There are three references that anyone who has a curiosity about how the soul comes to the material world should get familiar with. The first one is the letter Srila Prabhupada wrote in 1972 to Madhudvisa Prabhu, answering questions from Australian devotees about the origin of the soul. The second is a class Prabhupada gave in Tokyo on April 23, 1972, and the third is a series of purports on the fourth canto of Srimad Bhagavatam, chapter 28, where is narrated how King Purañjana became a woman in his next life.
Most of the time, Prabhupada avoided touching this subject, arguing that it’s not important to understand how one fell into the ocean, the important is to find how to get out of it. However, if one is curious, these are the three references where Prabhupada directly tries to explain this topic.
A point that is interesting to notice is that Prabhupada gives a consistent explanation in all three references, one of which being a letter, one a lecture, and the third part of his purports on the Srimad Bhagavatam. This defeats the theory that Prabhupada was giving different explanations according to the time and audience.
Many of us face difficulties in controlling our mental and physical urges. For some it may be sexual libido, for others, it may be attraction to different types of substances, for others, it may be junk food, or spending too much time on social networks or watching useless content. We may also have difficulties in keeping the mind focussed when we are chanting, and doing other things we understand are positive but that requires some self-control we unfortunately seem to lack.
All of these problems have the same origin: the mind desires different things and we struggle to control these urges.
Srila Prabhupada explains that any physical or mental urge goes away if we tolerate it long enough. According to him, even hunger can be controlled by this process, what to say about other things. It may sound simplistic at first, but this approach is something that has beem used quite effectively in modern psychology to treat addictions
Days ago I received an interesting question: Do souls ever come back to Earth after attaining liberation? It’s actually a little harder than it may seem at first.
In the Bhagavad-Gita (8.21) Krsna says, “That supreme abode is called unmanifested and infallible, and it is the supreme destination. When one goes there, he never comes back.”
When the soul attains his original position as an eternal servant of Krsna in one of the spiritual planets, there is no coming back. However, there are many other possibilities that can distract us, and when we go for any of those, we return. There are different types of liberation, but only one results in a permanent situation from which we never have to come back.
Most of us are not yet pure devotees, therefore we need good association to progress in our spiritual life. If we live in the middle of a congested city with the closest devotees living more than an hour away, the opportunities for us to associate will be limited. As a result, we will spend most of our time associating with materialistic people and as a consequence, our spiritual progress may not be as swift as desired. This is an even more serious problem for the ones who have children since children need friends to play with. Devotee communities are therefore very important for our spiritual progress.
However, anyone who ever tried will attest that building successful communities is not easy. Devotees may work well together when they see each other only on the Sunday festivals, but as soon as people come closer the problems increase exponentially.
We may think that this is a problem specific to devotees, but the truth is that nowadays most people can’t be part of any type of community. Big cities are very impersonal spaces, where everyone tries his best to isolate themselves from others. Physically people live very close, but in reality, they are very distant. People can live in a building without ever talking to any of the neighbors. Unexpectedly, such environments can be very unfavorable for our spiritual practice.
How to deal with it? How to grow in spiritual lives even while living far away from other devotees and spending most of our time working in unhealthy environments and associating with materialistic people, without any realistic possibility of getting out of it?
We all go through ups and downs in life. Often we feel we are fine, and that the material world is not such a bad place, but at other times we can suffer quite a lot. When suffering becomes too acute one can even go into depression or simply lose his will to live. In such cases, the deterioration in mental health can lead also to a deterioration in physical health, creating yet another cascading set of problems. How to escape this cycle?
One thing that I learned is that often the best way to help ourselves is to help others because when we help others our attention becomes fixed on them instead of on our own problems. The more we concentrate on our difficulties, the more these difficulties feel real and, interesting enough, the less we concentrate on them, the smaller they become.
All kinds of material suffering are described in the scriptures as illusory. There are two reasons for it to be described like that. The first reason is that they are temporary, coming and going just like the seasons of the year. Now we may be suffering, and a little later we may be enjoying just to suffer again later on. This is an unavoidable cycle as long as we are in this material world. Everyone here spends so much energy trying to reach a comfortable situation, but we all know it’s not easy, if at all possible, and, even if we reach such a situation, it doesn’t last very long.
In the 6th canto of Srimad Bhagavatam, we find the story of how Diti tried to manipulate her husband Kasyapa Muni with the goal of killing Indra, whom she blamed for the death of her sons Hiranyaksha and Hiranyakashipu. By serving her husband on all his needs and artificially behaving in an attractive way, with exaggerated feminine movements and so on, she got him under control. When Kasyapa Muni, feeling obliged, promised to give her a benediction, she immediately asked for a son who could kill Indra. On hearing such a request, he understood that he had been played upon and lamented:
“Alas, I have now become too attached to material enjoyment. Taking advantage of this, my mind has been attracted by the illusory energy of the Supreme Personality of Godhead in the form of a woman [my wife]. Therefore I am surely a wretched person who will glide down toward hell. This woman, my wife, has adopted a means that follows her nature, and therefore she is not to be blamed. But I am a man. Therefore, all condemnation upon me! I am not at all conversant with what is good for me, since I could not control my senses. A woman’s face is as attractive and beautiful as a blossoming lotus flower during autumn. Her words are very sweet, and they give pleasure to the ear, but if we study a woman’s heart, we can understand it to be extremely sharp, like the blade of a razor. In these circumstances, who could understand the dealings of a woman? To satisfy their own interests, women deal with men as if the men were most dear to them, but no one is actually dear to them. Women are supposed to be very saintly, but for their own interests they can kill even their husbands, sons or brothers, or cause them to be killed by others.” (SB 6.18.40)
Both the verses and the purports of this passage contain some quite heavy words about the negative qualities of women. It’s said that women are self-interested by nature, that their natural instinct is to enjoy the material world, and so on. It’s also described that they can become real traps for men, by using their attractive features to seduce and use them for their own purposes, just like Diti did with Kasyapa Muni.
