What makes human life a special boon? Bhagawan lovingly reminds us with memorable and powerful examples. Animals like cattle and birds cannot change the qualities which they acquire with their birth. The lion, for instance, is born as a cruel animal. It lives and dies as a cruel animal. The cat is born with the quality of trapping the rats and of killing them. It lives with these qualities. Try as they may, these animals cannot change their bad and cruel qualities. You can make a cat sit on the chair and give it satwik food like milk, curd and so on, in an attempt to convert the cat, but the moment it sees a rat, it jumps to kill the rat. Thus, the animal, which is born with cruel qualities, cannot change in spite of our best efforts. However, man is not like that. Man may be born with cruel qualities; but such a person, by contact with good people, by living with good people, in a good environment, can change his qualities. It is in this context that it has been said that of all the living things that are born of a mother’s womb, to have a human birth is the most difficult thing.