It cannot be denied that these physical bodies no longer exist. Here you may argue that an older person's present body is the same as the body he or she had as a child and as a youth, only now it is worn out. But such a view is based on an illusion. An organism is a "living thing", an organisation of living micro-individuals that we call organs, cells, molecules and atoms. With the exception of the organs, the cycles of these micro-individuals have such a rapid pace that their physical existence is of far shorter duration than that of the macrobeing. These beings are therefore continuously replaced in the organism of the macrobeing. Every minute there are cells and atoms that are born and die in our organism, so our organism actually undergoes a continuous process of transformation, and in the course of only a few months is almost totally renewed. So it is not an insignificant number of bodies an older person has already left behind. Every renewal must be perceived as a new body. But you do not notice these reincarnations or rebirths very much since, behind these transformations, you carry on a continuous, uninterrupted experience of life. The replacement takes place gradually and in such a gentle and harmonious way that it does not normally disturb or interrupt the experience of life. But if one imagines that the replacement of all these microbeings were to occur at the same time, the organism would have to die and an entirely new organism would have to replace it. A kind of death process would then have to take place between these replacements. The body we have as a child would then be unchangeable until that moment when we were mature enough to take possession of the body we have in youth, and the concept of "growing", in the sense in which we now know it, would be unknown to us. The replacement that could not take place gradually must then take place suddenly. We would have to fall into a kind of sleep or dormant state, and during this sleep the new body, which should bear our youth-consciousness, must grow quickly and the child-body must just as quickly shrivel up and be discarded in favour of the new. We would then wake up in a new body and use it for a period until a new replacement could occur.
      There are in fact beings in this physical world who experience their renewal of life according to this principle, namely various insects who go through the caterpillar, chrysalis and butterfly stages. These beings must experience a kind of death process between each of the stages within each separate terrestrial life. Imagine if we had to go through the same! One fine day we would be overwhelmed by an intense desire to sleep deeply, and the body by which our relatives and friends were used to identifying us would shrivel up and wither, and a new body would grow in its place. Day-consciousness would therefore be able to manifest itself again, and we would wake up in a new, beautiful body that no one would recognise as "us". Indeed, we could even participate in the burial of our recently discarded body. For some people all this will sound comical, for others perhaps alarming, but there are, however, beings in the universe, and even on this planet, that experience the physical renewal of life according to such a principle.