Hemant Mehta

[emjay]

Well, I'm sorry I missed it... but I can only read you in small doses

So non-human animals get an auto-upgrade, is that it? Is that straight to human, or is there a linear progression/hierarchy of animals that they have to go up through? Ie what is a 'worse' animal to reincarnate into and what is a 'better' one? Nature is a pretty brutal business all round but arguably some animals have it easier than others in terms of suffering, depending on where they are in the food chain etc.

As I just explained to Kem we do not know whether an animal was a human in the previous life (DEVOLUTION) or a different animal with less consciousness.
Only the entity that administer the karma law is aware of that.
We shouldn't really worry about that.
As far as the evolution of the consciousness goes the matter evolve into vegetation, into animals, into humans and back in the mind of the cosmic thinker once the cycle is completed.
The problems for humans arise as they leave the animal stage and turn into humans.
Below the stage of human karma does not apply but for human it does because in human most of the instinct leave place for free will and therefore decision making are not driven by instinct (mother nature) anymore.

Remember also that the old saying apply.......NO BRAIN NO PAIN..... so for an animal to be killed and eaten is not as painful as for us human which nervous system is a lot more complex.
When we breathe we kill millions of tiny germs that are in the air.
When we eat we also kill because the food contain live things.
When you walk in the street we kill tiny creature that are in the ground or footpath.
There is no way that we can avoid killing but there is a way to avoid doing more damage than we should
like eating low low consciousness form of lives such as in a vegetarian or vegan diet.
In this case the karma is almost nil if apply at all.  

In other words, how does 'reincarnation allocation' work going downwards (devolving) relative to someone's bad karma in death? Is it based on the amount of suffering an animal would supposedly endure in life (ie quality of life) or is related to the animal's supposed degree of consciousness/intelligence

Could be both or could only be related to the level of consciousness.
Obviously a human that turn into an animal because of his-her bad karma lose his-her consciousness
to the level of the animal that is going to be reincarnated in.
At the same time such an animal could well be punished a lot further according to his-her bad karma or simply stay in animal form or plant form or stuck in the matter for ages and ages.
Take some of the people who engaged in mass killing like Stalin, Pol Pot or other.
They may well be reincarnated into animals for thousand of times or be turn into matter as well.
Only the one who administer the karma law knows.  

Thanks for your answers but I see two major problems with the whole idea:

1) It seems to me this 'system' breaks down when animals are considered... that at the level of humans, with their karma, it's fairly well defined, but where 'devolution' to animals and 'evolution' from animals is concerned, it becomes decidedly vague and arbitrary, down to the arbitrary decisions of this 'cosmic thinker' who one can imagine, as you describe it, as keeping a ledger on every person, recording their punishment arbitrarily in the form of x lifetimes as say, a worm... or any variation on that. In other words there appears no systematic means for 'non-karmic' consciousness to 'evolve', only the arbitrary decisions of the cosmic thinker. So is that how you see Karma? As essentially no different from the Christian god doling out arbitrary punishment... ie not a systematic cycle of some kind... which is the impression I'd got of what you meant when reading you in the past... but rather an arbitrary judgement?

2) More importantly, once punishment has been administered and a being begins his 'sentence' as it were... x lifetimes as a given animal or whatever arbitrary variation on that the 'cosmic thinker' has decided upon, the resulting animal lives lack the conscious faculties to understand why they're being punished. Ie a punishment is only any good if the person being punished knows why they're being punished... but there's no way a worm for instance could understand what human transgressions it was being punished for, and thus surely it renders the punishment moot?