Lady guest (2): How long it takes for one to have to get a particular body of life, when coming back?
Devotee: You understand?
Prabhupāda: How long it takes?
Devotee: How long does the transmigration take?
Prabhupāda: Transmigration?
Devotee: From one life to another.
Devotee (2): One life to the next.
Prabhupāda: That depends on the previous form of life. For human being, suppose you can live for one hundred years utmost.
Lady guest (2): Hundred years?
Prabhupāda: Yes, that is utmost. Nowadays no one is living up to a hundred years, because as the days are going on, people are becoming sinful, and their duration of life also becoming reduced. It will be so reduced that in future, if a man lives for twenty to thirty years, he will be considered as very old man. That is stated in the śāstra. And actually, you take information of your grandfather's age, your father's age and your age, it is reducing, due to sinful activities. But the maximum a human being can live is round about one hundred years. That's all.
So it depends relatively: ant's life or the dog's life or the cat's life or the horse's life or the elephant's life, like that—the tree's life. The tree lives for thousands of years. I have seen one tree in San Francisco . . .
(break) . . . then you are already in the spiritual platform. That is stated in the Śrīmad Bhagavad-gītā:
- māṁ ca 'vyabhicāreṇa
- bhakti-yogena ya sevate
- sa guṇān samatītyaitān
- brahma-bhūyāya kalpate
- (BG 14.26)
Anyone who is engaged in devotional service, unflinching devotional service, he's already on the Brahma stage, on the spiritual platform. He's already. He's not in the material platform.