution, the soul must experience exactly 8,400,000 human lifetimes (births and deaths), alternating between male and female, rich and poor, and different nationalities to gather a complete balance of opposite experiences.
  
  
• Meher Baba refers to these 84 lakhs of human reincarnations as "shakings" because the soul is being shaken loose from its tight grip of sanskaras before it is ready for the process of spiritual realization.

2. Evolution (Pre-Human Forms) Before the soul ever reaches the human form, the number 8.4 million also dictates the exact number of species the soul must traverse during evolution.

• During the evolutionary journey, the soul passes through six primary pre-human stages: stone/metal, vegetable, worm, fish, bird, and animal.
  
  
• Meher Baba explained that there are exactly 14 lakhs (1,400,000) of species in each of these six pre-human forms. Multiplying 6 by 14 lakhs equals 84 lakhs (8,400,000) of species or "bindings".
  
  
• Thus, the soul experiences 84 lakhs of changes in species during evolution.

The Distinction: "Shakings" vs. "Sleeps of Death" To further clarify this distinction, Meher Baba's close disciple Eruch Jessawala provided an important note in God Speaks. He explained that the "Eighty-four lakhs of shakings or reincarnations are in human form". However, if one were to count the actual number of individual "deaths" or shedding of forms during the entire pre-human evolutionary process (moving from one individual stone to another, one plant to another, etc., rather than just counting the broad species), the soul goes through approximately "fifty crores [500 million] of sleeps of death" before it even reaches the human form.

In summary, the 8.4 million "shakes" or "reincarnations" strictly refer to the number of human lifetimes a soul experiences. However, during the prior evolutionary journey, the soul also traversed exactly 8.4 million species of pre-human forms (from stone to animal). The number is fixed for both processes independently.

Darwinism

It's a poorly kept secret that eugenics enjoyed widespread support amongst intellectuals and politicians in the decades before World War II. It got a bad name due its enthusiastic support by the Nazi Party in Germany. After the war, it never went away but was simply euphemistically rebranded using terms like human biodiversity (HBD). Here is a description of HBD from Forward:

“Human biodiversity” appropriates scientific authority by posing as an empirical, rational discourse on the genetically proven physical and mental variation between humans. It uses the language of genetics to underscore, for example, the prevalence of Mongolians in sumo wrestling, the IQ scores of black people or the inbreeding patterns of Ashkenazi Jews. The refrain of HBD bloggers and forum commenters is that the (gene-driven, according to them) dissimilarities they outline are “non-negligible” or “non-trivial” and have, accordingly, social policy implications. Though it has a rational, policy-wonk zing to it, that’s just Internet forum-ese for “you’re genetically distinct from us and should be treated differently.”

Having recently read The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin by Benjamin Wiker, I've realised that the rise of Darwinism in the nineteenth century fuelled the eugenics craze of the twentieth century. To quote from the book:

As biographer Janet Browne notes: in the decades following the publication of the Origin, Darwin’s defenders came to occupy influential niches in British and American intellectual life. Together, these men would also control the scientific media of the day, especially the important journals, and channel their other writings through a series of carefully chosen publishers—Murray, Macmillan, Youmans, and Appleton. Towards the end they were everywhere, in the Houses of Parliament, the Anglican Church, the universities, government offices, colonial service, the aristocracy, the navy, the law, and medical practice; in Britain and overseas. As a group that worked as a group, they were impressive. Their ascendancy proved decisive, both for themselves and for Darwin.

The triumph of Darwinism had major implications for the twentieth century but it was just one approach to what powers evolution, "a reductionist, materialist approach". To quote again from the book:

The truth of the matter is this: the methodical exclusion of divine causation was an assumption deriving from the particular secular Enlightenment goal of systematically excluding the divine as a matter of human progress. Darwin shared that vision and hence that goal, and it determined the way that he defined evolution. That was the problem with Darwin’s theory, and that is the problem with Darwinism. Darwinism is not a synonym for evolution. Darwinism is a particular approach to the evidence for evolution, a reductionist, materialist approach that excludes the Divine on principle. Evolution is a complex and difficult thing we are still trying to understand.