krishna lounge

None of us can wholeheartedly trust in and surrender to the body, because we know, beneath the bluff and the bravado, that our bodies are frail and weak and dying and that the greatest pleasure it gives us it heartbreakingly brief. We find ourselves bound within a complexity of muscle and vein that nature can dismantle at any moment, in any of thousands of horrible ways. Our strength and beauty leak away in daily increments. Our body disintegrates before our eyes and becomes itself a major source of our suffering, and then we die.

Therefore, no one can help but be horrified by his body (even though the mind must repress those feelings in self- defense). This horror is not an artificial hate or fear imposed by some life-denying religion. It is only a sensible reaction to a correct perception.

Our position is intrinsically divided. We are not whole. We are endowed with a developed consciousness that makes our incarceration in bodies like those of animals agonizing for us. We can imagine, abstract, generalize, range far beyond the narrow limits of local place and time. Our minds continually search for the first principles behind all things, for the one that underlies the many, for the permanent that persists through all change, for the eternal beyond the temporal. Meanwhile we struggle fitfully in a dying body. Our spirits reach for the infinite; our molars rot.

The consciousness that gives us such strong intimations of immortality also forces us to be acutely aware of our helplessness before nature, our fragility before the huge weight of the universe, and the constant threat of death under which we live. Even a small child draws the connection between the bleeding cut on his finger and the animals he sees exploded in gore upon the roadside.

All the same, we are possessed by an unremitting desire for pleasure, by the conviction that happiness is our right. This conflicts with the reality of our condition. Therefore, the mind represses with great power our perception of reality and our horror at our situation. Any person will verbally admit to you that he knows he is going to die, but the admission rings curiously hollow. It is as if he were talking about someone else. At heart, he refuses to believe it. This is how he lives a “happy” life-at least for a time.

We should recognize that most of human culture is a complicity to sustain our vital delusion, a skillful artifice to keep ourselves unconscious. We erect and vie for artificial or symbolic goals so that we can prove to ourselves our strength and power, our endurance and invulnerability; we have thousands of ways of patting ourselves and each other on the back. But of course, nature grinds relentlessly on and pays no heed to our fine and tender feelings, our banners and our flags, our list of conquests and victories. While we keep ourselves resolutely preoccupied and distracted, absorbed in our illusory enterprises, death comes, to our great surprise.

We dismiss death from our minds to be happy, but it doesn’t really work. On the contrary, since in this world life and death are bound tightly together, to retreat from death is to retreat from life. One cannot become selectively unconscious.

This explains the loss of that pristine and glorious vision of the world we knew as a child, a loss poets ceaselessly lament. Somehow we fall from grace, and thereafter we experience life with a deadened spirit and narrowed consciousness, a diminished capacity for feeling. Adulthood fully initiates us into the established system of illusions, into a life of intense effort toward makeshift goals whose real purpose is to keep us from thought. Such a life is necessarily thin, grey, tasteless, and it has an undercurrent of constant, nagging despair, for which most societies provide some sort of anesthetic—intoxicants, television, or the like. All the while, the wonder and splendor of the edenic world of our childhood lies shining all about us, but we have turned away from it in fear, for we have learned that it is a place of death.

The spiritual sky is not a concept but a fact. In the Bhagavad Gita this sky is described as self-illuminated. Every atom of that sky is alive and conscious. It is different from heavens. There are planets in this material world called Upper or Heavenly planets. These are located in the material world. Beyond the material sky there is a spiritual sky. Sky, or space, is extended more than scientists would have us believe. That is because their instruments are faulty and limited. You can experience spiritual sky, just as you can now perceive the blue vault over this planet. It simply requires finding out how to do so.

Mike Robinson: Can you tell me what you believe—what is the philosophy of the Hare Krishna movement?

Srila Prabhupada: Krishna consciousness is not a question of belief; it is a science. The first step is to know the difference between a living body and a dead body. When someone dies, the spirit soul, or the living force, leaves the body. Therefore the body is called “dead.” There are two things: one–this body; and the other–the living force within the body. We are speaking of the living force within the body. That is the difference between the science of Krishna consciousness, which is spiritual, and ordinary material science. In the beginning it is very difficult, for an ordinary man, to appreciate our movement. One must first understand that he is a soul, or something other than his body.

Mike Robinson: And when will we understand that?

Srila Prabhupada: You can understand at any moment, but it requires a little intelligence. For example, as a child grows, he becomes a boy, the boy becomes a young man, the young man becomes an adult, and the adult becomes an old man. Although his body is changing from a child to an old man, he still feels himself to be the same person, with the same identity. Just see: the body is changing, but the occupier of the body, the soul, is remaining the same. So we should logically conclude that when our present body dies, we get another body. This is called transmigration of the soul.

Student: Everything man creates…
Prabhupada: And why does he die? Who has created death? Man creates everything, but who has created your death, Mr. Man? What is the answer?
Student: Well, man has not created death.
Prabhupada: That means somebody else did. So how you can say that man has created everything?
Suppose man has created this building. Where from the ingredients came? Is this stone, creation of a man?
Student: No.
Prabhupada: Then, you have done the work of a laborer. You have taken ingredients from God, worked hard and transformed it. Has man created these trees? Why do they claim man has created everything?
Student: But they will say that they made the garden.
Prabhupada: That is the business of a gardener—servant–not the creator. I can keep a gardener, servant, telling him: “Do like this, do like that.” The servant is not the creator. It is my money with which he has created. Therefore, everything is Krishna’s. That is Krishna consciousness. You have not created anything. You are a servant. You are working, and Krishna is giving you your subsistence.

June 12. 1974