The Eternal

This spiritual art and science of devotional service is the great contribution of the Indian sages to the rest of the world. Everyone, therefore, who has taken his birth in India has an obligation to make his life perfect by adopting the principles of this great art and science, and then to distribute this to the rest of the world, to offer mankind the ultimate aim of life.

Human society is destined to reach this stage of perfection by the gradual development of knowledge. Many Indian sages have already reached this position, while other men still have to tread on the path for many more thousands of years. It is this writer's hope that the true sages of India today will make a serious and sustained effort to give the world this sublime information immediately, in a systematic way, so that they may not only save humanity's time and energy for this progress of life, but also so that all men may immediately take advantage of this human form of life-a form which they may well obtain again only through the labor of millions of years.

Many writers of philosophy and even of fiction advocate the concept of the eternal life of man. They contribute various literary suggestions to the rest of the world indicating that scientific progress can help man to live forever. But they do not generally believe in the concept of a Supreme Being as the Creator. We welcome the suggestions of such writers because we know that any actual progress in scientific knowledge will certainly take man to the spiritual sky, and that the advancement of knowledge will ultimately inform the scientist that the Supreme Creator exists, full with inconceivable potencies that lie beyond the calculation of material science.

As suggested hereinbefore, although every living being is eternal in form, one has to periodically change his outer coverings of gross and subtle matter. This changing process is technically known as life and death. So long as a living being has to wear the shackles of material bondage there is no relief from this changing process, which continues even at the highest stage of material life.

Our fiction writers may go on with their imaginings, as fiction writers are apt to do, but the saner section of the people, in studying natural law, will not agree that man can live forever within this material world.

A naturalist can observe the overall action of material Nature by simply studying fruit on a tree. A small fruit develops from a flower, and it continues to develop more and more. It stays for some time and then it becomes full grown and ripe. After the ripe stage it begins to dwindle day by day, and on some day it falls down from the tree to the earth and begins its decomposition. And at last it becomes dust, leaving behind its seed, which again springs up to become a tree and produces many, many fruits which in due course meet the same fate already described.

Similarly, a living being (the spiritual spark which is part and parcel of the Supreme Being) takes its organic form in the womb of the mother just after sexual intercourse. It grows little by little within the womb, and afterwards outside the womb, gradually becoming a child, a boy, a youth, an adult and so on. In old age a man begins to dwindle, and at a certain period he falls down in the grip of cruel death in spite of all the good wishes and desires of all sections of humanity, fiction writers included. So, by comparison, there is no difference between the two organic bodies-namely, the man and the fruit. As such the man may leave behind him seeds in the form of numerous children, but by Nature he cannot exist permanently within the material body.

How can our writers ignore the law of material Nature? No material scientist can change the stringent rules of Nature, however boastful he may be. No astronomer can change the course of the planets, although he can manufacture a toy planet under the name and style of Apollo. Foolish children may give much credit to the flying of a modern space capsule, but the saner section of the people will give more credit to the Creator of the truly gigantic "capsules"-namely, the stars and planets. If a small playful capsule has a creator in Russia or the West, why should the Creator of these gigantic capsules not exist in the spiritual sky? If a toy spaceship requires the assistance of so many scientific brains, why should we not believe in the existence of a more perfect and subtle brain which has created the gigantic spaceships? So far we have received no good answer from the nonbelieving class of men with their poor fund of knowledge about this suggestion of the Supreme Creator.

These unbelieving men put forward their theories of the Creation with so many doubtful wordings, some of which are as follows: "It is hard to understand … Our imagination cannot conceive of it … But it is quite possible that … " etc., which shows that the ideas put forward by such men are not based on authorized and scientific data. They are simply hypotheses resulting from imperfect induction.

But we can give an authorized account from The Bhagavad-gita of how, within this material world, there are living beings who possess a duration of life covering 1,000 x 4,300,000 x 12 x 2 x 30 x 100 solar years of our calculation. We call The Bhagavad-gita authorized because this book of knowledge has been widely accepted by India's great sages even in modern times, and by many of the greatest spiritual personalities, such as Sri Shankaracharya, Sri Ramanujacharya, Sri Madhyacharya, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and so on.