So human life should be for determining where I am going when I finish this life. When this body is finished, am I going to take another body because I have so many plans and desires which I could not fulfill in this body? Or am I going to be liberated and not accept another body to repeat the struggle of existence?

End of a Lifetime of Unfinished Work

Re-introducing the process of self-realization

HANSADUTTA: People are working hard to get some food, get a place to sleep and somehow or other live. But they won't live. No one will live. I will not live, you will not live. All of us will die. So the real engagement is before death to realize perfectly what I am, so that when we leave this body we aren't going to accept another body and again struggle to exist. After all, in material life there is no profit whatsoever. It is simply a struggle, with the end result that I will have to die. I will die, my wife will die, and my children will die. So this is the fact. Everyone will die. The President will die, my dog will die.

This material existence is temporary. It is unnatural. Our natural life is spiritual life, eternal life. But without knowing this, we are trying to find happiness in this temporary life. But there's no happiness at all. There is only struggling for existence. A person should understand, "Actually, I'm just struggling, I'm not making any progress, I'm getting older, my wife is getting older, my children are getting older, I will become diseased and die. So what is the profit? What is the purpose of struggling like this?"

GUEST: Serving people.

HANSADUTTA: Yes, you may serve them, but nevertheless your service is not effective either, because every living creature is destined to suffer and to enjoy according to his own actions, not only in this life, but in a previous life, because life is eternal. Life is not just a spot; it's permanent, continuous. So we may have very good wishes for someone in trouble, but if he's destined to go through that trouble, your good work and good wishes are to no effect. We see it everywhere. You give a man good advice, but he doesn't accept it, and instead he does the inevitable and falls into danger. Why? Because he was destined to do so. Or you give a man some money, hoping to help him out, but he squanders it or loses it, or he becomes an ingrate and never acknowledges it, so you suffer.

At every turn we are frustrated, and bewildered by material activities. The Srimad-Bhagavatam says that when there are many friends swimming together in the ocean, none of them can help one another. Everyone has to swim alone. The conclusion is that no one can help anyone. Everyone has his individual destiny. We might like to think we can do something good for humanity or a fellow human being, but in fact there is no real result. Another example... travelers come together at an inn. They sit down and have meals together, talk and enjoy each other's company, and then when they are finished, they go their separate ways, and the relationship is broken. Similarly, the conditioned souls come together as family members, community members, countrymen, friends, and associate in that way for some time, but then they go their separate ways. Actually, there is no real relationship. They are related only in terms of the material body, which is temporary. Children will leave home, or the wife will find another man and leave her husband, or the man will go with another woman. In this way we are constantly being brought together and separated unwillingly. At any rate, even if we stayed together, at the time of death everyone has to go his separate way.

So human life should be for determining where I am going when I finish this life. When this body is finished, am I going to take another body because I have so many plans and desires which I could not fulfill in this body? Or am I going to be liberated and not accept another body to repeat the struggle of existence? This is the pivotal point of our existence. This is really the basis for all activities. At the time of death, if the mind is thinking of the wife or children or who knows what, then his mind will carry him into the womb of another woman, where he develops another body just so that he can take up life where he left off in the last. That is the process of samsara, or the cycle of birth and death. Not that when we die everything will be finished. No. Everything goes on. Wherever you left off, you pick up and continue. Therefore, we should make ourselves always ready to go. The conditioned soul, a human being, should always be, in his mind, completely detached and ready to go, because at any moment he may go. Just like President Kennedy was not thinking that he would die in Dallas on that day, but he did, in an instant. No one knows when death will take place, but it will in all certainty.

So therefore, to become self-realized is the most important thing. And automatically it brings everything else too. Krishna provides. Krishna takes care of the devotee. He provides food, shelter, protection, everything that we require. Krishna says in Bhagavad-gita, "I provide what they need, and I protect what they have." The whole of society should be trained in this—not just a few people in the woods. People should be trained systematically in self-realization in the schools. Then society will be peaceful. Now people are just like animals, thinking that enjoyment means to eat more, sleep more, have more sex and defend. They never think of self-realization. There is no such education. That is the root cause of all problems. There is no spiritual knowledge, spiritual goal; only a material goal.

Shankaracharya, a great Acharya from India, observed, "The children are all wasting time in play, youths are chasing young women, grownups are busy in household affairs, earning money, and old men are all lamenting because they have lost the power of their senses and they can't enjoy any longer and are not able to fulfill their plans. No one is interested in Krishna. Everyone is otherwise busy."

GUEST: So then what? I think everybody starts out interested and later forgets. You become conditioned and forget.

HANSADUTTA: That's also a fact. Sometimes there is the beginning of endeavor, but then the person is overwhelmed by maya [the illusory attraction of the material energy], and he forgets all about it. He's not determined.

GUEST: The whole western culture seems to be set up that way, to keep you away from spiritual life or else corral you off to become a Catholic or Mormon or Protestant and keep it to Sundays, where it's respectable.

HANSADUTTA: Yes. Therefore a society has to be created where this is the aim, where the life style keeps this aim as the central point.

The important thing is that the process is standard. People are trying to create their own methods, and that won't work either. The whole culture of knowledge for the human being is already there, and if it's not followed, then we manufacture capitalism, communism, socialism, hippyism. Of course no one can be satisfied with a godless civilization, but without positive knowledge what to do, a positive alternative, they have created or expanded the state of ignorance. Society is in ignorance. There are rules and regulations, which have been given for living in the material world in happiness and success, but no one is following those rules and regulations. Everyone is inventing his own. Just like learning to play the piano. There is a system for learning. You just have to follow the instructions. Similarly, if we want to realize God, we have to follow the standard process. Everything is like that. If we want to go to San Francisco, there is a standard route. We don't have to make a new road; just follow the already existing route. So this is Krishna consciousness. This movement is re-introducing the standard process of self-realization, which everyone can follow step by step, very easily.