Of course, the opposite could also be described, since men also exploit women and use them for their own devices. This is unfortunately the nature of this material world: people exploiting and being exploited by others.
In his purports, however, Srila Prabhupada gives a higher perspective. As in other passages of Srimad Bhagavatam, this story is used to convey a higher message.
Most of us have quite challenging lives in terms of the demands of work, family, and so on.
In the past, middle-class people used to be able to sustain their families with just an 8/5 job. They would go out in the morning, return in the afternoon, and be free on weekends. The wives would generally not have to work and thus would have time to care for the children and the house. One could maintain a family and still have time to collect his thoughts.
Nowadays, however, things are much harder. Most well-paid jobs are quite demanding, and often both the husband and wife must work to maintain a family. This leads to a very chaotic situation, where they have to run around continuously trying to somehow balance the demands of work, caring for the children, maintaining their relationship, practicing spiritual life, maintaining their health, and so on. Due to pressure, usually one or more of these factors end up being neglected, often with disastrous results.
This is a cycle that is very difficult to avoid since modern life creates insurmountable demands, which force us to work like hamsters on the wheel just to maintain the status quo. Modern life makes us unhappy, and then offers the solution in the form of more products and services. To obtain these things, however, we need more money, which in turn forces us to work more, making us even more miserable, which in turn forces us to find quick fixes in the form of more products and services.
Srila Prabhupada was able to masterfully identify this propensity more than 50 years ago when society was still much earlier in this cycle. He also proposed a solution, that although radical is still the only one that seems to really, work: simple living high thinking.
One of the problems of the material world, especially in current society, is that people can’t be completely honest with each other. Honest and good-natured people are frequently cheated by others, and thus even the best people need to learn to build their defenses to be able to live in this world.
When we come to Krsna Consciousness we frequently lower our guard, thinking that all devotees are saints. Many indeed are, but unfortunately not all of them. There are many materialistic people who pose as devotees, and these can be quite dangerous. There are also devotees who are quite sincere, but not yet at a level where they can break with their negative materialistic tendencies, and thus can still be propense to cheat others.
In the Sri Isopanisad, Srila Prabhupada explains that a conditioned soul has four defects: the tendency to commit mistakes, the propensity of being in illusion, imperfect senses and intelligence, and the propensity to cheat others. We are all trying to get rid of such defects, but unfortunately, they follow us quite far in spiritual life.
In the 1930s, Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura wrote an article entitled “Putana”, in which he criticizes organized religion, comparing it to Kamsa in his efforts to bring people away from Krsna. At first, one could understand that this article condemns all kinds of organized religion, supporting some kind of spiritual anarchism, but an attentive look reveals that this is not the case, especially considering that Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura himself created an institution, in the form of the Gaudiya Math, and instructed his disciples to maintain it. So, what is it about?
In the article, he mentions that “King Kamsa, the typical aggressive empiricist, is ever on the lookout for the appearance of the truth for the purpose of suppressing Him before He has time to develop. This is no exaggeration of the real connotation of the consistent empiric position. The materialist has a natural repugnance for the transcendent. He is disposed to link that faith in the incomprehensible is the parent of dogmatism and hypocrisy in the guise of religion.”
In this analogy, Kamsa is compared to the inveterate materialist, who may create and profess some mundane religion while at the same time rejecting all genuine transcendental processes under the excuse of using logic and science. In this way, he professes a form of religion that actually keeps people bound to the material by the use of dogmas, rituals, and hypocrisy.
We can see that many popular religions in the world fit into this description, using some sacred scripture and professing in the name of some revered spiritual teacher, but at the same time offering a process based on dogmas and rituals that keep people firmly rooted into their materialism, distracting them from real spiritual processes.
In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krsna says: “Abandon all varieties of religion and just surrender unto Me. I shall deliver you from all sinful reactions. Do not fear.” That’s usually the verse everyone remembers, possibly because it’s one of the last verses in the Bhagavad-Gita. However, we often fail to try to understand what it really means, and as a result, we often misapply it, which can lead to serious problems in our spiritual lives.
The first problem is when we try to surrender to Krsna without really understanding what it means. Krsna says to Arjuna to surrender unto Him at the end of the Bhagavad-Gita, after making sure he understood the whole text. During the Bhagavad-Gita Krsna explains many topics, such as Karma-yoga, how to become free from the three modes of material nature, how to see Krsna everywhere, how to gradually control our minds and senses, how to gradually become detached while performing our material duties, and so on. Surrendering to Krsna means understanding and following these instructions, which is impossible to do if we don’t study the whole text thoroughly. This leads us to the second problem.
Often people who may not have a completely mature understanding of spiritual life use the verse to press others to agree with whatever understanding they have of the spiritual process. In this case, his followers may not exactly be surrendering to Krsna, but surrendering to him as a leader and to whatever ideas he has about spiritual life. There are many who teach adulterated versions of the philosophy and tell their followers to not trust anyone apart from them.
