Things ought to run even more smoothly if they also were to decree that there shall be no birth, death, disease and old age...

The Decree that Cannot Be

For the Chinese, 60 years has a special significance. Traditionally, birthdays are not celebrated until the 60th year, when there is a grand celebration of the person's longevity and lifetime of accomplishments, be they however humble or great. So the 60th year of Communist Rule is a big affair, a once-in-a-lifetime celebration. The Chinese especially like to commemorate such special occasions with weddings, and authorities at registration bureaus around the country anticipate that there will be a record number of couples getting married during the 60th year celebrations. So as not to overload the system, and to accommodate the registrations, they have decreed there shall be no divorces for the holiday period.

Things ought to run even more smoothly if they were also to decree that there shall be no birth, death, disease and old age, but alas, these things are outside the mandate of kali-yuga governments, who unlike wiser governments of Vedic times, take no responsibility for the real well-being of the people.

Secular government does not mean a "hands-off" government — as people under both Communist and Democratic rule have experienced. It simply means in these days, the government will disregard religious principles, the foremost being that it is government's duty to safeguard every citizen's best interest, which is his or her spiritual development. Rather, the governments and those who hold the government purse strings enslave the people to endeavor for so-called economic progress, and so they march in lockstep, slogging day and night for practically all the days of their life until they breathe their last, and miss out on the real purpose of human life, which is to realize "I am not this body, but spirit soul" and that "I'm working so hard to maintain this body and its extensions, all for nothing, because at the the time of death, I have to leave this body and everything else behind" and to ask, "I have nothing to do with this body, so what have birth, death, disease and old age to do with me?"

So the registration bureaus may not record any divorces during the festivities, but in ignorance, people are divorced from the reality that they suffer needlessly from repeated birth and death.

Government cannot or will not save us from this predicament, though it may try to hide it from us, just as the Buddha's father tried to prevent him from taking notice of the facts of birth, death, disease and old age. But the Buddha's eyes were opened to it, and he endeavored to make a solution, to transcend it. In the Vedas it is said that the one who opens the eyes of knowledge is the spiritual master.

om ajñana-timirandhasya
jñanañjana-shalakaya
cakshur unmilitam yena
tasmai shri-gurave namah

"I offer my respectful obeisances unto my spiritual master, who with the torchlight of knowledge has opened my eyes, which were blinded by the darkness of ignorance." (Gautamiya Tantra)

Forty-four years ago, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada came out from the East to bring the vast spiritual knowledge of the Vedas to the Western world, and he has left behind a literary legacy of inestimable value. His books have been translated into the world's major languages — books like the timeless Bhagavad-gita As It Is and Srimad-Bhagavatam.

Now whereas the Buddha eschewed worldy affairs altogether, the Vedas and the Vaishnava Acharyas do not; they look at everything in context of the arrangement and divine will of the Supreme Lord, with a view to helping eradicate suffering in this world. If the world's leaders were to study the books of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami and implement their ideas, human society the world over could advance to the pinnacle of civilization and attain real prosperity.

For instance, the Communist idealogy espouses fair and equal prospects for all the citizens as a community, and the Democratic ideology espouses the rights of its people to self-determination, and while each has its merits, they are in themselves incomplete, and fall way short in practice. The Bhagavad-gita, on the other hand, promotes the organization of society according to different cooperative divisions of occupation and stages of life. This system is called daivi-varnashram or varnashram dharma. The idea is that everyone is suited to a particular type of work or occupation, by nature (not by birth). A society composed of different components all working according to design functions on a much higher level than one whose components are thrown together helter-skelter without consideration how they are made to work. But this is only one part of the equation; the other part being that there are different stages in life through which everyone progresses, with the aim being to gradually disengage from material life and advance to spiritual self-realization. This is the Bhagavad-gita's version of an ideal, enlightened human civilization.

In these times, government leaders are firstmost concerned with their own so-called self interests, and so ideologies fail, but intelligent persons who hear from the spiritual master can have their eyes opened, and for them, the four scourges of material existence — namely, birth, death, disease and old age — will cease to be.