Repentant Prayer

The child in the womb, praying out of bewilderment and repentance, realizes he is not independent or supreme. He seeks shelter from the Supreme Lord, perceiving that the Lord in his heart is the supreme master and that he is subordinate. By the grace of God, the child in the womb can understand his actual relationship with the Supreme Lord, and he realizes that he has been reduced to his abominable condition because of his forgetfulness of God. He wants to get out, but he understands that he can do so only by the mercy of the Supreme Lord, and thus he asks for the Lord's blessings.

After nine months, however, the child in the womb makes an extraordinary request to the Lord: "Although I am living in a terrible condition, still I do not wish to depart from my mother's abdomen to fall again into the blind well of materialistic life." The child foresees that the trauma of birth will destroy his clear knowledge of the miseries of material life and his remembrance of Lord Krsna. If he forgets the ordeal in the womb and again assumes the false position of an enjoyer, it would be better for him never to be born. Although bitten and burned and surrounded by blood and urine, at least in the womb he is able to remember Krsna. The thought of his future miseries makes him reluctant to take birth, but of course he cannot possibly live in the womb much longer. While he thus extols the Lord, the wind that helps parturition propels him forth with his face turned downward. Pushed down suddenly by the wind, the child comes out with great trouble, breathless and deprived of his memory due to severe agony. He cries piteously, having lost his superior knowledge in the ordeal of birth.

We should not take lightly this account of life in the womb. One may say, "I cannot remember such pain in the womb. I am not suffering now, so why worry? Besides, I don't care." According to this way of thinking, ignorance is bliss. But it is only a temporary illusion of bliss. Although we now have no idea of the suffering in the womb, by reading such scriptures as the Srimad-Bhagavatam and the Bhagavad-gita, we can understand the terrible condition there and learn how to act in such a way that we will not suffer again. We learn from the Bhagavad-gita that, as individual souls, we are never created, but are eternal, fragmental parts of the Supreme Lord. By misusing our small independence, we desire to be supreme and are thus cast into the material world. Then we wander, according to our material desires, from body to body in each of the different species, until we finally evolve to the human form of life. All this happens under the supervision of the Supreme Lord. As Sri Krsna states in the Bhagavad-gita (18.61), "I am seated in everyone's heart, and I direct the wanderings of all living beings." If, upon reaching the human form of life, we do not utilize the opportunity for self-realization, we will again be forced to enter a womb and undergo repeated tortures there. We should therefore thoughtfully reflect, "What can we do to avoid such miseries?"