Hope Against Hope

Such do-gooders and planning commissions are surely bound by hundreds and thousands of thoughts produced by insatiable lust. When their lust is not fulfilled to their satisfaction, they become possessed by anger, insanity, violence, loss of intelligence, and finally they threaten to destroy everything with monstrous bombs. These different atheistic groups all have various plans in mind, and these plans are exhibited in different patterns of godlessness. One atheistic nation thinks in a different way from another atheistic nation, and the unseen hand of the daiva causes their circles to overlap and makes them clash. None of these groups function beyond the range of direct perception of the material senses. None of them function according to the guidelines of spiritual knowledge. The mass of people themselves are unable to see things in their true perspective, and under various political arrangements they are made to follow blind leaders who present them with multi-colored ideals which are sure to fail in the long run. In this way the populace is made to hope against hope that some great solution is pending.

There are many hope-against-hope parties, and whenever they fail to gratify the senses of the masses, they are all endangered. When these parties are endangered, they begin to fightone another, and at the end one of the parties is eventually victimized by another for the sake of a false ideology unknown to the common people. Communal flare-ups and revolutions are now ordinary occurrences in this iron age due to the advancement of godless and materialistic learning. The poor followers and innocent masses, however, are the sufferers on such roads to heavenly ideologies. The masses are gradually being driven into a hopeless condition due to lack of information of real spiritual life. They are kept in darkness and in a bewildered state of sense gratification. Consequently they seek happiness in a labyrinth of sense gratification and try to accumulate wealth by unlawful means.

When one is in impure consciousness, ignorant of the Supreme Lord, he accumulates everything unlawfully because he does not acknowledge that everything in the universe belongs to the Supreme Lord. Everyone is thinking, "I am the proprietor of everything," and the whole material world is being conducted under the impression that "I am the monarch of all I survey." This is called illusion. According to Sri Īsopanisad:

"Everything animate or inanimate that is within the universe is controlled and owned by the Lord. One should therefore accept only those things necessary for himself, which are set aside as his quota, and one must not accept other things, knowing well to whom they belong." (Sri Īsopanisad, 1)