For All Humanity

This vibration is not just meant for boys with shaved heads and girls who wear saris. It is meant for all humanity. Everyone is looking for an object which will make him eternally happy, eternally satisfied. But that object can nowhere be found in the temporary material world. To satisfy ourselves, therefore, we must go beyond the limiting range of material phenomena and try to connect with the Absolute Truth, the Personality of Godhead Sri Krsna, who is the eternal reservoir of bliss and knowledge. That connection is made by chanting the maha-mantra, Hare Krsna. One must become convinced that there is no happiness anywhere in the material world. A person may say that he is happy, but what has he actually accomplished? We must say, "My dear sir, now you say that you have been very successful in life. You've raised a nice family, you've had a nice job, you've had nice sex life, you've had nice food on your plate and a nice roof over your head, and you've also done some charity work. Now just tell us who you are and where you are going at the time of your death." A person in material consciousness cannot answer this question. Because he has not cultured spiritual knowledge, such a person is forced by the laws of nature to fall back into the samsaric existence of birth and death.

The Krsna consciousness movement is meant for culturing spiritual knowledge in order to become qualified for release from the bondage of the material world-to go back to Godhead, back home, back to the spiritual realm. Sri Īsopanisad states:

One may be content to think, "What am I going to eat now? Where am I going to sleep? How will I defend myself in case of difficulty?" But what a waste of consciousness that is. Our materialistic society has simply increased the quality of our eating, sleeping, mating and defending. Thus it has increased the fire of our material consciousness, which always burns with the desire to enjoy illusion. Nayam deho deha-bhajam nrloke. "In this human form of life, the body is not meant for sense gratification like the animals." All animals also eat, sleep, mate and defend, and to use our human intellect simply to increase the quality of these functions is no credit to human consciousness. Human life is meant for controlling sense gratification in order to move on to spiritual realization.

So the more we increase the degree of our sense gratification, the less we advance in spiritual progress. This does not mean that in snowy winter weather one should wear leaves. Srila Bhaktivinode Thakur, a great Vaisnava acarya, once said, "Man's glory is in common sense." So the idea is to keep material sense gratification to the minimum and be satisfied with only the bare necessities for bodily maintenance.

Life's desires must not be directed towards sense gratification. One should desire only for a healthy life or for self-preservation because the life of a human being is meant for inquiry into the Absolute Truth, and nothing more should be desired from one's occupational service. (Bhag. 1.2.10)

If one's mind is surcharged with material considerations regarding eating, sleeping, mating and defending-the animal propensities-then certainly one does not need the human form of life, which is meant for higher level activities. Therefore Krsna says, "sada tad-bhava-bhavitaḥ: A person gets his next life according to whatever he is absorbed in thinking." This lifetime is meant for qualifying ourselves for our next body. If we simply live like animals in suits and ties, then Krsna, seated as the Supersoul in everyone's heart, will understand our real desires, and in our next birth we may be born into a lower species of life and there continue our search for happiness in the material world. The worm in the stool is very content. He enjoys himself nicely eating stools. The dogs are happy hoarding their bones. But we are not worms or dogs. We have the human form of life, and we are meant to elevate our consciousness from the bodily concept of life to the ultimate stage of understanding fully the questions of spiritual life: "Who am I? Why am I here? How did I get here? Where am I going at the time of death?"