Page 38 - Metaphysical questions of life

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life due to ignorance of the soul. One sees only the diﬀerent types of
bodies of living beings: dog, cat, man, elephant, insect, ﬁsh, bird, etc.
The reality is that the individual soul in each species of life has nothing

to do with the incidental bodies that entrap him. One receives a mate-
rial body according to the diﬀerent unfulﬁlled desires of the previous
life and karma, the good and bad reac ons of ac vi es.

The Bhagavad-gita explains how to see correctly:

“One who sees the Supersoul accompanying the individual soul in all
bodies, and who understands that neither the soul nor the Supersoul
within the destruc ble body is ever destroyed, actually sees.” (Bg 13.28)

On receiving spiritual knowledge one learns to see the material body as
dis nct from the individual soul within the body and the Supersoul or
God who is the witness to all the ac vi es of the body. Without spiritu-

al knowledge one may only see the body and remain ignorant of the
soul and Supersoul. Bewildered by such incomplete knowledge, people
think that when the body dies, everything is terminated. The truth is
that a er the body dies, both the soul and the Supersoul con nue to
exist because they are eternal and not subject to death.

The living en ty entrapped in the temporary and con nually changing
body evolves diﬀerent concep ons of life under the inﬂuence of the

modes of material nature. This is stated:
“The living en ty in the material world carries his diﬀerent concep ons
of life from one body to another, as the air carries aromas. Thus he
takes one kind of body and again quits it to take another.” (Bg 15.8)

Bhak vedanta Swami Prabhupada writes:

“Here the living en ty is described as īśvara, the controller of his own
body. If he likes, he can change his body to a higher grade, and if he
likes he can move to a lower class. Minute independence is there. The
change his body undergoes depends upon him. At the me of death,
the consciousness he has created will carry him on to the next type of

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