Snails’ marine cousins, limpets, have the strongest and hardest teeth on the planet. If you’re curious about this bizarre dental fact, read on …

For anyone who believes in karma, being a snail or returning as one is a conversation that’s worth having. Of course you can’t believe in karma without giving a deeply bowed head to reincarnation. Without that, well, the other simply cannot exist.

If in fact it does.

Many on this planet have no inclination whatsoever to even mildly consider the possibility of reincarnation. Not lightly, not slightly; not even in the way one might contemplate buying an 8-game auto pick in a $70 million lottery. Or whether there are clutters of huntsman spiders permanently living in your car that you never see.

The idea of living lives again and again until you don’t, was certainly a familiar and realistic concept to the western world’s first 20th century superstar guru, Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952). His life story, published in 1946, Autobiography of a Yogi proved an inspiration for many, including Norah Jones’ dad Ravi Shankar, musical mentor to George Harrison. He too, was a devotee.Yogananda told his followers that God could supply a third set of teeth,”We have a first and then a second set of teeth; why not a third?” Why not, indeed – and by 2030 no less.

According to biographer Walter Isaacson, American business magnate Steve Jobs first read the yogi’s autobiography as a teenager. It was the only book he ever downloaded, and he read it more than forty times. So profound an influence did it have on his life, he arranged for all 500 of his memorial attendees to receive a wooden box containing a copy of the book at the conclusion of the service.

Paramhansa (his preferred spelling) Yogananda maintained that prior to landing as a human are five-to-eight million times in other forms; and then another number-of-millions of lifetimes before the physical plane of existence ceases to be necessary. He emphasised the power of joy and how a positive outlook has a significant effect on wellbeing which of course includes oral health. Stress, anxiety, and negative emotions contribute to tooth decay and gum disease.

He probably still maintains all of these things in whichever form he presently takes.

Rumour has it however, that when he took his last breath at the Biltmore Hotel in LA, in doing so he achieved mahasamadhi – the conscious exit from the body only a yogi can do. It’s different to an out of body experience or astro travelling in that you don’t get to tell anyone about it since it’s a permanent state of (not) being. That being the case of actually continuing being, Paramhansa Yogananda will have attained the final state of liberation, and union with the divine.

You don’t come back for your hat and coat after that.

With all of this, it’s said that the soul is itself never born, it never dies, and it remains indefinitely in witness of itself. The whole thing is so endlessly confusing that at least working out that aspect is surely a huge chunk of enlightenment sorted.

What’s not sorted, is establishing the true number of languages Autobiography of a Yogi has been translated into which is variously reported 19, more than 33 and 50.

It adds to the mystery as a contemplation sidebar.

As to whether reincarnation as a snail is a gift or the short sharp shrift the awakened view would be that it’s both. Which is very likely exactly how the snail feels. Since many religions teach the interconnectedness of everything, gastropod empathy sits somewhere on a ladder that apparently belongs to Jacob. He’s happy to lend it (it’s in his DNA) and it’s well worth climbing.

Whichever rung identifying with a snail is placed can only be a determination far from the realms of mere mortals. Who’s to judge which life has more meaning, or makes the greater contribution to their earthly surrounds? The sole benchmark of ‘worthless’ versus ‘valuable’ separates species into questionable categories. Ostensibly they’re based on whether they’re cute enough to handle or have in your house, rather than how useful they are.

Every living thing on this planet has some purpose to serve. Thereby any subjective evaluation is largely without merit and mostly to jack up egos or property prices.

We ridicule how famously slow snails are, without any acknowledgment whatsoever that moving by rippling their muscular foot along a trail of slime, uses the most kinetic energy in the entire animal kingdom. That alone requires a level of dedication they have in even their small radius of activity that many of us don’t. Most snails spend their entire lives only metres from where they hatched. A physical necessity for them; a reason for psychoanalysis for us.

The gel surface they produce for motion changes according to conditions: sometimes it’s a lubricant, sometimes a glue. Top speed is about 20 metres an hour, and generally reached (unsurprisingly) when they’re looking to mate, and utilising another snail’s already laid trail. A slippery slipstream it seems.

Since they don’t go far, the chances of univalve union is pretty low and makes androgyny highly advantageous. Being able to take advantage of any member of the same species they may come in contact with that has the ability to reproduce is a gastropoda plus.

With few exceptions, snails are vegetarian. Contrary to the belief of most, the majority prefer decaying plant material to fresh. Some love eating algae and mould. Imperative to soil quality and structure, they shred and transform organic material via digestion, decomposition and combining their slime with dirt particles. Their high biomass also makes them an important food source for other animals.

Like all molluscs, snails have a radula – essentially a toothy tongue. Made of chitin (a polysaccharide in the form of a white, horny substance found on the exoskeleton of insects, crabs and lobsters) fourteen-to-twenty-thousand teeth are arranged in rows on a chitinous ribbon. It’s a mechanism that rasps food particles from underneath, which you can feel it if you let a snail move over your hand.

Don’t be so freaked – some people put them on their faces. There’s a normalisation of snail slime as an age-defying remedy from a cheap and supposedly unlovable source. By 2034, the value of the snail beauty product market has been projected as $US3.4 billion. Slime is a stress response, and collection methods are inherently cruel, despite industry assurances.

Every animal production trade has them. Snails feel stress, fear and pain. The popularity of their mucin means they’re used and abused in their multiple millions because apparently looking your age is a much more deplorable thing.

As a by-product, chitin is a wound-healing agent, a stabiliser and thickener for foods and pharmaceuticals, a flocculating agent for waste water, an ion-exchanging resin, a membrane for electrodialysis and chromatography, a binder for dyes and adhesives, and a sizing agent for textiles and paper.

Comparatively, we humans contribute so much less to the wellbeing of the planet, both practically and adaptively. Therein lies the lesson of assumed superiority. Not only are they more resourceful and more resilient, even snails’ teeth are harder than ours. By three times.

And just as diamond had for so long been considered the overall strongest material on Earth until man-made nano-materials beat it, snails’ marine cousins, limpets, have the hardest and strongest teeth on the planet. Made of a matrix of protein and iron-containing crystal nanofibres (goethite) their radula can grind rock as they feed. It’s a material that on average is about five times stronger than spider silk and quite amazingly, can withstand pressure that would turn carbon to diamond.

It’s the equivalent of a single strand of uncooked spaghetti having 1500 one-kilo bags of sugar balanced on it.

So no more bragging about dental enamel reigning supreme. And don’t chuck snails from your garden over the fence, or tread on them with some misguided sense of satisfaction. The snail karma question hasn’t exactly been dealt with. The snail having taught humans that with a smooth tongue, one can cross over thorns is a proverb of one of Africa’s largest ethnic groups, the Igbo people, emphasising the merit of kindness and good wit when navigating challenges and tough times.

Until you’re constantly cleaning up waste and regenerating soil with an indiscernible carbon footprint, the question of most valuable and viable between mollusc and man remains a worthy debate. In Buddhism snails symbolise sacrifice and compassion. We’d do well to take on some of that.

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